Hatch (door)

“ Waiting, only to recharge my weapon, I ran from the roof, and down the first two flights of stairs.
Here, I paused to listen. As I did so, there came another tinkle of falling glass. It appeared to come from the floor below. Excitedly, I sprang down the steps, and, guided by the rattle of the window-sash, reached the door of one of the empty bedrooms, at the back of the house. I thrust it open. The room was but dimly illuminated by the moonlight; most of the light being blotted out by moving figures at the window. ”

“ This sliding door is inside the hut, and so arranged and fixed on two stout stakes buried in the earth, and standing to the height of 21⁄2 to 3 feet, as to be easily moved to and fro. There are no other openings or outlets of any kind, either for the escape of smoke, or for the free ingress and egress of atmospheric air. The doorway itself is of such small dimensions that, to effect an entrance, one has to go down on all fours, and even then much wriggling is necessary before an entrance is effected. ”

“ It is necessary to stoop very low to enter the house proper, for the doorway is only three feet high, and is protected by a heavy wooden door strengthened by iron clamps. The interior resembles a cavern, owing to the absence of windows, the labyrinth of rooms not six feet high, the gnarled, unbarked trees which support the roofs, 192 the dimness, the immense thickness of the mud walls, the rays of light coming in through protected holes in the roof, the horses tethered to the tree-trunks, and the smoke. ”

“ Each room in the house seemed to have its own particular draught, while the wind seemed to be for ever playing at hide-and-seek up and down the great wide corridors and staircases, banging every now and then a bedroom door, or creeping with snake-like motion under any piece of carpet that had not been firmly nailed down. ”

“ The male is not allowed to remain with the doe, lest he should destroy the young ones.
"Hutches are made singly, or in stacks, to suit the apartment, which should be capable of thorough ventilation. The best size is about three feet long, two feet deep, and fourteen inches high, with a small apartment partitioned off from one end, nearly a foot wide, as a breeding place for the doe. A wire door forms the front, and an opening is left behind for cleaning; the floor should have a descent to the back of the 321 hutch of two inches. All edges should be tinned, to save them from being gnawed. ”

“ The crevices between the slabs, and any accidental fissures, are closed up by throwing a few shovelfuls of loose snow over the building. Two men are generally engaged in the work; and when the dome is completed, the one within cuts a low door, through which he creeps. As the walls are not more than three or four inches thick, they admit a soft subdued light into the interior, but a window of transparent ice is generally added. Not only the hut, but the furniture inside it, is made of snow; snow seats, snow tables, snow couches—the latter rendered comfortable by coverings of skins. ”

“ Before thatching, both the roof {87} and sides are formed by poles lashed together on which the thatch is worked. The door, if it can be so called, is merely an aperture which opens from a raised platform, and to get into the hut it is necessary to step—one generally falls—down into the room.
EARLY MORNING, GAVUTU, SOLOMON ISLANDS
There are no windows, and the door is the only place for letting in the light and letting out the smoke of the fire, which is generally burning in the centre of the hut on the floor. ”

“ An ordinary hut built of logs, perhaps twenty feet square, with a door made of puncheon planks, by which I mean planks that have been hewn out of the log with an axe rather than cut by a saw, and two windows, in one of which four panes of glass were broken, but both protected by shutters which swung from the outside. The building consisted of one room on the floor where the occupants were supposed to eat, sleep and live, while above was a loft formed by the roof, and approached through a scuttle situated directly opposite the door, at the rear of the hovel. ”

“ A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, beforehand, what wonderful wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and sob, and shriek,—and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy, but ponderous, in some distant chamber,—and to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks miraculously stiff,—whenever the gale catches the house with a window open, and gets fairly into it. ”

“ All the windows looking, like mine, upon the air-shaft were shrouded in darkness; only a light still burned in the window beneath the grating with the iron stair to the little yard. What was at the foot of the stair I could not descry, but I thought I could recognize the outline of a door.
From the window of the cabinet de toilette to the yard the sides of the house, cased in stained and dirty stucco, fell sheer away. Measured with the eye the drop from window to the pavement was about fifty feet. With a rope and something to break one's fall, it might, I fancied, be managed. . . . ”

“ Few of the streets, except the bazaars, can be called in any sense thoroughfares. They wind and twist about most irregularly, sometimes open to the sky, sometimes covered in by rooms belonging to the adjoining houses, and they usually [54] end abruptly at the closed door of a house or garden. When one or more rooms are built over the street the builder rarely trusts to the strength of the original wall: he fixes wooden uprights on each side to support the cross beams. Dirtiness and want of ventilation are conspicuous. ”

“ For the admission of light into the huts, a round hole is cut on one side of the roof of each apartment, and a circular plate of ice, three or four inches thick and two feet in diameter, let into it. The light is soft and pleasant, like that transmitted through ground glass, and it is quite sufficient for every purpose. When, after some time, these edifices become surrounded by drift, it is only by the windows, as I have before remarked, that they could be recognised as human habitations. ”

“ They are dug out of the ground, damp and dark; their ceiling is on a level with the surface of the earth, and their roof consists of layers of turf, or of dry thatch covered with moss. The only door resembles the lid of a snuff-box, and is set in the roof on a level with the ground. ”

“ He heard the familiar sound of water gushing from the sink in to the grate, the dropping of a pail outside the door, the clink of a coal shovel, the banging of a door, the sound of voices. So many houses cheek by jowl, so many squirming lives, so many back yards, back doors giving on to the night. ”

“ This house is bigger than it looks, for it slides for two storeys down the hill behind, and the wooden door, which is always locked, really leads into the attic. The knowing person prefers to follow the precipitous mule-track round the turn of the mud wall till he can take the edifice in the rear. ”

“ He can put up a house-front with a door, and if needed, a porch. He can put up a shop, or for that matter, a couple of adjacent shops. He can put up the arched gates of a city or castle. These are comparatively shallow structures. But he can also take advantage of the whole depth of the space, and arrange a chamber, a cave, or a bower, furnishing it as he pleases, and adding doors at the back or side, or a back window, which would enable him to give more light, even if only borrowed light from the tire-house, to an interior scene. ”

“ The houses have the effect of being built in terraces rising one above the other, but it is hard to say exactly what a house is—whether it is anything more than one room. You can reach some of the houses only by aid of a ladder. You enter others from the street. If you will go farther you must climb a ladder which brings you to the roof that is used as the sitting-room or door-yard of the next room. From this room you may still ascend to others, or you may pass through low and small door-ways to other apartments. ”

“ It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or ornamentation without. ”

“ This, I proceeded to do at once; visiting the whole of the basement again, and examining each of the doors. Luckily, they are all, like the back one, built of solid, iron-studded oak. Then, I went upstairs to the study. I was more anxious about this door. It is, palpably, of a more modern make than the others, and, though a stout piece of work, it has little of their ponderous strength. ”

“ The noises increase, children’s feet and voices are heard around the hut, and—is it possible?—a stone comes whizzing through the glassless window across the darkened space, and a heavy thump announces that it has found a destination; another, and another follows—some come in sideways, and one striking the window bar glances off and reaches the hearth, whence it drives before it a lighted stick which sends out sparks on every side and causes a faint gleam of light in the hitherto gloomy room. ”

“ In these a huge portal, with armorial bearings and massive pillars, defended by a stout iron-bound door, opens into a dark porch, from which one enters the patio through an equally strong entrance. The windows that look on to the street are heavily barred and none are within reach of the pedestrian. ”

“ The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry, might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.
The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. ”

“ One man found a staircase leading up from a small door in the main hall, and started up into the darkness to explore the floor above. But the Chief and I made for the corridor that led to the room of the voices, kicking or jemmying open the doors we passed, and making as sure as we could that we left no enemies behind us to take us in the rear.
Evidently the place was a regular labyrinth. But the most curious feature of it was the fact that we found no windows anywhere. The inhabitants must have lived eternally in an artificial light or in darkness. ”

“ Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling, purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. ”

“ They seem to be terribly ill off, and their chimneyless hovels—pierced only with a door and one very small window or hole in the wall, into which all the light, and out of both of which all the smoke have to find their way—are of the worst description. ”

“ The thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round bottles—a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into the house is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside the door. ”

“ I am the son of the master wood-cutter from Lautergräben and on my way across the Alm, down to the Winkelegg forest. As I pass the hut, I see that the door stands wide open. 'There is nothing in there,' I said,—'nothing at all that would be worth while to carry away, but 't is a bad thing to leave an open door in an empty house; the snow will fly in all winter long. ”

“ All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to the roofs and can be drawn up—the pueblo way of bolting the door. The houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing blankets by beating them in the flowing water. ”

“ The moonlight’s path across the floor wavered suddenly, the door opened, was locked again, and with a quick, catlike step a man moved along the side of the wall where the shadows lay thickest near the door, dropped on his knees, and began to fumble hurriedly with the base-board of the wall, pausing at every alternate second to listen intently. ”

“ The interior is usually kept in good order; but every part is blackened with smoke from the fires they employ in cooking their provisions. The house is entered by a door in the centre of the floor, to which the inhabitants ascend by means of a ladder. ”

“ The sides of the projecting doorway—that is, the spaces between the roof and the sloping doorway timbers—are filled in with small sticks of the required length. Sometimes the ends of these sticks are bound in place with twigs of yucca, being made fast to the door-frame, but generally they are merely set in or made to rest against the outer roof covering. Usually the larger timbers are roughly dressed on the sides toward the interior of the hut, and the smaller poles also are stripped of bark and rough hewn. ”