They had not proceeded thus far without thinking of a plan; and this plan was, to place the bark along with the ashes in one of the large yak-skins still in good preservation, and after making it up into a sort of bundle--like clothes intended for the laundry--to plunge the skin and its contents into the spring, and there leave them--until the boiling water should perform its part.

By this ingenious contrivance, did they get over the difficulty, of not being provided with a not.
When Karl thought that the bark was sufficiently boiled, it was taken out of the water, and also out of its yak-skin wrapper.

It was then placed, in mass, upon a flat rock near by--where it was left to drip and get dry.
During the time that it was in the water--and also while it was dripping and drying on the rock--none of them were idle.

Caspar was engaged in fashioning a stout wooden mallet--a tool which would be needed in some after operations--while Ossaroo was equally busy upon an article of a very different kind.

This was a sort of sieve made of thin splints of cane, set in a frame of thicker pieces of the same cane--ringall bamboo.
Ossaroo had undertaken this special task: as none of the others knew so well, how to fashion the bamboo into any required utensil; and although he was now making something altogether new to him, yet, working under the direction of Karl, he succeeded in making a sieve that was likely to serve the purpose for which plant-hunter designed it.