In the far distant regions of the north, there are places on the earth to which no daylight or sunshine comes for four long months at a time. During this gloomy period the ground goes on, from hour to hour, scattering more and more of its heat, until it is almost as cold as the chill space in which the great world is poised, and has indeed more than 100 degrees of frost. The land and the water alike get covered up by one broad and thick sheet of never-melting ice and snow. There is not a leaf, or a grass blade, or a vegetable stalk any where in the wide white desolation. But there are animals and human beings, who are born and die, who maintain a prolonged existence in it. Let us just look in upon one of the households in this drear frost land, and see what the odd community is like.
In the midst of a broad snow waste, through which the sharp wind is howling with a fearful sound, there is a small mound nearly covered by the snow-drift. We perceive this mound by faint starlight, the only gleam that comes down from the sky. A few feet away from the mound we discover a small hole blocked up by a lump of snow. We move the lump aside, and stretching ourselves out at full length on the ground, we squeeze into the hole head foremost, and crawl along a narrow passage, burrowed out in the firm snow for about a dozen feet. We then find ourselves in a vault ten feet wide and fifteen feet long, and so low that we can scarcely sit upright within it. This is the inside of the mound. It is the interior of a hut, or dwelling-place, of these people of the drear frost land. The walls of the hut are built of large stones piled together, with a padding of frozen moss covered over them, and with thick ice and snow covered over the moss.
There are twelve living individuals, men, women, and children, huddled together in this close vault. They have no fire to keep them warm. Indeed, there is neither coal nor wood which they could use to light a fire, within many hundred miles. There is in one corner of the hut a broad shoulder-blade of a large quadruped laid flat, and in the hollow of this blade there is some crushed seal’s blubber, and some soft moss, with long cotton-like rootlets. The end of the moss is burning with a small, dull, smoky flame. This is the only artificial source of light and warmth within the hut.