Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/142

formed of seven bearded-seal guts joined together and sewn fast to a skin frame about one metre wide, which was fastened to the skin lining. The gut-skin window gives more light and is easier to wipe clean of rime than the ice window; but it is not so tight.

Store room and doorway are usually built as separate houses, circular; more rarely they are of a more oval form as shown in Parry.^[1] Only in one single instance, at Hall's Lake, have I seen a doorway with straight walls as seems to be the rule among the Copper Eskimos.^[2]

On journeys which include women and children. snow bouses of the same plan as fig. 77 are usually built, but without a store room and window and with only a small shelter-wall in front of the door, which can be closed from the inside by means of a block of snow; if a lot of baggage is taken, a special house must sometimes be built for it. If men travel alone, small, very low snow houses are built without a platform. At the settlements small houses are often built for a dog with pups or as a latrine; for the latter purpose, however, a circular wall is often sufficient, merely to keep off the wind and the dogs.

Snow houses can generally be built in the course of October; in 1923 the first snow houses on Southampton Island were built in the middle of October. The change from a tent or qarmaq to a warm, tight snow house is a great comfort, even if at first, when the snow is soft and the temperature low, the snow house is quickly worn out. A month or six weeks may be taken as being the usual duration of a snow house in the cold winter period; skin-lined houses, however, can often last much longer, often the whole winter. When quite new the snow house is cold; but the heat of the lamp soon melts the innermost layer of snow and this is sucked up by the walls and freezes into ice, which makes the house tight and strong. Ventilation takes place through a small air hole, qingaq, "the nose of the house", which at night is closed with a piece of skin, a mitten, or some similar object (but not with snow, as that is too tight). But the time comes when the melted snow can no longer be sucked up and then the house begins to drip, a most uncomfortable time, when platform skins, rugs and clothing become wet. If there is much heat in the house, widening the air hole will often put a stop to the dripping; otherwise one tries to avoid it by cutting off the icicle or unevenness from which the drops are falling so that the water may run down the walls; or a lump of snow is put on to the place from which the drops