Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/255

Rh cold until midday, then positively roasted until about four in the afternoon, when you again feel cold until your fire warms you at night. You must have a fire, for, although the houses hereabouts are built of mud bricks, they are by no means tight about doors and roofs. While I was in Antananarivo, the weather was cool and delightful morning and evening, perhaps a trifle too warm in the middle of the day only. But the air was always clear and bracing, and there was generally a light breeze blowing.

Many of the hamlets were now surrounded by a deep ditch, a huge fence of cactus, and a very wide low wall. They reminded me at once of pictures of scenes in central Africa. The ditch generally has some sort of drain, for fear of its overflowing during the heavy rains of the wet season. The ground within the inclosure is quite smooth and level, and the houses usually stand in two rows right and left of the low and narrow entrance gate, which is partially closed by a great stone slab or by piles of logs. I stopped for the night in one of these villages, and was shown quarters in a wretched hut half full of pigs. That is to say, I was offered a room adjoining the pigsty, into which the door of the house directly opened, while the people scrambled into the dwelling room by a window about two feet square, to which they mounted by a pile of rough stones. Upstairs there was a dirty kitchen, to which you had access from the pigsty by a flight of dark, narrow, steep steps in which there was a turn at right angles, for otherwise the house was so small the steps would have had to be vertical. Adjoining this kitchen was a room just large enough to contain my camp bed, and this I accepted—fleas and all—for, if I had to be in the same house as the pigs, at least I preferred another étage. All these villages seemed to allot a large portion of their ground floors to a horrible little black and white spotted pig. The infrequency of pigs on the east coast is more than balanced by their frequency in the central districts.

We continued on during all the next day in a sort of rough valley bordered by ranges of hills. The soil was poor, the grass was coarse, and there was much red clay. The country was very thinly settled and few people were met upon the road. I stopped for my lunch in one of the circular, ditched villages, in a very dilapidated dirty hut in which the only door, as usual, opened directly into the pigsty, while the family scrambled through a little bit of opening several feet from the ground. To facilitate the exit of smoke two large holes had been made at either end of the roof. This let in some daylight, which was much needed, but looked as if much unneeded rain must enter by the same orifices. In the center of the room next the piggery was a fire, and against the walls a few cooking utensils, a rice mortar and pestle, a basket of young squawking ducks, some rolls of matting, and a few clothes.