There was no great difficulty in it.

It was enough to scour the clay with sand, then to mold the bricks and bake them by the heat of a wood fire.
Generally bricks are formed in molds, but the engineer contented himself with making them by hand.

All that day and the day following were employed in this work.

The clay, soaked in water, was mixed by the feet and hands of the manipulators, and then divided into pieces of equal size.

A practiced workman can make, without a machine, about ten thousand bricks in twelve hours; but in their two days work the five brickmakers on Lincoln Island had not made more than three thousand, which were ranged near each other, until the time when their complete desiccation would permit them to be used in building the oven, that is to say, in three or four days.
It was on the 2nd of April that Harding had employed himself in fixing the orientation of the island, or, in other words, the precise spot where the sun rose.