THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 403 



This is an appropriate place for certain suggestions as to the 

 building of houses in the North. To most white men it seems 

 improper that the walls of a house should be anything but vertical, 

 but to the Eskimos it seems proper and to me it appears sensible 

 that instead of being vertical they should lean inward slightly. 

 When a wall of boards is vertical it takes great skill even with the 

 best of prairie sod to build a sod wall outside that shall not even- 

 tually lean away from the house enough to make an air space, 

 thereby destroying a great part of the protective value of the sod 

 wall. But if the board wall slopes inward five or ten degrees from 

 the vertical, any one can place sod so that it will hug the wall, 

 eliminating the air space. Gravity takes care of that. 



Another idea of value in arctic house-building is to have the 

 door low. We have outlined the principle in describing snowhouse 

 building which applies in any house, that hot air is light and wants 

 to rise while cold air is heavy and inclined to sink down. If in a 

 cold climate a house has its door in the floor, the laws of gases and 

 of gravity will take care that the cold air does not get into the 

 house from below any faster than the warm air escapes at the top. 

 This is the same principle applied in ballooning, where the bag is 

 filled with gas lighter than air and the mouth of the bag turned 

 down and left open without fear of the hydrogen escaping rapidly. 

 If, on the other hand, the door is high, as in most dwellings in 

 civilized countries, when the door is opened there is an inrush of 

 cold air along the floor through the lower half of the doorway 

 and an outrush of warm air through the upper half. In an exceed- 

 ingly cold climate, such as the Arctic, where the temperature out- 

 doors may be fifty below while the air inside has been heated to 

 seventy or eighty degrees above, a great quantity of heated air will 

 escape even with the most hasty opening and closing of the door, 

 and much fuel is thus wasted. It cannot be supposed that getting 

 the cold air into the house that way is advantageous for reasons of 

 ventilation, because entirely other means must be used for con- 

 trolling the supply of fresh air. We have always a chimney through 

 which warm air escapes and in all except snowhouses some means 

 other than the door for the gradual entrance of cold fresh air. 



But I must say that the discussion of a low door in a big frame 

 house to be occupied by sailors is purely academic. You would 

 have far more trouble in teaching your sailors the advantage of 

 going in and out through such a door than you would in supplying 

 fuel to counteract the greatest possible escape of heat, for in my 

 experience sailors are of all men the most conservative. 



