Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/141

which all, directly or indirectly, merge into a centre room; the whole block has only one common exit, and one can pass from one house to the other without having to go outside. In its ground plan it resembles the house which Hall^[1] figures from Nuvuk, although the latter is more simple.

The largest single snow house I have seen, at Pingerqalik in April 1923. was lined with skin and measured 5.5 m in diameter. 2.5 m high, both measures to the skin lining. The window consisted of two slabs of ice, 1.3 × 0.65 m; the door measured 0.75 × 0.50 m: there were two main platforms. There was a central store room, from which were doors to the house, to two smaller side rooms for clothing and meat and a wooden door to the dogs' room, in one side of which was a small opening into a separate little snow house which acted as a latrine. In February 1924 the same family lived at Pingerqalik in a snow house that had no skin lining. 6.5 m in diameter. 4 m high.

According to Capt. Comer. Boas^[2] refers to a snow house on the west coast of Hudson Bay with a diameter of 7 m, height 4m. and Low^[3] mentions one at Fullerton, 27 feet in diameter, 12 feet high: this, however, was too big for the material and had to be supported by battens.

Skin lining of snow houses is commonly used by the Iglulingmiut and Tunumeriut, but not by the Aivilingmiut; none of the earlier expedition reports mention skin-lined houses here either. I have seen skin-lined houses both at Repulse Bay and at Qajûvfik; but in both cases they belonged to Iglulingmiut who had moved down there.

The skin lining (iluperuk) is made of sealskin sewn together: more often it is worn-out tent skins that are used for this purpose. The hair side faces the interior of the house. The skin hangs ten to forty centimetres from the wall of the house and is held by a number of strings (sanariaq), both ends of which are fastened to wooden sticks; one of these rests on the outside of the snow house, the other holds the skins up; from the middle of the roof hangs a thick seal thong, thirty to forty em long, with a thick wooden stick at each end; the others are thinner and shorter. The skin lining usually extends right down to the platform and is fastened at the bottom with wooden pegs.

Thin slabs of fresh-water ice are oftenest used as windows in the snow house; these are hewn out with the ice pick, most easily at a place on the lake where two cracks cross; the shape of the ice-pane is usually trapezoid or rectangular: Parry mentions round windows. In skin-lined snow houses gut-skin windows are often used; at Ingnertoq I saw in March 1922 in a large, skin-lined house, a window