The next step is the porch or sukso, another little domed erection much like the main igloo, built in front of the entrance and intended, first to break the force of the wind and to keep the larger place warm, and secondly as a store house for surplus meat and blubber, for the dogs’ harness, whips, sealing lines, and anything the latter and the wolves might find eatable. (Eskimo dogs, be it remarked, find nothing uneatable save sticks and stones). As an entrance or exit for the sukso, a further passage is built, like a little tunnel; again as protection from the arctic wind. The finishing touch is the window. Light is a necessity, but the Eskimo is scarcely particular about ventilation. The less he gets of that the more successful his architecture seems to be. A square opening is cut high up in the dome of the igloo, facing the sleeping bench. It is then glazed after the fashion of the Arctics. The builder sets off for the nearest sheet of fresh water ice, and with the butt end of his sealing spear shivers out a good thick pane of it. This he places over the hole in the roof, packing its edges round with half melted snow, and pouring water over the packing. In two minutes, everything is frozen airtight and solid, and a window of flawless ice lets the illumination of the northern night into the pure and icy chamber of the newly made house. Failing a window of ice, one is made of strips of dried seal intestine (a thin, translucent material, not unlike oiled silk), stitched together with fine deer sinew. The seams are parallel, and as neatly executed as if by machine working on the smallest stitch. The fabric is stretched over the opening and pegged down at the corners, and congealed into its place by half melted snow. A small hole is cut in the dome for ventilation, and a snow block provided to stop it up again when necessary. Finally, the interior has to be glazed. While the householder himself has been busy more or less within the building, on the outside the old men and the children and the women have been set the task of packing every joint and crevice in the snow masonry with loose snow, so as to make it absolutely wind tight. Now comes the moment when the doorways, too, are closed and every entrance blocked. Two lamps, well trimmed and well supplied with oil, have been carefully lit and left burning inside, much as we in this country leave a sulphur candle in a room to be fumigated after infectious illness, and seal up the door. As the lamps burn slowly away, the temperature rises and all the surface of the snow is slightly melted. As the lamps die out the temperature falls again, and the surface freezes to glass-like smoothness. Every asperity of the sawn blocks of snow is annealed, and the dwelling is as proof against draught as the inside of a bottle. Water, too, is thrown on the floor, to make it smooth as marble and as durable as cement.