Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/151

whale skulls. At Nutarasungneq and Kuktujoq, between Janes' Creek and Albert Harbour at Ponds Inlet, there are seven and six qarmat respectively, built entirely of stones; they seem to be fairly recent. A single, rather older one, is at Mitimatalik. Padloq told me that a few years ago he built a qarmat at Naulingniarbik river at Usugarsuk, and one of the recently erected qarmat at Kûk lay some distance from the others, was rather small and built entirely of turf.

Still less solid buildings than these, but resembling them, are the hunting shelters (siniktorvik) which the caribou hunters often build when sleeping out at night and no tent has been taken along. A number of stones are placed in a ring or a square; at one end an elevation is made on which to rest the head, and two caribou skins are used to form the roof. These hunting shelters, which often are only used for one night, are frequently met with, especially in the interior.

The ice house is another form of qarmaq. During our sojourn at Hansine Lake on Southampton Island we lived in an ice house from 11th to 22nd October 1922. Its erection proceeded in the following manner: The work was commenced three days before, the ice being hewn away from an area of the lake near the shore on which the ice house was to be built; the reason was that the ice covering the lake had become too thick to build with, and therefore new, thinner ice had to be formed; the thick, useless slabs were pushed in under the ice. In the course of three days the new ice had attained a thickness of 12–15 cm; it was then cut into eight square slabs 1.8 × 1.0 m by means of the ice pick and these slabs were taken up one by one, a hole being made in the middle and through this the loop of a seal thong was run; this loop was then caught by a salmon spear pushed in under the ice and drawn up to the top, where the two ends of the thong were run through the loop and two or three men dragged the slab, by means of these two ends, up on to the firm ice, raised it on edge and pulled it ashore. On a stony, slightly sloping surface by the shore the slabs were placed on edge, leaning slightly inwards, and were cemented together with wet snow. Two slabs were broken during transportation and were cemented together again with wet snow. They were trimmed at the top to make them all the same height; owing to the dip of the terrain the height of the slabs at the front wall was 1.70 m, at the rear wall 1.50 m. In the walls a door was cut facing SE; just big enough for a man to creep through. Before the walls were closed up a number of stones were dragged in, particularly flat stones suitable as edge-stones for the platform, and after that a quantity of grit and small stones was scraped from the floor