Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/225

Rh lamp would light sufficiently a hall built of this material. The snow about the mouth of the cave within had the yellow color of the flame to me approaching, as if the lamp were close to it. We afterward buried the lamp in a little crypt in this snow-drift, and walled it in, and found that its light was visible even in this twilight through fifteen inches thickness of snow. The snow was all aglow with it. If it had been darker, probably it would have been visible through a much greater thickness.—But what was most surprising to me, when E. crawled into the extremity of his cave, and shouted at the top of his voice, it sounded ridiculously faint, as if he were a quarter of a mile off. At first I could not believe that he spoke loud, but we all of us crawled in by turns, and though our heads were only six feet from those outside, our loudest shouting only amused and surprised them. Apparently the porous snow drank up all the sound. The voice was in fact muffled by the surrounding snow walls, and I saw that we might lie in that hole screaming for assistance in vain while travelers were passing along twenty feet distant. It had the effect of ventriloquism. So you need only make a snow house in your yard and pass an hour in it, to realize a good deal of Esquimaux life.

Jan. 20, 1859. Among four or five