THE big head line stuff in our camp this week is the conflagration that occurred. Perhaps you have not heard of it yet. Two of the straw huts of the Wayumwezi boys have been "razed to the ground by fire,"—as they say in the "Punkin Center Journal."
The palatial mansions in question are built of little sticks and mud for walls, circular in form, and have conical straw roofs on them. They must measure eight or ten feet across, with the walls standing at least four feet high, and the roof is like nothing so much as a Palm Beach hat which has seen better days.
You see, two of the boys,—Cigaretti and Tumbo, were cooking their dinner of corn meal and meat over a little fire in one of the huts and took the opportunity to retire to the river for a bath. How they can build a fire and live in them in spite of the smoke is a mystery to me; and why they all don't bum up is a greater mystery. Well, while they were away the roof caught fire and the alarm was spread. Such scurrying and bustle you never saw. I didn't see it either. I will tell you later where I was. But the town gossip has it that there was a great to do here in our "thriving community." At least two buckets of water, thrown from the basins and cups, were expended upon the conflagration. Sticks and stones were hurled at the flaming edifice, and in a masterful effort to save the real estate, they tore down the mud walls and brought the attack to a successful issue, after all combustible material had been oxydized.
Of course the adjoining residence became ignited from the great cloud of sparks. It was sixteen inches away. It suffered the fate of the unfortunate first, and given the same heroic treatment. To cap the climax, and really what made this a menace to the whole of Africa, a third structure became ignited. Yes, sir! The fire department was taxed to its last re-sources ! And here is where real genius shines. Exigencies of this sort bring out the master mind.
When the straw roof of No. 3 Wayumwezi Avenue, burst into flame, someone, now lost to fame I fear, I was not there to record it, someone suggested lifting off the roof and setting it on the ground where they could spank it into submission. They did this. They lifted it off like the lid of a sugar bowl, set it gently on the ground and beat the fire to death.
When I returned I viewed the smoking ruins. But no one seemed dismayed: no one had lost any property. The two boys had their three yards of cotton cloth, all their wardrobe, on them, at the bathing resort. They also had their copper wire bracelets and their walking sticks. They hadn't even lost their dinner. Some provident bystander had rescued that. Nothing is lost in Africa!
A Quiet Day in Camp
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By evening they had set the detached roof back on the circular walls of residence No. 3, and two or three boys more or less in one of these huts does not overtax the housing facilities of the place. The more the snugger! In a day or two, new buildings will rise where the charred skeletons of those magnificent edifices, lost in the recent holocaust, are now a monument to our great catastrophe.