Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/150

Five new qarmat at Kûk, Southampton Island, were quite similar; one of the houses, however, had two platforms like the snow house fig. 78. For six days at the end of October 1922 we lived in one of these qarmat; the wall was heightened with two courses of snow blocks and above these the tent skin was laid as a roof. The many qarmat built upon house ruins at Ponds Inlet also have the same construction; but by no means all of them have whale skulls in the walls.

At one time these solid qarmat seem to have been more generally used than now. Aua (about 60 years old) told me that when his father was a small boy, Eskimos lived in qarmat at Iglulik, Pingerqalik, Tikerâq, Ugle and Uglerlârssuk. And it was presumably qarmat that Sherard Osborn^[1] saw at Ponds Inlet and describes as winter houses: ". . . sunk from three to four feet below the level of the ground: a ring of stones — few feet high, were all the vestiges we saw. No doubt they completed the habitation by building a house of snow of the usual dome shape over the stones and sunken floor . . ." Presumably it was the settlement Iterdleq at Button Point that Osborn has seen. When Knud Rasmussen^[2] says that the immigrants from Ponds Inlet to Cape York on their way "built houses of stone and turf in the autumn", the qarmat is also undoubtedly meant.

Permanent qarmat are, however, also built at places where there are no house ruins; in these cases they are always without