The skin topeks were set up. Caves in the bluff became dwellings. Where the wind had swept the ledges bare, they quarried rough stone and built igloos of these, chinked with reindeer moss and banked with snow for warmth. Many of them, too, began to dismantle the ships and build rude cabins of the wood and sails. Such were the nondescript abodes of the new village, and here they settled down in the darkness and terrible cold of the Arctic midnight, content, for near at hand were provisions and loot such as had never been dreamed of in the wildest flights of Eskimo imagination. The looting went on continuously and peacefully, at first, for there was more than enough for all. The village became crowded with cabin fittings, wrecked deck houses, spars, ropes, sails, and all the metallic paraphernalia of a full-rigged ship. In the holds they broke into the flour barrels and scattered the contents about in willful play, for they knew nothing of the value of flour. Hard bread they prized, but flour was then to them a thing of no meaning, and there are aged Eskimos alive to this day who will tell with sorrow how they wasted the precious stuff, throwing it at one another and setting it adrift down the wind in glee. The ivory, they prized, the oil, and especially the whalebone, which they eagerly appropriated and took ashore, hiding much of it as well as they could from one another. Later, when all had been taken from the ships and trouble and distrust had come, the villagers began looting from each other. But at first all went well. With plenty of the prized hard-tack, with meat in barrels, with oil in great profusion, and wood and iron galore, it seemed as if the Eskimo millennium was at hand, and that the tribes might live in peace and plenty here for a long time to come and—who knows?—out of their prosperity found a permanent city and develop a higher scheme of Eskimo civilization than they had hitherto known. Yet it was not to be, and the very plenty that might have been their upbuilding became their undoing. The serpent of envy entered their below-zero Eden, and set tribe against tribe and family against family. Men began to quarrel over articles of loot aboard ship. There was not room to stow their wealth in the igloos, and the women and children fought over what was outside.