Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/146

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holds the line tight and the whole tent upright. The tent-sheet (tupeq) is laid over this skeleton; it consists of ten seal skins sewn together; of these, the five which form the rear part of the tent (qingmerun) and the roof in the fort part (uming) are hairy, whilst the five in front are unhaired (nerdlernang) and translucent. The tent-sheet is held down and taut by 27 stones (perut) placed in a circle; when the tent is moved, these stones remain as the well-known tent rings. The doorway, the opening between the two flaps of the tent, may be fastened back or closed at will. The rear part of the tent is occupied by the platform, bounded at the front by a number of flat stones; it extends to the centre pole; here the width of the floor is 2.7 m, the depth of the platform is 2.0 m, depth of floor from platform to doorway 1.3 m.

I have seen this type of seal skin tent, with various small modifications, in use from Southampton Island to Ponds Inlet. On Southampton Island I have seen in several tents three sticks laid at right angles to the ridge-pole on the centre-pole, which is sometimes inserted through loops on the tent sheet; other rods are sometimes placed under the tent sheet from the crossed-poles obliquely back to the ground in order to stretch the tent further out. One small tent had the vertical centre pole replaced by two oblique poles, joined at the top by a ridge-pole.

At Ponds Inlet I saw several tents in which the centre pole was replaced by two oblique poles forming a cross; sometimes there was also a third pole which ran from the cross along the rear wall of the tent, and in one case there I saw two longitudinal poles connecting the two crosses, thus making the seal thong along the ridge of the tent superfluous. The construction used seemed to depend upon how many poles they had. The construction last referred to required seven long poles as compared with the three poles of the first-mentioned; but of course this made a much firmer skeleton. The tent described by Boas[1] from Ponds Inlet only differs from the one first described above in that. instead of two crossed poles in the front. it had one vertical and one oblique pole. Parry[2] described a tent at Iglulik which had only one pole, a vertical centre pole with a ridgepole besides a pole outside the tent, and this pole consisted of several pieces of antler and bone lashed together; in this case a part of the tent-sheet was made of walrus hide, cut thin and translucent. Parry[3] also refers to double tents, two tents of this kind joined at the doorway, with one common door at the side.

  1. ↑ 1888, fig. 505.
  2. ↑ 1824, p. 271.
  3. ↑ l. c., p. 272.
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