Page:The food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa.djvu/81

 38 heap, if possible near to a running stream, where the workers can refill their drinking-cups for the mid-day meal. Here women sit, with trays formed of the broad banana leaves, on which the beans are placed as they extract them from the pod with wooden spoons. The result of the days work, placed in panniers on donkey-back, is "crooked" down to the cocoa-house, and that night remains in box-like bins, with perforated sides and bottom, covered in with banana leaves. Every twenty-four hours these bins are emptied into others, so that the contents are thoroughly mixed, the process being continued for four days or more, according to circumstances.

This is known as "sweating." Day by day the pulp becomes darker, as fermentation sets in, and the temperature is raised to about 140° F. During fermentation a dark sour liquid runs away from the sweat-boxes, which is, in fact, a very dilute acetic acid, but of no commercial value. During the process of "sweating" the cotyledons of the cocoa-bean, which are at first a purple colour and very compact in the skin,