I lived in a room next
the main parlor, with a green glass window looking on to the street--a
single pane, not very clear at that--and Glahn had chosen a little bit
of a hole up in the attic, much darker, and a poor place to live in. The
sun heated the thatched roof and made his room almost insufferably hot
at night and day; besides which, it was not a stair at all that led up
to it, but a wretched bit of a ladder with four steps. What could I do?
I let him take his choice, and said:
"Here are two rooms, one upstairs and one down; take your choice."
And Glahn looked at the two rooms and took the upper one, possibly to
give me the better of the two--but was I not grateful for it? I owe him
nothing.
As long as the worst of the heat lasted, we left the hunting alone and
stayed quietly in the hut, for the heat was extremely uncomfortable. We
lay at night with a mosquito net over the bedplace, to keep off the
insects; but even then it happened sometimes that blind bats would come
flying silently against our nets and tear them. This happened too often
to Glahn, because he was obliged to have a trap in the roof open all the
time, on account of the heat; but it did not happen to me. In the
daytime we lay on mats outside the hut, and smoked and watched the life
about the other huts.
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