444 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



they voted for a new building, partly doubtless because snowhouse 

 building was novel enough to be fun. I searched around but was un- 

 able to find any snow harder than that used by the Eskimos. In 

 fact it was probably a little softer, for the blizzard of two days 

 before had covered the underlying snowdrift by at least two feet of 

 fresh drift. I tried to shovel this soft snow off and cut blocks from 

 beneath, but both drifts were so soft that there was no clear line 

 of demarcation between them. I made the mistake of building the 

 house unnecessarily large. The softer the snow the easier it is to 

 build if the cakes are strong enough, and the house was erected 

 with remarkable speed considering the inexperience of my com- 

 panions. By the time we had finished there was a stiff bliz- 

 zard blowing. We cooked supper. The heat from the cooking com- 

 bined with the rise of temperature outdoors due to the gale softened 

 the blocks still further, and towards the end of supper when some- 

 body looked up we found that the roof, v/hich had an hour before 

 been a hemispherically curved vault, was now nearly fiat like a 

 ceiling, with the distinct appearance of a sag one side of the 

 center. We hastily got together all our boxes (we carried food 

 in one, cooking gear in another, and writing materials in a third) 

 and made of them a pillar of support, but the roof continued sink- 

 ing on both sides of the pillar with the promise that in half an 

 hour or so the top box would cut a square piece out of the roof, 

 allowing the rest to sink down upon us. 



There was but one thing to do. The caved-in Eskimo house 

 had at least the advantage of an ice crust in its interior due to 

 former heating. We had to put on our outer clothes in a hurry 

 and were just able to get our gear out of the house before it be- 

 came so low as to make moving about in it difficult. We now dug 

 a tunnel into the old snowhouse. On interior view it appeared that 

 the central depression had sunk so close to the floor that the only 

 method of accommodation for us was to sleep each with his feet 

 at the head of the next man in a complete circle around the house. 

 We made a pillar of boxes again, afraid the roof would sink under 

 the weight of snow from the outside, especially when softened by 

 the heat of our bodies. Thanks to the inside ice crust our 

 pillar worked very well and we passed the night tolerably, al- 

 though some of the bedding got wet because of our being so 

 close to the walls as to touch them. It is our great pride always 

 to keep bed-clothing dry in winter, and although some of the 

 bags got pretty badly wet we had them all dry long before we got 

 across to Kellett and without hanging them up. They were never 



