“excavate a round cellar, four or five feet deep and twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. Over this they build a square cabin of split poles or puncheons, planted erect in the ground and covered with a flattish puncheon roof. They eat and sleep in the cellar ... and store their supplies on the bank above next to the walls of the cabin.”[192] The Maidu make a hut of slabs placed together in something the shape of a tipi, with a low, square projection for an entrance. Passing northward to the Aleuts, we find “houses built with the floor somewhat below the level of the outside soil, the walls of whale-ribs, sticks of wood, or upright stone walls, covered outside with mats, straw and finally turf.... The roof was formed by arching whale-ribs, or long sticks of driftwood, matted, thatched, and turfed like the sides, with a central aperture. A platform, somewhat raised, around the sides of the house afforded a place for sitting and sleeping. Later each village had a large house or _kashim_, which served as a common work-shop, and a lodging for strangers, as well as for a town-hall for their discussions and festivals.... Still later, in a period not greatly antedating the historic, the Aleuts began to build large communistic dwellings with features peculiar to themselves, without doors, and entered by the hole in the roof, the inmates descending on a notched log placed upright. These large yourts were divided, by partitions of wood, stone, or matting, into small rooms like the state-rooms of a steamer, but without doors; open toward the center of the yourt, and each accommodating one family.”[193] It will be noted that we have again changed materials of construction; and why? Because the Aleutian Islands are devoid of timber, devoid of good building stone that an Amerind could get at, and he resorted therefore to what there was—driftwood, whale-ribs, turf, etc.[194] The house called by the Russians _barabára_ seems to have been originally made of turf even to the roof, and I saw examples in the summer of 1899 at Unalaska and on St. Paul Island. The turf or sod was cut into slabs and laid up like stones. [Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF ESKIMO SNOW IGLU]