_Snow houses_ (_apúya_).--Houses of snow are used only temporarily, as for instance at the hunting grounds on the rivers, and occasionally by visitors at the village who prefer having their own quarters. For example, a man and his wife who had been living at Nuwŭk decided in the winter of 1882-’83 to come down and settle at Utkiavwĭñ, where the woman’s parents lived. Instead of going to one of the houses in the village, they built themselves a snow house in which they spent the winter. The man said he intended to build a wooden house the next season. These houses are not built on the dome or beehive shape so often described among the Eskimo of the middle region of Dr. Rink.[N154] [Footnote N154: Parry, 2nd Voy., p. 160 and plate opposite; Franklin, 1st Exped. vol. 2, pp. 43-47, ground plan, p. 46; Boas, “Central Eskimo,” pp. 539-553; Kumlien, Contributions, etc., p. 31; Petitot, Monographie, etc., p. xvii (a full description with a ground plan and section on p. xix), and all the popular accounts of the Eskimo.] The idea naturally suggests itself that this form of building is really a snow _tupek_ or tent, while the form used at Point Barrow is simply the iglu built of snow instead of wood. When built on level ground, as in the village, the snow house consists of an oblong room about 6 feet by 12, with walls made of blocks of snow, and high enough for a person to stand up inside. Beams or poles are laid across the top, and over these is stretched a roof of canvas. At the south end is a low narrow covered passage of snow about 10 feet long leading to a low door not over 2½ feet high, above which is the window, made, as before described, of seal entrail. The opening at the outer end of the passage is at the top, so that one climbs over a low wall of snow to enter the house. At the right side of the passage, close to the house, is a small fireplace about 2½ feet square and built of slabs of snow, with a smoke hole in the top and a stick stuck across at the proper height to hang a pot on. When the first fire is built in such a fireplace there is considerable melting of the surface of the snow, but as soon as the fire is allowed to go out this freezes to a hard glaze of ice, which afterwards melts only to a trifling extent. Opposite to the door of the house, which is protected by a curtain of canvas, corresponding to the Greenlandic ubkuaĸ, “a skin which is hung up before the entrance of the house,”[N155] the floor is raised into a banquette about 18 inches high, on which are laid boards and skins. Cupboards are excavated under the banquette, or in the walls, and pegs are driven into the walls to hang things on. As such a house is only large enough for one family, there is only one lamp, which stands at the right-hand side of the house[N156].