Being set on building a substantial house, or rather fortress, as I said, we saw that with our rude tools it would take us a very long time, and so we first took in hand to make a small hut which would shelter us while the other was a-building. This we determined to place at the edge of the wood above the lake, and we found much material in the trees which had been uprooted in the storm, and in young straight saplings which we could either pull up, the soil being thin, or cut down with our stone axes. These axes of ours soon became blunt, but we found a means to sharpen them by whetting on the hard rocks by the shore, and it became our constant practice to begin each day with bathing in the sea, and then sharpening our axes, which sharpened our appetites also, I do assure you. Having got a sufficiency of these slender poles for our walls, we stuck them in holes which we made with our axes, and held them together with tendrils of the creeping plants that grew very plentifully in the woods. We thus made walls about ten feet high, about a space twelve feet square, and it was not until the walls were up that we began to consider of how to put a roof to them, having no ladders nor any means of mounting to such a height. This made us see how needful it was to take thought beforehand, though we never succeeded in foreseeing all the difficulties that we should meet with, and I suppose no one ever did. All we could do about this roof of ours was to carry up small rocks from the shore, and pile these one on another until we made a stand high enough for us to lay saplings from wall to wall. Since it was clear that this roof would protect us but little, the rain being able to come through the interstices, we put up stands of rocks inside the hut, and supported on these we made shift to weave grasses and creepers among the poles, finding it very hard work, and very long too, we having to take the stands down and build them up again as we moved from place to place in the hut. As for the walls, we filled up the interstices in them with earth from the hill-side above us, which we found to be of a clayey sort, and soon hardened in the sun, though after a little it began to crack and crumble. We carried this earth in our hands, a very troublesome and slow manner of doing it, but we had no vessels, nor did we at that time think of making any.