Within were galleries for the defenders,
rude ladders to mount them, and magazines of stones to throw down on the
heads of assailants. It was a mode of fortification practised by all the
tribes speaking dialects of the Iroquois.
The voyagers entered the narrow portal. Within, they saw some fifty of
those large oblong dwellings so familiar in after years to the eyes of
the Jesuit apostles in Iroquois and Huron forests. They were about fifty
yards in length, and twelve or fifteen wide, framed of sapling poles
closely covered with sheets of bark, and each containing several fires
and several families. In the midst of the town was an open area, or
public square, a stone's throw in width. Here Cartier and his followers
stopped, while the surrounding houses of bark disgorged their inmates,--
swarms of children, and young women and old, their infants in their
arms. They crowded about the visitors, crying for delight, touching
their beards, feeling their faces, and holding up the screeching infants
to be touched in turn. The marvellous visitors, strange in hue, strange
in attire, with moustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuse,
halberd, helmet, and cuirass, seemed rather demigods than men.
Due time having been allowed for this exuberance of feminine rapture,
the warriors interposed, banished the women and children to a distance,
and squatted on the ground around the French, row within row of swarthy
forms and eager faces, "as if," says Cartier, "we were going to act a
play.
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