Chapter Seventy-Eight: Building a Kiln and Burning Bricks
They built a large cave kiln. The whole kiln is composed of a fire mouth, a fire chamber, a fire path, a kiln chamber and a kiln grate. According to the sketch drawn by Qian Duoduo, the tribesmen built the kiln chamber into a circle, with a kiln grate at the bottom, and many fire holes on the grate.
The flame entering from the fire chamber reaches the kiln chamber through the fire path and fire hole, and the temperature in the kiln can reach more than 1000°C.
In order to make the adobe bricks stronger, Qian Duoduo had people mix gravel and hay into the clay, and it took two days to make 800 bricks.
More than a dozen tribal men followed Qian Duoduo to learn to make adobe. After the adobe bricks have been dried, the water is dried, and they can be put into the kiln to burn.
When the first batch was burned, because the heat was not mastered, more than half of the bricks were wasted. When the second batch was burned, the reasons and experience of the last failure were summarized, and it was generally better.
In this way, while groping and making adobe bricks, I saved more than 600 usable bricks in four or five days.
But that's not enough.
If you enclose the entire canyon, it is 500 meters long from south to north, and from east to west it is the width between the two canyons, about 50 meters. If the brick wall is built in its entirety, the circumference will reach more than 1,100 meters, and the amount of adobe required is definitely a staggering number.
Fortunately, the two sides of the canyon are originally cliffs, so there is no need to fence them off, and it is a natural barrier in itself. Then as long as you build three brick walls at each end of the canyon, you can block the invasion of wild beasts.
The difficulty was that the height of the wall had to reach more than 15 meters. Because the snowy mountains are full of very large beasts, the walls must be built high to prevent them from jumping in, and that is not enough, because the beasts in the sky will fly down. Therefore, if the protective shield is lost, the lion tribe will suddenly fall into passivity and will have a hard time.
But they have no other way but to believe that their own people will win the day.
While the whole clan was digging earth to make bricks, Qian Duoduo also began to teach some ingenious women and old people to make pottery. Pottery does not require a lot of effort, but there are requirements for aesthetics and comprehension. Qian Duoduo found that the old people of this tribe were very intelligent, and they were able to carve lifelike animals, flowers and birds.
Moreover, the women are also very quick to master the cooking method, and they can get started with a little hint, and they can already draw inferences after a few days. No, Qian Duoduo ate the meatballs they made with fish puree mixed with meat puree in the morning, although the taste is not very good, but this is innovation.
Look at the earthen and bamboo buildings rising from the ground, as well as the cube-shaped stone houses and triangular wooden houses built by the tribesmen themselves to serve as warehouses and toilets. Qian Duoduo sighed that civilization may really be a cycle, and it only takes a little spark to rekindle it.
Many things may be buried deep in the bones, in the blood and soul, God has only deprived a certain civilization that mankind once created, not the wisdom of the human race. Wisdom will not be lost because of the loss of civilization, just an opportunity, a little hint, the spark will be rekindled, and civilization will be born again.
The transition from ignorance to civilization may only require a very small opportunity.
Just as before the invention of the steam engine, people could not have imagined that they would leap from the agricultural age to the industrial age so quickly, and similarly, before Edison invented the electric light, no one thought that electricity would bring so much change to human society...... It seems to be a blink of an eye, and mankind has transitioned from the feudal era to modern civilization.
In the past, where would the ancients have thought that people would be able to fly in the sky hundreds of years later, there are all kinds of iron boxes running on the road, and houses are built like chopsticks to reach the sky......
In the long years of the earth, it is really less than a blink of an eye to achieve this earth-shaking change.