THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 419 



or seven feet high and varying in length from eight to twenty 

 feet. The door at the outer end of the alleyway was four or five 

 feet high and two and a half or three feet wide. But the door 

 by which one entered from the alleyway into the house proper 

 was always so low you had to go in on hands and knees, and the 

 upper edge of the door was a few inches lower than the top of the 

 bed platform when you came in. 



The largest of all the houses was that of my old acquaintance 

 Hitkoak, the much-traveled man who had in 1899 seen Hanbury's 

 party on the Arkilinik River above Baker Lake and who told me 

 about it in Prince Albert Sound in May, 1911.* This was far 

 the largest snowhouse I had ever seen. In its longest diameter 

 the floor was thirty feet across. There were two bed platforms 

 each ten or twelve feet across the front and eight feet wide. A 

 sort of impromptu reception for us was held in this house. With 

 the visitors, family and intimate friends sitting Japanese-fashion 

 on the bed platforms, there was room for about seventy-five people 

 to stand closely packed on the floor space in front. It has to be 

 admitted that they were almost as closely crowded as straphangers 

 in an American street car, but even at that it was a marvel to me 

 that a hundred people could gather under one snowhouse roof. 



The highest point of the central dome was probably ten or 

 eleven feet from the floor. The house was brilliantly lighted by 

 several oil lamps each burning with a foot of flame. These were 

 set low down in Eskimo fashion but their light was reflected again 

 and again from the million snow crystals in the dome, so that the 

 house was filled with a soft and diffused glow. 



A house as large as Hitkoak's is never purely a residence but 

 is intended in part as the assemblyroom or club house of the village. 

 With its high dome it is difficult to heat, for it becomes so warm near 

 the roof that the snow tends to melt before it is comfortably warm 

 at the level where people sit. Moreover, heating so large a house 

 takes a great deal of seal oil. Families of social ambition among 

 the Eskimos would perhaps not mind the mere trouble and expense 

 if large houses were fashionable. This is the opposite of the fact, 

 for the snowhouse dwellers of the east, no less than the dwellers 

 in wooden houses whom we have already discussed, prefer coziness 



* For a photograph of Hitkoak, see "My Life With the Eskimo," opposite 

 p. 284. For Hitkoak's account of his meeting with Hanbury, see the same 

 book, page 285; and for Hanbury's account of his meeting with the party 

 of which Hitkoak was a member, see David T. Hanbury's "Sport and Travel 

 in the Northland of Canada," p. 14. 



