The shelters of stone - Jean M. Auel [248]
When Ayla awoke the next morning, everyone else seemed to be up and gone already and she was feeling uncharacteristically lazy. Her eyes were accustomed to the dim light inside the dwelling, and she lay in her sleeping roll, looking at the designs carved and painted on the sturdy wooden center pole and the smudges of soot that already blackened the edges of the smoke hole, until she had to pass water—she felt the need even more often lately. She didn’t know where the community waste trenches had been dug, so she used the night basket. She wasn’t the only one who had used it, she noticed. I’ll empty it later, she thought. It was one of the unpleasant chores that were shared by those who felt it was a duty and those who were shamed into it if it was noticed that they hadn’t recently.
When she walked back to her sleeping roll to shake it out, she looked more closely around the inside of the summer camp shelter. She had been surprised at the structures that had been made while she and Jondalar were visiting the day before. Though she had noticed the lodges of the people who had set up their camps near the main area, she was still expecting to see the traveling tents, but most people did not use the tents they had traveled with at the Summer Meeting camp. During the warm season, the traveling tents would be used by various people for temporary treks to hunt, or gather produce, or visit as they ranged over their territory. The summer lodge was a more permanent structure, a circular, straight-sided, rather substantial dwelling. Though made differently, Ayla understood they were similar in purpose to the lodges used by the Mamutoi during their Summer Meetings.
Though it was dark inside—the only light came from the open entrance and an occasional sliver of sunlight that found its way through cracks in the wall where pieces joined—Ayla saw that, besides the center pole of pine, the dwelling had an interior wall of panels woven out of flattened bullrush stems and painted with designs and animals. They were attached to the inside of poles that encircled the center pole and provided a fairly large enclosed space that could be left open or divided into smaller areas with movable interior panels. The ground was covered with mats, which were made of bullrushes, tall phragmite reeds, cattail leaves, or grasses, and sleeping rolls were spread out around a slightly off-center fireplace. The smoke escaped through a hole above it, near the center pole. A smoke hole cover could be adjusted from the inside with short poles that were attached to it.
She was curious about how the rest of the structure was made and stepped outside. First she glanced around the camp, which was composed of several large circular lodges surrounding a central fireplace, and then she walked around the outside of the dwelling. Poles were lashed together in a way that was similar to the fence of the surround that was erected to capture animals, but instead of the freestanding flexible construction that could yield when an animal bumped or butted into it, the summer lodge fencing was attached to widely spaced anchoring poles of alder that were sunk into the ground.
A wall of sturdy vertical panels made of overlapped cattail leaves, which shed rain, was attached to the outside of the poles, leaving an air space between the outer and inner walls for extra insulation to make it cooler on hot days and, with a fire inside, warmer on cool nights. It also avoided accumulation of moisture condensation on the inside when it was cold out. The roof was a fairly thick thatch of overlapping