They covered the floor of the room they had cleared with dried skins, laying them with the hairy side up, thus making a comfortable carpet; large blocks of stone were piled at intervals around the rooms for seats, and these were also covered with soft skins, making very passable but immovable seats. A table was built by setting four blocks of stone up endwise in the centre of the room and laying one large, smooth, thin slab on its top, around which were placed five movable seats to be used while eating.
What annoyed them greatly was, there was no way of warming the room, and as the weather now was becoming cold, they found it a great discomfort, as the sun could not penetrate the thick stone walls to dry the dampness that gathered on them. They were quite puzzled to know how they were to be comfortable in that place without a fire, there being no place in which to build one. There were two windows that extended from the floor five feet, up which, probably, had been frames, that were once filled with some perishable material, but of which not a vestige now remained. These openings they always closed at night by hanging skins before them, which were taken down in the morning to let the light in. The door-way that led into the room, was entirely destitute of any vestige of a door, although they found grooves cut in the blocks of stone that ran along the side on which a door had been hung. This door-way opened into a long hall, that ran through the house from the front portal to the back—the doors that led into the four rooms of which the temple was composed, opening on the inside. This hall, which was truly a magnificent one, was thirty-five feet wide, and fifty long, forty feet high, tapering towards the centre overhead, in a lofty dome.
"We must have a fire," said the trapper, one morning, after an unusually frosty night. "This is too cold. Can't we build one in the hall, chief?"
"The smoke will suffocate us; we could not stay in doors with it," said Whirlwind.
"Why don't you build it in one of the windows? the smoke could then go out, while much of the heat would come in," said Edward.
"Better yet," said Sidney: "build a chimney by one of the windows, then all the smoke will go out, and all the heat come in."
"You have it exactly," said the trapper. "I wonder we did not think of it before. What say you, chief—shall we have the chimney?"
The chief, not only assenting, but entering with alacrity into the project, the whole party went to work to collect the material, of which there was plenty, but as the blocks were nearly all large ones that lay round them, they had to bring them from the mass of ruins by the river, which was of smaller material, and which they could handle to better advantage. They worked hard all that day, Sidney standing by quite uneasy, because they would not allow him to help. The next morning they mixed some mud and clay for mortar, and commenced laying up the chimney, and succeeded by night in finishing a very serviceable, though not a very beautiful one. They found, on building a fire in it, that it worked to a charm, filling the room with a genial warmth and cheerful light, while it carried away all the smoke.
They had gathered some twenty bushels of fruit, that tasted like our apples, but resembled a pear in shape and color, which was very hard and tough, not fit to eat then, but which, the chief said, would be good in midwinter. They had taken the precaution to gather them by his advice—he having made some large baskets of the pliable twigs of willow, in which they were conveyed from the trees to the temple, where they were deposited in the room they occupied.
"The fire will injure them," said the chief. "We must put them in another room in order to save them."