From this we crouch into the living-room through a door two and a half or three feet high, and find ourselves in an apartment twelve feet square, and lighted by a small, square skin window in the roof. The only noticeable furniture consists of two board beds, with skins for bed-clothes. The women sit on these beds, sewing upon seal-skin boots. They receive us with their characteristic fat and phlegmatic good-nature, a pleasant smile on their chubby cheeks and in their dark, dull eyes,--making room for us on the bedside. Presently others come in, mildly curious to see the strangers,--all with the same aspect of unthinking, good-tempered, insensitive, animal content. The head is low and smooth; the cheekbones high, but less so than those of American Indians; the jowl so broad and heavy as sometimes to give the _ensemble_ of head and face the outline of a cone truncated and rounded off above. In the females, however, the cheek is so extremely plump as perfectly to pad these broad jaws, giving, instead of the prize-fighter physiognomy, an aspect of smooth, gentle heaviness. Even without this fleshy cheek, which is not noticeable, and is sometimes noticeably wanting, in the men, there is the same look of heavy, well-tempered lameness. The girls have a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of them are really pretty, though always in a lumpish, domestic-animal style. The hands and feet are singularly small; the fingers short, but nicely tapered. Take hold of the hand, and you are struck with its _cetacean_ feel. It is not flabby, but has a peculiar blubber-like, elastic compressibility, and seems not quite of human warmth.
See them in their houses, and you see the horizon of their life. In these fat faces, with their thoughtless content, in this pent-up, greasy, wooden den, the whole is told. The air is close and fetid with animal exhalations. The entrails and part of the flesh of a seal, which lie on the floor in a corner,--to furnish a dinner,--do not make the atmosphere nor the aspect more agreeable. Yet you see that to them this is comfort, this is completeness of existence. If they are hungry, they seek food. Food obtained, they return to eat and be comfortable until they are again hungry. Their life has, on this earth at least, no farther outlook. It sallies, it returns, but here is the fruition; for is not the seal-flesh dinner there, nicely and neatly bestowed on the floor? Are they not warm? (The den is swelteringly hot.) Are they not fed? What would one have more?