Directly after tea they began to work again at the preparations for the raft, cutting some more poles and sawing up those they had already into the proper lengths. Sawing is very hard work, causing a continual strain upon the same muscles, with no change of position as possible while chopping, and they were obliged to do it by shifts, one working so long and then the other. The raft was to be twelve feet long and five wide. The beams for the foundation gave them most trouble to procure, being largest, and not every tree was exactly the size they wished.
They laboured on into the moonlight, which grew brighter every night as the moon increased, and did not cease till all the materials were ready; the long beams of aspen and poplar placed side by side (on rollers) and near these short cross-pieces of fir with holes bored for the nails, then a row of long fir poles, and the short lengths of plank to form the deck. Everything was just ready for fitting together. It cost them some self-denial to wait till all was thus prepared instead of at once beginning to nail the frame together.
There is something in driving in a nail tempting to the wrist; when the board is ready, the gimlet-hole made, and the hammer at hand, the physical mind desires to complete the design. They resisted it, because they knew that they should really complete the raft much quicker by getting every portion of the frame ready before commencing to fix it. They did not recognise how tired they were till they started for the hut; their backs, so long bent over the sawing, had stiffened in that position, and pained them as they straightened the sinews to stand upright; their fingers were crooked from continually grasping the handles; they staggered about as they walked, for their stiff limbs were not certain of foothold, and jerked them where the ground was uneven.
Mark sat down to light the fire in the courtyard, for they wanted some more tea; Bevis sat by him. They were dog-tired. Looking in the larder to lay out the supper, Mark saw the mushrooms which had been forgotten; he hunted out the gridiron, and put two handsful of them on. Now the sight of these savoury mushrooms raised their fainting spirits more than the most solid food, and they began to talk again. While these were doing, Bevis cut Pan a slice of the cooked bacon on the shelf; it was rather fat, and pampered Pan, after mumbling it over in his chops, carried it just outside the fence, and came back trying to look as if he had eaten it.
With the mushrooms they made a capital supper, but they were still very tired. Bevis got out his journal, but he only wrote down “Friday,” and then put it away, remarking that he must soon write a letter home. Even cards could not amuse them, they were so tired; but the cry of a heron roused Bevis a little, and he took the matchlock and loaded it with shot, to see if he could shoot it and get the plumes.
“Heron’s plumes were thought a good deal of in our day where we lived, you know. Didn’t the knights use to wear them?” he said. “Herons are very hard to shoot.”
Mark came with him and the spaniel, and they walked softly down the path, now well-worn, and peered over the moonlit water, but the heron was not on the island, nor in sight. He was probably on some of the lesser islets among the shallows, so they returned home and immediately went to bed, quite knocked up. Pan curled round by the bedside for about an hour, then he got up and slipped out under the curtain into the moonlight.
In the morning when they went to bathe there was a mist over the water, which curled along and gathered thicker in places, once quite hiding Serendib, and then clearing away and drawing towards the unknown river. The water was very warm.
They then began to nail the raft together. On the long thick beams they placed short cross-pieces of fir close together and touching; over these long poles of fir lengthways, also touching; lastly, short planks across making the deck. There were thus four layers, for they knew that rafts sink a good deal and float deep, especially when the wood is green, as you may see a bough, or a tree-trunk in the brook quite half immersed as it goes by on the current. It was built on rollers, because Bevis, consulting his book, read how Ulysses rigged his vessel:—
And roll’d on levers, launch’d her in the deep.