At the same time that the ground is cleared on which the house is to be built, a plot immediately in front is also cleared for use as a dancing ground. This is customary, but not invariable, for some tribes are content with the dancing space inside the house. The outside dancing floor once cleared is quickly trodden down, and though no special preparation is attempted will soon be baked comparatively hard in the sun.
The construction of the great house is not complicated, but the workmanship is dexterous, and will bear the closest inspection. Four great poles, 20 to 30 feet high, form the main supports of the roof, which slopes down on either side tentwise almost to the ground from the central ridge-pole. More posts and cross-beams support it, and the whole is most adroitly lashed together. The forest supplies all the needed material. It is there ready to hand, growing where the house is to be erected. The straightest tree-trunks provide the posts and cross-beams; the creeping lianas serve to splice and bind the framework together; Bussu palm-leaves[23] make the thatch, which, as the actual wall is but some three feet in height, is practically roof and wall in one. The bejucos, or lianas, used to tie the beams and poles are first soaked in water to render them supple enough.[24]
Fig. 2.
To make the thatch the Indians slit bamboos and insert the palm-leaves doubled backwards.[25] The strips are then laid on the framework of the house, one above another, so that the uppermost strips shall hang half over those below. They are piled on to a thickness of from a foot to eighteen inches, and when completed this shingling is absolutely waterproof. When it ceases to be so the house will be abandoned. The leaves are not plaited, or intertwined in any manner, so the roof consists only of loose fronds, row upon row, and these have more the appearance of tobacco plants hung in an open drying-barn than a reed or straw thatch.
PLATE VI.
FLOWERS AND SECTION OF LEAF OF THE BUSSU PALM
THE LEAF IS USED FOR THATCHING
All the native houses are made after much the same manner. They vary only in unimportant details. The shape, as a rule, is a rough parallelogram or square with rounded angles, but on the lower Apaporis the houses are circular. On the Napo River also they are hemispherical, but the section of a Witoto or Boro house usually would be a triangle some 30 feet high, with a 60-feet base. Witoto houses sometimes are more circular as to ground-plan, but always have the pointed roof, not a cone ([see Fig. 4]).