The shelters of stone - Jean M. Auel [81]
“It goes uphill,” Ramara continued. “Follow that a little way and you will come to a split. The left trail is steeper. It continues up and will take you to the top of this cliff. But take the right path. It curves up around the side until you can see Wood River below. A little beyond is a level open field with several trenches—you’ll smell it before you get there,” Ramara said. “It has been a while since we dusted it, and you can tell.”
Ayla shook her head. “Dusted it?”
“Sprinkled it with cooked cliff dust. We do it all the time, but I don’t suppose all people do,” Ramara said, bending over and picking up Robenan, who was getting restless.
“How do you cook cliff dust? And why?” Ayla asked.
“How you do it is to start with cliff rock, pound it into dust, and heat it in a hot fire—we use the signal fire hearth—then strew it in the trenches. Why is because it takes away a lot of the smell, or covers it up. But when you pass water or add liquid, the dust tends to get hard again, and when the trenches fill up with waste and hardened rock dust, you have to dig new ones, which is a lot of work. So we don’t like to dust them too often. But they need it now. We have a big Cave, and the trenches get used a lot. Just follow the path. You shouldn’t have any trouble locating them.”
“I’m sure I’ll find them. Thank you, Ramara,” Ayla said as the woman left.
She started to pick up the bowl, had another thought, and ducked inside to get the waterbag so she could rinse out the woven basin. Then she picked up the smelly thing and started for the path. Gathering and storing food for such a large Cave of people is a lot of work, she thought as she headed along the trail, but so is taking care of the waste. Brun’s clan just went outside, the women in one place, the men in another, and they changed their places every so often. Ayla thought about the process Ramara had explained and was intrigued.
The heating, or calcining, of limestone to get quicklime and using it to decrease the smell of waste products was not a practice she was familiar with, but for people who lived in limestone cliffs and used fire continuously, quicklime was a natural by-product. After cleaning a hearth of ashes, which would invariably include the accidentally accumulated lime, and dumping them on a pile of other waste materials, it wouldn’t take long for the deodorizing effect to be noticed.
With so many people living in one place, more or less permanently except during the summer when various groups of them were gone for periods of time, there were many tasks that required the effort and cooperation of the entire community, such as digging toilet trenches or, as she had just learned, roasting the limestone cliff rocks to make quicklime.
The sun was near its zenith before Ayla returned from the trench field. She found a sunny place near the back path to dry and air out the woven bowl, then decided to check on the horses and refill the waterbag at the same time. Several people greeted her when she reached the front terrace, some of whose names she recalled, but not all. She smiled and nodded in return, but felt a trifle embarrassed about those she couldn’t remember. She took it as a failure of memory on her part and made a decision to learn who everyone was as soon as possible.
She remembered feeling the same way when members of Brun’s clan let it be known that they thought she was somewhat slow because she couldn’t remember as well as Clan youngsters. As a result, because she wanted to fit in with the people who had found and adopted her, she disciplined herself to remember what she was taught the first time it was explained. She didn’t know that in the process of exercising her native intelligence to retain what she learned, she was training her own memorizing ability far beyond that which was normal for her own kind.
As time went on, she grew to understand that their memory worked differently from hers. Though she didn’t fully understand what they were, she knew that people of the Clan had “memories” that she did not have, not in the same way. In a form