Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/20
country. The surface of the old peneplain is cut up by the erosion of water and ice; faults also play a part in the formation of the terrain. There are numbers of lakes, and the rivers often form large but irregular valleys. The southern part of Melville Peninsula is very much cut up by Repulse Bay, Gore Bay and Lyon Inlet and their offshoots. The lower stretches are often occupied by shore-ridges, almost the whole of the region having been sunk under the sea since the glacial period.
Along the east side of Melville Peninsula, from Usugarssuk northwards, stretches a belt of silurian limestone formations in front of the higher rock terrain, which in most places ends abruptly in a steep cliff. The native limestone itself, yellowy-grey in colour and fairly hard, appears only exceptionally; otherwise the land consists of loose fragments which have been forced by the ice into shore ridges which, through the slow rising of the land, have thus come to lie the one behind the other, rising almost imperceptibly to the foot of the primitive rock. These shore ridges, which are bare of vegetation in summer and of snow in winter, intersected by partly swampy hollows which in summer have a little vegetation, in winter are covered with snow, form the characteristic type of landscape of Iglulik; in this is included the peninsulas Amitsoq and Ingnertoq, the land around Hall's Lake and the island of Iglulik itself.
Southampton Island, which is separated from the mainland by the sound Roes Welcome — a water very difficult to cross — and Frozen Strait, consists of the same two kinds of terrain as Melville Peninsula: