"Adobe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they came to more substantial one-story houses of adobe, with the walls painted in two distinct colors, blue, pink, or yellow, with red-tiled roofs, and the names with which they had been christened in bold black letters above the entrances. Then the carriage rattled over ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... shayird to pilot me into and round about the fortress. It is rapidly falling to decay, but is still in a sufficiently good state of preservation to show thoroughly its former strength and conformation. The fortress is a decidedly massive building, constructed entirely of mud and adobe bricks, a hundred feet high, of circular form, and some two hundred yards in circumference. The disintegrated walls and debris of former towers form a sloping mound or foundation about fifty feet in height, and from this the perpendicular walls of the castle rise up, huge ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... followed the oysters he illustrated for the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure between the Mexican pueblo and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... be seen on the corner from which she had vanished was a small, yellow-washed house much like the one Aurora occupied, as it was like hundreds that then characterized and still characterize the town, only that now they are of brick instead of adobe. They showed in those days, even more than now, the wide contrast between their homely exteriors and the often elegant apartments within. However, in this house the front room was merely neat. The furniture was of rude, heavy pattern, Creole-made, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... desire to let himself go to the devil—not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the old plaza. He passed a train of fagot-laden burros in charge of two Mexican boys from Tesuque, the sides and back of each diminished mule so packed with firewood that it was a comical caricature of a beruffed Elizabethan dame. Into the plaza narrow, twisted streets of adobe rambled carelessly. One of these led to the San Miguel Mission, said to be the oldest church ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... estimate, at least five thousand persons. It is true the dwellings were of the most primitive description, consisting of huts, for the most part built of wattles and palm thatch, with here and there a more pretentious structure, the walls of which were adobe, and it was indescribably filthy; yet the place was laid out with some pretension to regularity, being divided up into several wide streets, while in the centre of the town there was a wide, open space, or square, one side of which was occupied by a hideous ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... inclosed a court containing another adobe building, baked with the solar beams of many summers. Leaving our horses in the charge of a few peons in the courtyard, who were basking lazily in the sun, we entered a low doorway, where a deep shadow and an agreeable coolness fell upon us, as sudden and grateful as a plunge in cool water, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... softly falling on the bark thatch of the cabin with a muffled murmur, like a sound heard through sleep. The southwest trades were warm even at that altitude, as the open door testified, although a fire of pine bark was flickering on the adobe hearth and striking out answering fires from the freshly scoured culinary utensils on the rude sideboard, which Uncle Jim had cleaned that morning with his usual serious persistency. Their best clothes, which were interchangeable and worn alternately by each ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... a shelter use every and any thing handy for the purpose; ofttimes an uprooted tree will furnish a well-made adobe wall, where the spreading roots have torn off the surface soil as the tree fell and what was the under-side is now an exposed wall of clay, against which you may rest the poles for the roof of a lean-to. Or the side of the cliff (Fig. 23) may offer you the same opportunity. Maybe two or ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... ledge that spread in front of the opening, smothering him with heat waves that eddied in and out, and though the interior of the low-ceilinged chamber pulsed with the fetid heat sucked in from the plains generations before. The adobe walls, gray-black in the subdued light, were dry as powder and crumbling in spots, the stone floor was exposed in many places; there was a strange, sickening odor, as though the naked, perspiring bodies of inhabitants ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking adobe houses were set down at uneven intervals. To the eastward the street ended in the corrals and shipping-pens; in the other direction it merged into a narrow dusty trail that curved northward from the twin steel rails and quickly lost itself ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... one thousand Indians joined in the attack. One priest was killed and all inhabitants of the mission more or less wounded, and the mission itself was burned. The present ruins are the "new" buildings on the site of the old, completed in 1784, the walls of adobe four feet thick, the doorways and windows of burnt tiles. These half-cylindrical plates of hard-burnt clay were used to protect the inmates from the sun and the burning arrows of the Indians, and are now greatly ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... a very pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,—yellow this morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were. She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town; then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek, across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... "I haven't any cause to love you, or Gerald Wynn, or Bob Katz. One of you put a bullet into my shoulder, at the old adobe near Wickenburg. The three of you, also, made off with fifteen thousand dollars belonging to me and to Lafe Wynn. Now I can put you through for all that, and put you through good and hard. Even if I can't get hands on Gerald and Katz, I've ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... Zunis, Moquis, Acomans, and others, having different languages, {11} but standing on the same plane of culture. In many respects they have advanced far beyond any other stock. They have specially cultivated the arts of peace. Their great stone or adobe dwellings, in which hundreds of persons live, reared with almost incredible toil on the top of nearly inaccessible rocks or on the ledges of deep gorges, were constructed to serve at the same time as dwelling-places and as strongholds against ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... town, that paid little attention to the arrival or departure of strangers, San Andreas in the valley merely rubbed its eyes and dozed again as Cheyenne and Bartley rode in, put up their horses at the livery, and strolled over to the adobe hotel where they engaged ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... to get the sick man transferred from the filthy hovel in which he found him to clean, comfortable quarters in an ancient adobe palace, screened, airy, spacious. The second step was to secure the services of two competent and high priced nurses from Mexico City, one an American, the other an English woman, both experienced, intrepid, ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... severity and angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants. Besides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or large sun-baked bricks, plastered; houses of grass and bamboo; houses on the ground and houses raised on posts; but nothing looks prosaic, commonplace, or mean, for the glow and luxuriance of the tropics rest on all. Each house has a large garden or "yard," ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... which would be used with the Tob (adobe, sun-dried brick) forming the walls of Egypt and Assyria. M.G. Maspero, in his excellent booklet "L'Archeologie Egyptienne" (p. 7. Paris, Quantin, 1887), illustrates this ancient industry which endures with all its gear to the present day. The average measured 22 X 11 X 14 cm.; the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the crowd at Narragansett is essentially other than the crowd at Newport—the two do not mix; but the difference is one of degree rather than kind. The crowd at Newport is architecturally perfect, while the crowd at Narragansett is in the adobe stage,— that is the conspicuous difference; the one is pretentious and lives in structures more or less permanent; the other lives in trunks, and is even more pretentious. Neither, as a crowd, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... beside my horse, and we soon reached the camp, a log house of one room, with an adobe fireplace and chimney, a rough table, and a couple of boxes for seats. Also, there was a plank floor, a novelty and a luxury in that country at that time. Under this floor was a family of huge rats that I had been unable to exterminate, ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... no remedy for this, Hal asked, talking with one of his mule-drivers, Tim Rafferty, the evening after his ride with Cho. There was a remedy, said Tim—the law required sprinkling the mines with "adobe-dust"; and once in Tim's life, he remembered this law's being obeyed. There had come some "big fellows" inspecting things, and previous to their visit there had been an elaborate campaign of sprinkling. But that had been several ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... convinced that we were alone. But suddenly I realized it was not so. The kitchen adjoined an interior back-garden. I could see it through the opened door oval—a dim space of flowers; a little path to a pergola; an adobe fountain. It was a sort of Spanish patio out there, partially enclosed by the wings of the house. Moonlight was struggling into it. And, as I gazed idly, I thought I saw a figure ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of two or three miles, never far from the bay they arrived at what had evidently been a sleepy little village. The original low, picturesque, red-tiled adobe buildings still clustered about the Mission. But much had been added. The Keiths found themselves in an immense confusion. Screaming signs cried everywhere for attention—advertising bear pits, cock fights, theatrical attractions, side shows, and the like. Innumerable hotels ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... was at home, but Daylight dismounted and ranged the vegetable garden, eating strawberries and green peas, inspecting the old adobe barn and the rusty plough and harrow, and rolling and smoking cigarettes while he watched the antics of several broods of young chickens and the mother hens. A foottrail that led down the wall of the big canyon invited him, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... "zephyr," as they term it in San Pasqual, sighs joyously past him, snatches his headgear, whirls it down the tracks and deposits it at the western boundary of Donna's "ranch." This boundary happens to be a seven-foot adobe wall— so ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... idea sought. Awkwardness in comprehending this dialect easily reveals that the hearer bears the disgrace of being a "pilgrim," or a "tender-foot," as they style the new emigrant. To master it is an object of prime necessity to him who would win the miner's respect. Thus the term "adobe," the sun-dried brick, as applied to a man, signifies vealiness and verdancy. A "corral" is an enclosure into which the herds are gathered; hence a person who has everything arranged to his satisfaction announces that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... papers and cleverly rolled a cigarette with one hand. In the other he held his battered felt hat. His eyes had a far-away look as he reached forward and lighted his cigarette at the fire. "I was settin' on a crazy bronc', holdin' his head up so he couldn't go to buckin'—outside a little old adobe down in Yuma, Arizona, then," he explained, glancing at the girl. "Did you ever drift away complete, like that, jest from some little old ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... foothills—raises nothing but kindliness and a few vegetables and some hay. It is the sweetest place in its spirit I have ever felt, and lovely physically, too. I wish I could get you to go out there with me. Put up a comfortable adobe on the knob of a hill with a wide prospect and then make things grow, including our ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... hillsides came shouldering close to the stream, but fell away, forming a deep, semicircular basin toward the west, at the hub of which stood bolt-upright a tall, snowy flagstaff, its shred of bunting hanging limp and lifeless from the peak, and in the dull, dirt-colored buildings of adobe, ranged in rigid lines about the dull brown, flat-topped mesa, a thousand yards up stream above the pool, drowsed a little band of martial exiles, stationed here to keep the peace 'twixt scattered settlers and swarthy, swarming Apaches. The fort was their soldier home; ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... a cagelike cell, heavily guarded with bars on all sides. The adobe walls had been trusted in no direction. The steel lining was the strength of the Sour Creek jail. The sheriff himself set about shaking out the blankets. When this was done, he bade his two companions draw their guns and stand guard at the steel ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... which were always held "outside the walls." In the loess plains there could not have been any stone whatever for building purposes, and there is little, if any, specific mention of brick. Probably the walls were of adobe, i.e. of mud, beaten down between two rigid planks, removed higher as the wall dries below. This is the way most of the houses are still built in modern Peking, and perhaps also in most parts of China, at least where stone ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Mission, with its double towers, corridor of many arches, and sloping roof covered with red tiles. Between was the wild valley where cattle grazed among the trees and the massive bowlders. The red-tiled white adobe houses of the Presidio and of the little town clustered under its wing, the brown mud huts of the Indians, were grouped in the foreground of ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... furled towards the azure ceiling. How it imprinted itself upon their minds! A long sandy beach strewn with hides and skeletons of slaughtered cattle, a few scrubby oaks, farther back low sand hills rising behind each other as a background to a few old shanties that leaned away from the wind, an old adobe barracks, a few donkeys plodding dejectedly along beneath towering bundles of wood, a few loungers stretched lazily upon the beach as though nothing could astonish them; and between the picture and the emigrants still loomed up here and there, at ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... deliver the anniversary oration before the Pioneer Society, to celebrate the settlement of San Francisco. Any man is qualified for election into the society who came to California before 1853. What moderns they are! I tell them of the time when Richardson's shanty of 1835—not his adobe house of 1836—was the only human habitation between the Mission and the Presidio, and when the vast bay, with all its tributaries and recesses, was a solitude,—and yet I am but little past forty years ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... is a one-story, 1,750 square-foot adobe (mud bricks) building. An ice house is located on the west side along with an 9'-4" deep underground cistern. A 14 by 18.5 foot stone addition, which included a modern bathroom, was added onto the north side in the 1930s. East of the house there is a large, divided ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... Washington had summoned the boy to the war in April of 1917, three chambray shirts in an excellent state of repair, half of a fat steer jerked, a full bag of Bayo beans, and a string of red chilli-peppers pendant from the rafters of an adobe shack which Pablo and his wife, Carolina, occupied rent free. Certainly (thought old Don Miguel) life could hold no problems for one of Pablo's race ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... homestead, a group of low-roofed adobe buildings blending with the abrupt red background of the hill which sheltered it from the winter winds, was a settlement in itself, providing shelter and comfort for the wives and children of the ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... building, with adobe walls. It was raised up on pillars as long as telegraph poles, and the ground floor was divided into various apartments. There was the "calaboos," where Padre Pedro's chickens were encouraged to "put" eggs. There were the stables for ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... a clearing sky, and Baptiste pronounced it good for luck. There had been a hurricane in the night. The weed- grown tile-roofs were still dripping, and from lofty brick and low adobe walls a rising steam responded to the summer sunlight. Upstreet, and across the Rue du Canal, one could get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... ADOBE (pronounced a-do-be; also corrupted to dobie; from the Span. adobar, to plaster, traceable through Arabic to an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "brick''), a Spanish-American word for the sun-dried clay used by the Indians for building in some of the south-western states of the American Union, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I met a frontiersman named Phillips, of long experience, who told me in his new adobe house of an old chief who had lost five sons, and when the first was slain he cut off a piece of his thumb, next of his forefinger, and so on, till five told of his boys killed. The last was a brave, and supposed no ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... [] footnotes moved to EOParagraphs but NOT renumbered. (They are numbered "a" or "b" when two pages of notes are together.) Comments and guessed at characters in {braces} need stripped/fixed. Greek letters are encoded in brackets, and the letters are based on Adobe's Symbol font. ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... Indian trading-stations of that day, of adobes, or sun-dried bricks. It was enclosed by walls twenty feet high and four feet thick, encompassing an area two hundred and fifty feet long by two hundred wide. At the diagonal northwest and southwest corners, adobe bastions were erected, commanding every approach to ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... following remarks was the placing of a bronze tablet upon the oldest adobe building in San Francisco, the former residence of the Comandante, now the Officers' Club, at the Presidio, under the auspices of the California Historical Landmarks League, on Serra Day, November 24, 1913. Maria de la Concepcion Marcela Argueello (pronounced Arg-wail'-yo), ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... horse ranch was a long, low L-shaped adobe structure. The first impression Curly received was that of negligence. In places the roof sagged. A door in the rear hung from one hinge. More than one broken pane of glass was stuffed with paper. The same evidence of ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... the store, caught up a Mexican sombrero, and led the way up the trail to a grove of live-oaks perched on a bluff above. Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit, together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand. No life stirred in the valley except a circling buzzard high in the sky, and the tiny ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... so he hadn't been able to do it. Six years after they took possession they moved out, ruined. He remembered it as if it had been yesterday—the adobe house with its flat roof and strings of red peppers hanging on the walls, the cart piled high with furniture, Juana on the front seat and Pancha astride of the mule. Juana had grown old in those six years, fat and shapeless, but she had been dog-loyal, dog-loving, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... summer sun, and what hills were these that walled in the peaceful scene from the rest of the world, we could not tell. The village seemed awakening from its serene sleepiness, and one by one the windows of the adobe cottages swung open as if the people rubbed their long-closed eyes at some unwonted sight; and the doors gradually opened as though their dumb lips would hail us and ask who were these strangers that vexed the quiet waters of their bay. But two small fishing-boats lay at anchor, and these Booden ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... as bright and beautiful as all mornings are wont to dawn in Southern California. A light mist hung over the old adobe mission church, through which, with its snow-white towers and cold, clear-cut lines, it rose like a frozen fairy castle. Bell opened her sleepy eyes with the very earliest birds, and running to the little oval window, framed with white-rose ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... which was comparatively new, and their guide explained that this structure was one erected by the Mentor Company. Then they went over a slight rise, and finally came into view of a long row of one-story buildings with several rows of adobe houses behind them. ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the elaborate ornamentation found in the Aztec ruins in Mexico. The exterior of the house is absolutely plain. It is sometimes seven stories in height and contains over a thousand rooms. In some instances it is built of adobe—blocks of mud mixed with straw and dried in the sun, and in others, of stone covered with mud cement. The entrance is by means of a ladder, and when that is pulled up the latch-string ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... topped with tiles, concealed pleasant secluded gardens, from which the heavy perfume of the floribundia and other semitropical flowers poured out on the evening air. Behind such a wall and in the midst of such a garden stood the two-story adobe dwelling of the Senorita Maria Ygnacia Bonifacio, known to her intimates as Dona Nachita. In the "clean empty rooms" of this house, furnished with Spanish abstemiousness and kept in shining whiteness, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... light there lifted a terraced adobe building with ladders faintly outlined on the terraces. There was no sound save the barking of a dog and the ripple of the river. With a muttered admonition, Kut-le left Rhoda to the others and climbed one of the ladders. He returned ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... acres of high land in Fresno county that can't be irrigated. It is red adobe soil and there is hardpan in it. Which kind of fruit trees will grow and pay best? How near may the hardpan be to the surface before I ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... nothing, however, in what I saw about me of a character calculated to suggest an explanation of the motive for my seizure. The building was simply one of those low, one-storey adobe structures, thatched with palm leaves, such as then abounded in the lower quarters of Kingston, and which were usually inhabited by the negro or half-breed population of the place. The interior appeared to be divided into ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... Just that. On this side of the notch you will see—when you are close enough—a few adobe buildings. I want to pass over those buildings at a height of, say, five hundred feet; or a little lower will be better, if you can make it. Then circle and come back again. And try and make the return trip as high as you did coming down, until you are well past those mountains we passed over, ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... ill-kempt gardens, where loafers were sleeping, leaning against the trees, or women were combing their hair in the sun; a bridge; wretched suburbs with tumble-down houses; then the open country, hilly roads and at last a grove of cypress trees beyond an adobe wall and the tops of marble buildings, angels stretching out their wings with a trumpet at their lips, great crosses, torch-holders mounted on tripods, and a pure, blue sky which seemed to smile with superhuman indifference at the excitement of that ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... heard the bells of San Juan has a journey yet to make. He who has not set foot upon the dusty road which is the one street of San Juan, at times the most silent and deserted of thoroughfares, at other times a mad and turbulent lane between sun-dried adobe walls, may yet learn something of man and his hopes, desires, fears and ruder passions from a pin-point upon ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... substance for hours to mix it well. The poorer people build ranches of long, slender canes or Indian cornstalks tied together by grass and coated with mud. These are all erected around and about the most imposing edifice in the place—the whitewashed adobe church. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... little river, through irrigating ditches, past dozens of those deliciously quaint adobe houses, past the inevitable church, past a dead pony, ran over a chicken, made the little seven-year-old girls take their five-year-old brothers up in their arms for protection, and finally we climbed a long hill. At the top stretched an endless plain. The road forked; presently ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... blanket ceased; the soft, swishing sound recommenced. He drew a glittering bowie-knife from his boot-leg, and in three noiseless strides was beside the pile. There he saw what he fully expected to see,—a narrow, horizontal gap between the log walls of the cabin and the adobe floor, slowly widening and deepening by the burrowing of unseen hands from without. The cold outer air which he had felt before was now plainly flowing into the heated cabin through the opening. The swishing ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... glutinated with the bird's saliva and mixed with plant fibers, for the little mason does not believe in making bricks without straw. So well packed is the inch-thick wall that a stiff knife blade must be used to cut through it. While the natural color of the adobe cottage is ash-gray, and therefore harmonizes with the general hue of its surroundings, and also with the mezzotints of the builder, yet he sometimes decorates it with the gaily colored wings of moths caught ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these one and all tend inward to ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These provincials had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole, better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were putting the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to the open with a baby under each arm the moment an earthquake began, and in the first seconds even this was not so bad. The wall about the Presidio was fourteen feet high and seven feet thick and there were solid trunks of trees crossed inside the adobe. It looked like a heap of dirt, nothing more. Luis was riding up from the Battery of Yerba Buena and his horse was flung down and he saw the sand-dunes heaving toward him like waves in a storm and shiver like quicksilver. And there was a roar as if the earth ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... halted behind a long adobe wall to the right of the main street, and as we crouched there the sun rose like a great searchlight and pointed us out, and exposed us, and seemed to hold up each one of us to the derision of Santa Barbara. As the light flooded us we all ducked our heads simultaneously, and looked wildly about ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... There was water at Twenty Mile—the only water for twoscore of miles. Consequently it was an important station on the road between the southern country and Old Camp Grant, and the new mines north of the Mescal Range. The stunt, liquor-perfumed adobe cabin lay on the gray floor of the desert like an isolated slab of chocolate. A corral, two desolate stable-sheds, and the slowly turning windmill were all else. Here Ephraim and one or two helpers abode, armed against Indians, and selling whiskey. Variety ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... excited and hostile that he dared not enter their village. He did, however, venture to climb a hill at a distance, from which he had a view of one of the cities of Cibola. The houses, built of light stone and whitish adobe, glistened in the wonderfully clear air and bright sunlight of that region, and gave him the idea of a much larger and richer city than really existed. Friar Marcos, by this time thoroughly frightened, ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... the mouth of the canon, that he put Ysidro's house. It was built out of mud bricks, called adobe, as near as possible like Ysidro's old house,—two small rooms, and a thatched roof made of reeds, which ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson
... to live on top of an adobe hill one mile from a small town which has been brought up on the Declaration of Independence, without previously taking a course in plain and fancy wheedling. This is the mature judgment of a lady who has tried it. Not ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... their nests under the eaves of the barn. The bluebirds had been broken up in a little bird-house near by, by the rats or perhaps a weasel, and being no doubt in a bad humor, and the season being well advanced, they made forcible entrance into the adobe tenement of their neighbors, and held possession of it for some days, but I believe finally withdrew, rather than live amid such a squeaky, noisy colony. I have heard that these swallows, when ejected from their homes in that way by the phoebe-bird, have been known to ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... piece of land, about three hundred feet above the river. A rocky brook behind the town supplies the water for drinking and cooking purposes. The large square or plaza has the church at one end; on the other three sides are red-tiled adobe houses and stores, with floors of clay or red bricks. Streets branch off at right angles from the square, and are crossed by others. The best houses are those nearest the square. Those on the outskirts ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Straight as an arrow! They say that his folks are rich. Come out here way over the mountains, and is just going to teach school in a log school-house—all made of logs and sods and mud-plaster, adobe they call it—a graduate of ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... California. At the latter place I visited the scenes of "Two Years Before the Mast.'' At the old town of San Diego I met Jack Stewart, my father's old shipmate, and as we were looking at the dreary landscape and the forlorn adobe houses and talking of California of the thirties, he burst out into an encomium of the accuracy and fidelity to details of my father's book. He said, "I have read it again and again. It all comes back to me, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... a beautiful one, low and long, with all the rooms opening on the broad veranda; it is part of adobe and part of wood, the sides being covered with a network of fuchsia, heliotrope and jasmine reaching to the eaves of the brown tile roof; a broad, branching fig tree is in the little court before ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... on, past the bunk house and across the narrow flat opposite the corrals and up on the first bench of the bluff that sheltered the ranch buildings from the worst of the desert winds. She did it very innocently, and as though she had never in her life had any thought of invading the squat, adobe building kept sacred to the leisure hours of the ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... Barbara Mission, where Franciscan fathers still live, has a fine church with double towers and a long row of two-story adobe buildings enclosing a hollow square where a beautiful garden is kept. One of the brotherhood, wearing a long brown robe just as Father Serra did, takes visitors into the church, and also shows them the garden and ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... aglow, although the sun had set, and in the subdued light the coarse adobe huts and rickety frame dwellings were endowed with a picturesque appearance they did not really possess. Beth and Patsy came to the end of the main street rather suddenly, and stood a moment looking at the shadows cast by the rocky ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... difficulty. He was the first white man to see the extraordinary ruin called Casa Grande, near the present town of Florence, and on the occasion of his first visit he took advantage of the structure to say mass within its thick adobe walls. This is probably the most remarkable ancient building within the limits of the United States, For a long time it was called the House of Montezuma, though, of course, Montezuma never heard of it. A similar ruin, called Casas Grandes, exists in Sonora. The construction ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the reins on a pair of fast horses at full speed, we whirled past the old adobe wall (which the Mormons had built to defend their city from the Indians) and came out into the purple night of Utah, with its frosty starlight and its black hills—a desert night, a mountain night, a night so vast in its height of space and breadth of distance that it seemed natural ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... consisted of two trunks, and I had only the sum of ten dollars in my pocket. I might, perhaps, have carried one trunk, but I could not manage two; so I was compelled to pay out seven of my ten dollars to have them taken to a room in an old adobe building on the west side of what is now known as Portsmouth Square. This room was about ten feet long by eight feet wide, and had a bed in it. For its occupation the sum of $35 a week was charged. Two of my fellow-passengers and myself engaged it. They took the bed, ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... winter quarters was under way, and in the following spring Young conducted a train of eight hundred wagons across the plains to the great valley where a city of adobe and log houses was already building. The new city was laid off into numbered lots. The Presidency had charge of the distribution of these lots. You may be sure they did not reserve the worst for their use, nor did they place about themselves undesirable neighbors. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... was treated to a fairy-like sight. It was when a recent shower had left little puddles in the clay road, and the eave swallows from a house across the meadow came down to procure material for their adobe structures. Most daintily they alighted on their tiny feet around the edge, holding up their tails like wrens, lest they should soil a feather of their plumage, and raising both wings over their backs like butterflies, ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... houses are built of. This is all alluvial country; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't see anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation, either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... farmhouses, like the agricultural districts of the East. The inhabitants all live in towns, or "forts," as they are more commonly called, each of which is governed by a Bishop. These are invariably laid out in a square, which is surrounded by a lofty wall of mere dirt, or else of adobe. In the smaller forts there are no streets, all the dwellings backing upon the wall, and inclosing a quadrangular area, which is covered with heaps of rubbish, and alive with pigs, chickens, and children. The same stream which irrigates the fields in the vicinity supplies the people ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... West;" but it was with a view of ascertaining some facts concerning occurrences of more recent date, as well as of seeing some of the actors therein, that we paid a visit to Pueblo. We found it a rather odd mixture of the old and the new, the adobe and the "dug-out" looking across the street upon the imposing structure of brick or the often gaudily-painted frame cottage. It looked as though it might have been indulging in a Rip Van Winkle sleep, except that the duration might have been a century or two. High mesas with gracefully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... class II—detached family dwellings—consist sometimes of a single room; more often of several rooms. The rooms are generally built of stone, although examples constructed of mud and adobe are also found in certain regions. The average size of the room is larger than in the communal building, and there is a gradual increase in size of rooms from north to south. There are front doorways and light and air holes are larger than in the communal houses. Mr Bandolier suggests that ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... height above it, the ruins of a dilapidated castle. Its base was formed by a mass of shapeless walls, of mud hovels, gray and dusty looking as the soil, together with some fragments of turreted walls, in whose shelter about a thousand humble huts raised their miserable adobe fronts, like anaemic and hungry faces demanding an alms from the passer-by. A shallow river surrounded the town, like a girdle of tin, refreshing, in its course, several gardens, the only vegetation that cheered the eye. People were going into and coming out ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... first mile the tunnel had to be driven through solid granite. Then the way led through adobe hills, so soft that the sagging walls were a constant menace. Not until six workmen had died at the job was the adobe finally sealed with concrete. After the adobe came sand, spring riddled. More rough-necks gave up their lives fighting the gushing floods and ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... a quaint, attractive building, made of adobe cement, in the ancient mission style; but it proved roomy and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... for making unbaked bricks (TobSpan. Adobe) with chaff and bruised or charred straw. The use of this article in rainless lands dates from ages immemorial, and formed the outer ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... hasta otra vista!" he had hailed, but his gaze sought the little window in the adobe wall where a pair of dark, languorous eyes peered out from between the parted curtains and a dusky face dodged out of view the instant it saw it was seen. What Sancho said in answer is not recorded, but now he was watching the coming of the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Montgomery gave the marching order. Fife and drum struck up a lively air and to its strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... The moon, almost full, already smiled down upon us over the wall on the left. We continued along the plain between the ranges, which later receded into the distance, as if retiring for the night. Flat, mud-colored, Palestinian adobe huts stood here and there in the moonlight among patches of a ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... represent these several conditions of Indian life with reasonable completeness. Their houses will be seen to form one system of works, from the Long House of the Iroquois to the Joint Tenement houses of adobe and of stone in New Mexico, Yucatan, Chiapas, and Guatemala, with such diversities as the different degrees of advancement of these several tribes would naturally produce. Studied as one system, springing from a common experience, ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond. The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... from his own land and surrounded by a thousand perils. The woman did not speak again and they moved on with an even stroke down the canal which had an uniform width of about thirty feet. They were still passing houses of stone and others of adobe, but before they had gone a mile they were halted by a sharp command from the shore. An officer and three soldiers, one of whom held a ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... coarse furnishings of the adobe with disgust as she was led to the one room where she could secure sleeping accommodation. It contained three beds with as many different colored spreads, queer little pillows, and drawn-work on one towel hanging ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... was of adobe, low, with a wide veranda on the three sides of the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which looked to the south. These verandas, especially those on the inner court, were supplementary rooms to the house. The greater part of the family life went on in ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... merely as a shelter against the sun and wind. They are made of the canes that grow in the jungles of the larger river bottoms, or along the banks of irrigating ditches. On the roof the spaces between the canes are filled with adobe, sun-dried mud. It is not necessary to plaster the sides of the houses, for it is pleasant to let the air have free play, and it is amusing to look out through the cracks and see everything ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... missions, the first of which was founded by the great Father Junipero Serra at San Diego in 1769. The fathers brought with them the vine and the olive, reduced the savage Indians to industrial pursuits, and opened the way for that ranchero and adobe civilization which, down to the coming of the American, in about 1840, made in this region the most picturesque life that our continent has ever seen. Following this is a period of desperado adventure and revolution, of pioneer State-building; ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Gunsight, running grandly down to the station; but the rest is mostly vacant lots and scattered adobe houses, creeping out into the infinitude of the desert. At noon, when he had come to town, the street was deserted, but now it was coming to life. Wild-eyed Mexican boys, mounted on bare-backed ponies, came galloping up from the corrals; freight wagons drifted ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... of the type used for adobe and called "caliche" may be found and this is an excellent binder for ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... the end of the high bridge and looked over it to where her father was making his way along the river-bank by a path leading to the smelter. Then she glanced up another path branching at her feet from the road crossing the bridge and which climbed the mountain until it reached a little adobe cottage, then stopped. She seemed undecided, but the sweet tones of a church bell striking quickly on the clear April air caused her to turn her face in the direction ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... Montgomery street was on the banks of the bay. There was one pier at this time constructed from it in the bay, and a temporary pier by Colonel Stevenson at the north beach. The city was growing up toward Happy Valley. Portsmouth Square, the plaza, still had some of the adobe buildings on it. The best hotel was the Parker House, on the west corner of it. The plaza was sand, no vegetation ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... he rose to his full height and, with a sweeping gesture the length of his arm, pointed to the domelike summit, dazzling in the slant of the evening sunshine, that seemingly overhung the dun-colored adobe corrals on the flats to the south, yet stood full five miles away. 'Tonio so seldom opened his lips to speak that the six men listened with attention they seldom gave to one another. Yet what 'Tonio said was translatable ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... checked, and a large part of the old French town was reduced to ashes. Six years later another fire equally destructive, completed the work of blotting out the French town, and the old New Orleans we now know is the Spanish city which arose in its place: a city not of wood but of adobe or brick, stuccoed and tinted, of arcaded walks, galleries, jalousies, ponderous doors, and inner courts with carriage entrances from the street, and, behind, the most charming and secluded gardens. Also, owing to premiums offered by Baron Carondelet, the governor, tile roofs came into vogue, so ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street |
