146 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
At half past four we finally came up with Kerd- 
rillo and his party. We had made the thirty miles 
from Shipwreck Camp to the sixth camp in two 
days, going twelve the first day and eighteen the 
were already 
occupying the igloo at this camp so we built another 
for ourselves. 
In building a snow-igloo the first thing to do is 
to find a level place where the ice is heavy and will 
not crack; it is of course not always possible to find 
the ideal spot and you have to be content with the 
heaviest ice you can find and take your chances. 
The snow should be hard and firmly packed. You 
start in cutting blocks of snow with a snow-knife, 
an implement which has a steel blade about a foot 
and a half long, two inches wide and a sixteenth of 
an inch thick, with a wooden handle about six 
inches long, an inch and a half wide and a quarter 
of an inch thick; we had lengthened the handles 
of our snow-knives by lashing hatchet-handles to 
them, as I have already mentioned, so that we could 
use both hands in wielding them. Sometimes in¬ 
stead of a snow-knife we would use an ordinary 
hand-saw in cutting the blocks out; we could often 
do more work with this than with a snow-knife. 
The Eskimo in the distant past used to use a knife 
made of stone or bone. 
The size of the snow-blocks varied. For the 
second. Kerdrillo and his family 
