The roof is always made to project at least three feet beyond the walls, and its edges are supported by posts. The space under the eaves makes quite a small verandah, and is banked up with clay to the height of a foot so as to form a step or low platform running round the house. The walls are not more than four feet high, perhaps less; the centre of the hut may be twelve feet. Small huts have a diameter equal to their height, or even less, and require no support inside; larger ones are wider than they are high, and the roof is supported by a strong central post, and extra ones, if necessary, in proportion to the increased diameter. The walls are plastered with clay at the beginning of the cold (and dry) season; this plaster (at any rate in the lower-lying districts) is either removed during the summer, or not renewed when it drops away of itself. It is always done by the women, who also do the floor of the hut in the same way as the verandah, and mould it into a circular ridge about two feet in diameter for the central fireplace. Sometimes one or more oblong platforms are made for sleeping-places; but many people simply spread their mats on the floor, and some make regular bedsteads (or, as it has been described, a ‘family sleeping-shelf’) by fixing stout sticks in the ground and spreading a mat on top of them. Whatever the sleeping arrangements, people lie with their feet to the fire, which is fed at night with one or more logs laid end on to the fireplace, and kindled at the inner end, so that whoever happens to wake in the night can, without any trouble, put on fuel by merely pushing the outer. The fire is not much used for cooking except in wet or windy weather; and in fact the hut is mainly a place for sleeping and storing things in. The fireplace is generally surrounded by four posts supporting a stage or shelf (_nsanja_), which serves all the purposes of a storeroom and larder. Strips of meat and fish are hung on it to dry; provisions, cooked and uncooked, are placed there in pots and baskets, and the seed corn is kept there in the smoke, where the weevils and other insects will not attack it. Other things—spears, bows and arrows, the spindle and weaving-stick, bags of beans, the gourds for drawing water, etc.—are hung from the rafters or stuck in the thatch. Cloth and beads are stored away in baskets. Besides the articles already mentioned, a few cooking-pots, a carved wooden pillow or two, a few skins, perhaps one or two small logs to sit on, or even a stool made out of the root of a tree, and a jar of water with a gourd dipper to drink it from, will about complete the inventory of the furniture.