The first process in the paper-making did not require much nicety in its execution; and, moreover, it could be performed as well inside the hut as in the largest room of a paper-mill. All they had to do was to pick the bark to shreds. This occupied them the whole evening—during which there was much conversation of a cheerful kind, with a joke or two about oakum-picking in a prison; and of this, not only the task in which they were engaged, but the situation in which they were executing it, did not fail to remind them.
When they had finished, they ate their frugal supper and retired to rest—full of the idea of continuing the paper manufacture in the morning.
When morning came, they had not much to do: for the next process was one which required the exercise of patience rather than of labour.
When the bark of the daphne has been thoroughly picked to pieces, it is put into a large pot or cauldron filled with water. A lixivium of wood-ashes is then thrown in along with it; and it is suffered to boil for several hours.
As our manufacturers were without pot or cauldron of any kind, there would have been here an interruption of an insurmountable kind: had it not been that they had plenty of water already on the boil, and perpetually boiling—in the hot-spring near the hut.
Apparently all they should have to do would be, to immerse the prepared bark in the spring, and there leave it for a proper length of time. But then the water, where it was hottest, was constantly in motion—bubbling up and running off; so that not only would the strings of bark be carried away, but the ashes would be separated from the mass, and consequently of no service in aiding to macerate it.
How was this difficulty to be got over? Easily enough. They had not proceeded thus far without thinking of a plan; and this plan was, to place the bark along with the ashes in one of the large yâk-skins still in good preservation, and after making it up into a sort of bundle—like clothes intended for the laundry—to plunge the skin and its contents into the spring, and there leave them—until the boiling water should perform its part. By this ingenious contrivance, did they get over the difficulty, of not being provided with a not.
When Karl thought that the bark was sufficiently boiled, it was taken out of the water, and also out of its yâk-skin wrapper. It was then placed, in mass, upon a flat rock near by—where it was left to drip and get dry.
During the time that it was in the water—and also while it was dripping and drying on the rock—none of them were idle. Caspar was engaged in fashioning a stout wooden mallet—a tool which would be needed in some after operations—while Ossaroo was equally busy upon an article of a very different kind. This was a sort of sieve made of thin splints of cane, set in a frame of thicker pieces of the same cane—ringall bamboo.
Ossaroo had undertaken this special task: as none of the others knew so well, how to fashion the bamboo into any required utensil; and although he was now making something altogether new to him, yet, working under the direction of Karl, he succeeded in making a sieve that was likely to serve the purpose for which plant-hunter designed it. That purpose will presently be spoken of.