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Adobe   Listen
noun
Adobe  n.  
1.
An unburnt brick dried in the sun; also used as an adjective, as, an adobe house, in Texas or New Mexico.
2.
Earth from which unburnt bricks are made. (Western U. S.)
3.
(Geol.) Alluvial and playa clays of desert and arid regions, differing from ordinary clays of humid regions in containing carbonates and other soluble minerals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Adobe" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Tin"clay, mud, 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... direction. But the sun was now high enough to paint the little eminence on which the cabin stood. In spite of his self-control, his heart beat faster as he raised his eyes toward it. Its window and door were closed, no smoke came from its adobe chimney, but it was else unchanged. When within a few yards of it, he picked up a broken shovel, and, shouldering it with a smile, strode toward the door and knocked. There was no sound from within. The smile died upon his lips as he nervously ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... England 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," with ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... 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— ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... 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 great ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... 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 ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... about this?" Bob asked, after they had roamed from one room to another. "For my part I think I'd fancy living in one of those three story adobe houses of the Hopi Indians, we saw pictures of at the hotel; or even a Navajo hogan. But one thing sure, these people never had to ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson

... so 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, hurriedly retraced ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... 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. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... 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, and he ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... plain from the language used at durbars, 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 (or brick) is not cheaper; the "barbarian" parts of China are still the ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... 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 ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... 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 the Kohlers' house, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... upon the steep side of a gulch which was an arm of Antelope Coulee. He looked down into the gulch, searched with his eyes for the stake that marked the southeast corner of the eighty lying off in this direction from the shack, and finally saw it fifty yards away on a bald patch of adobe. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... Plumas lay sleepily quiet under the hot, white, brooding spring sunshine. A few trim-looking places cuddled their yards and gardens close against the life-giving channel, whose green banks, covered with vegetation and shaded by trees, bisected the town. Elsewhere, naked adobe walls flanked the dusty streets and from their stark surfaces gave back the sunshine in a blinding glare. Here and there an umbrella tree, or a locust, made a welcome splotch of green and shade down the length of the barren, dusty streets, or the tiny yard of a house set back ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... Major Overstone differed outwardly but little from those of his companions. It was the usual structure of logs, laid lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... Materials. — N. material, raw material, stuff, stock, staple; adobe, brown stone; chinking; clapboard; daubing; puncheon; shake; shingle, bricks and mortar; metal; stone; clay, brick crockery &c. 384; compo, composition; concrete; reinforced concrete, cement; wood, ore, timber. materials; supplies, munition, fuel, grist, household stuff pabulum &c. (food) 298; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... 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 ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... The low adobe house, with its gleaming roof, looked like a jewel set in the valley. Far away, seemingly to the very rim of the world, the flat lands stretched; and then beyond, in a golden haze, the stern mountains loomed, almost kissing the sky. ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne

... first group are placed those ancient or modern habitations which are isolated, on all sides, from cliffs. They may be situated in valleys or on elevations or mesas; they may be constructed of clay, adobe, or stone of various kinds, but are always isolated from cliffs. They are single or multiple chambered, circular or rectangular in shape, and may have been built either as permanent habitations or as temporary outlooks. Their main feature is freedom, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... plazas, the Texan at once went to the presidio—the palace of the governor. It was of adobe, like the rest of the buildings, but the thick walls were ornately decorated with stone. It was a fortress as well as a dwelling place, and it contained many rooms. Several dozen rather ragged soldiers were loafing about the presidio when Kid Wolf ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... restricting ban of Johnson's jealousy, or was she a deformed cripple, or even a bedridden crone? From the extension at times came a murmur of voices, but never the accents of adult womanhood. The gathering darkness, relieved only by a dull glow from the smouldering logs in the adobe chimney, added to my loneliness. In the circumstances I knew I ought to have put aside the repast and given myself up to gloomy and pessimistic reflection; but Nature is often inconsistent, and in that keen mountain ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Aravaipa in a coma of sunheat. Its adobe-lined streets basked in the white glare of an Arizona spring at midday. One or two Papago Indians, with their pottery wares, squatted in the shade of the buildings, but otherwise the plaza was deserted. Not even a moving dog or a ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... the 17th of June, 1859, there was much more of a genuine simoom. So hot a blast of air swept over the town as to fill the people with terror. This burning wind raised dense clouds of fine dust. Birds dropped dead from the trees. The people shut themselves up in their thick adobe houses. The mercury rapidly rose to 133 degrees, and continued so for three hours. Trees ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... counted for nothing in planning towns in a land made up of distances. At the end of this street stood the "Last Chance" general store, the outpost of civilization. What the freighter failed to get here he would do without until he stood inside the brown adobe walls of the old city of Santa Fe. Tell Mapleson, the proprietor of the "Last Chance," was a tall, slight, restless man, quick-witted, with somewhat polished manners and a gift of persuasion in ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... watercourse, ascended its bed to big cottonwoods and flowing water, followed it into box canons between rim-rock carved fantastically and painted like a Moorish facade, until at last in a widening below a rounded hill, we came upon an adobe house, a fruit tree, and a round corral. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... once sent into the mountains to secure logs for cabins, and work on adobe huts was also begun. On August y those of the Twelve present selected their "inheritances," each taking a block near the Temple. A week later the Twelve in council selected the blocks on which the companies under each should settle. The city as then laid out covered a space ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... which will make a stable, compact pile, as boxes, baskets, oil or other cans, may be used for a revetment. Barrels may be used for gabions. Canvas stretched behind pickets is well thought of in a foreign service. If the soil will make adobe, or sun-dried bricks, an excellent revetment may be made of them, but it ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... dark, shadowy rocks, grim witnesses of the battle. This spot is known by the appropriate name of "The Devil's Gate." Wherever the walls of the canon recede from the river's brink, and leave a space of cultivable land, there the industrious Mormons have built log or adobe cabins, and converted the circumscribed domain into farms, gardens, and orchards. In one of these isolated settlements I seek shelter from a passing shower at the house of a "three-ply Mormon " (a Mormon with three wives), ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... now, for the summer rains were long overdue, and bogged firmly in the red adobe mud was a gaunt long-horned cow. The Chief was too tender-hearted to shoot her and drive on, as he knew he should. Instead he stopped the car and got out to see if he could possibly "extract" her. Failing to frighten her into pulling herself ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... and, by a strange irony, the enormous, widely-spaced stacks of wild oats are replaced by a carpet of tiny-leaved mosses and chickweed at the roots of trees, and the minutest clover in more open spaces. The baked and cracked adobe soil of the now vanished plains is exchanged for a heavy red mineral dust and gravel, rocks and boulders make their appearance, and at times the road is crossed by the white veins of quartz. It is still ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... how it came about. One hundred and thirty years ago, the port of La Paz, in Baja California, lay baking in the sun. La Paz was then, as now, a little old town, with narrow, stony streets and adobe houses, standing amidst palms, and chaparral, and cactus. To this port of La Paz came, one eventful day, Don Jose de Galvez, envoy of the King of Spain. He brought orders to the Governor of California, Don Gaspar de Portola, that he should send a vessel in ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... 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 ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King

... and cast one single suspicious glance around the rude apartment which served as a sitting-room. Flip had apparently been writing. A small inkstand was still on the board table, but her paper had evidently been concealed before she allowed them to enter. The squaw instantly squatted before the adobe hearth, warmed her bundled baby, and left the ceremony of introduction to her companion. Flip regarded the two with calm preoccupation and indifference. The only thing that touched her interest was the old squaw's draggled skirt and limp neckerchief. They were Flip's ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... kneading it and rolling it between maxillae and palpi. When it has reached the proper consistency they bear it away to some dry, warm place, such as the rafters of an outhouse or a garret, and there use it in the construction of their adobe or mud nests. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... 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 in the chase and attached to the plaster while it is fresh. The rock ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... this he did—in true Mexican fashion. With a curse of but five words—words of great scope and finest selection, however—he mercilessly raked Felipe's ancestors for five generations back; he objurgated Felipe's holdings—chickens, adobe house, money, burro, horses, pigs. He closed, snarling not obscurely at Felipe the man and at any progeny of his which might appear in the future. Then he dropped his reins and sprang off ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... the Laguna-Bell road, reached a cross-roads shaded by tall and spreading trees. Back from the road John saw an old house that charmed him. It was of whitewashed adobe, two stories in height. Entirely around the second story was a balcony of wood, ascended by an open stairway. Wooden shutters were opened at the windows, the sills of which were two ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... little adobe or sod houses at night and listen to the wolves howl over the graves of our babies. For the howl of the wolf is like the cry of ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... 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, "where ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... himself at the stern, where he controlled the tiller, while the native lounged on the front seat smoking his eternal cigarette. Behind them the pretty little capital, with its five thousand inhabitants, distributed mostly in adobe huts, shabby and of small dimensions, gradually sank out of sight, and finally vanished behind a bend in the river. To the right, stretched the immense undulating plain of exuberant forest, with its tropical luxuriance, its smothering climate and its overwhelming animal life. The banks ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... a rivulet of liquid glass. That was all the mesa had to show, only its endless gray sagebrush and the creek bed almost dry—unless one should reckon the three parched cottonwood trees beside the stream, a little way down from the canon, and the flat-roofed adobe house near by, and the empty corral behind built of aspen poles. In that immensity of mountain and mesa the house looked like a brick of sun-baked mud, the corral like a child's device of straws, the three cottonwoods like three twigs stuck in the earth. Or, at any rate, that is how ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... the old town, in an adobe house, with a garden which was a tangle of roses and pomegranate blossoms, under orange trees and palms. And there were narrow paths of hard sand, the colour of old gold, which rounded up to the centre, and had little runnels of water on either side. The sunshine ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... 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 ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis

... that is closed. He hardly noticed the blank walls, the archways of brick and tile, the tall badgirs, even the filth and smells. But strangest was it to listen to the hot silence, to look up at the brilliant stripe of blue between the adobe walls, while over there—! ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... house 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 concrete ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum

... of any importance we passed was Fronteras. It is built on the summit and slopes of an elevated plateau and looks extremely picturesque at a distance. Seen close, however, it turns out to be a wretched little cluster of adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses. Not only the town itself, but also all the ranches in the neighbourhood are erected on elevations, a precaution from former days against ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... quaint, attractive building, made of adobe cement, in the ancient mission style; but it ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne

... to near timber line, usually in deserted Woodpecker holes, natural cavities in trees, fissures in the sides of steep rocky cliffs, and, in the settlements, in suitable locations about and in the adobe buildings. In settled portions of the west it nests in the cornice of buildings, under the eaves of porches, in the nooks and corners of barns and outhouses, and in boxes provided for its occupation. Prof. Ridgway found the Rocky Mountain ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various

... 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 only ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... and Robinson, Smith and Brown, You from the piping prairie town, You from the Fundy fogs that came, You from the city's roaring blocks, You from the bleak New England rocks With the shingled roof in the apple boughs, You from the brown adobe house— You from the Rockies, you from the Coast, You from the burning frontier-post And you from the Klondyke's frozen flanks, You from the cedar-swamps, you from the pine, You from the cotton and you from the vine, You from the rice and the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various

... refugees, the men in brown derby hats—Cubans, negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and children absolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and from balconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, and roofed with rugged lichen-blackened tiles. The windows reached from sidewalk to roof and were grated heavily, the doors oak and clenched with great nail heads. Santiago, Santiago ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris

... I found myself at the foot of a narrow street which passed between two tall adobe buildings and entered the plaza near the centre of its western side. I took it at a run, and when half-way through saw directly before its inner end, facing the north, a group of old, gray-haired Navajos standing alone with ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... and went up to the small adobe house where he had lived in solitary contentment with his cat Compadre until Luck Lindsay, seeking a cheap headquarters for his free-lance company while he produced the big Western picture which filled all his mind, had taken calm and ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... thin air. When we crossed the Raton Mountains into New Mexico the sick boy got off at the first station, and I waved good-bye to him as the train pulled out. Then the mountains and the funny little adobe huts and the Pueblo Indians along the line made me ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey

... efforts on Hop's part, to get to the Seabury bungalow. It was in the midst of a beautiful garden, and a long walk led up to the house, around which was an adobe wall, with a red gate. Over the gate was a roof, making a pleasant shade, and there were seats, where one ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young

... out before they reached the outskirts of the mining-camp. At the first house of the rambling suburbs Neill slipped to the ground and walked beside her toward the old adobe plaza ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine

... 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 and ugly, for ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... with raisins in it. We filled it in—a wash-basin full of it—on top of a few incidental pounds of chile con, baked beans, soda biscuits, "air-tights," and other delicacies. Then we adjourned with our pipes to the shady side of the blacksmith's shop where we could watch the ravens on top the adobe wall of the corral. Somebody told a story about ravens. This led to road-runners. This suggested rattlesnakes. They ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... 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, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... 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 ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard

... thickly clothed with sword grass, here the slopes were bare and brown. We were too far north for rice; corn, wheat, and kaoliang took the place of paddy fields. Instead of brick-walled houses we found dwellings made of clay like the "adobe" of Mexico and Arizona. Sometimes whole villages were dug into the hillside and the natives were cave dwellers, spending their lives within ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... 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

... was, and is 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 it, and ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison

... of the water, the high mountains about Santa Cruz, the low beach of the Saunas, and the strongly-marked ridge terminating in the sea in a point of dark pine-trees. Then the line of whitewashed houses of adobe, backed by the groves of dark oaks, resembling old apple-trees; and then we saw two vessels anchored close to the town. One was a small merchant-brig and another a large ship apparently dismasted. At last we saw a boat coming out to meet us, and when it came alongside, we were surprised ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... 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 ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... Acrobat Reader (R) [http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html] installed on your computer to view and print the forms accessed on the Internet. Adobe Acrobat Reader may be downloaded free from Adobe Systems Incorporated through ...
— Copyright Basics • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... both Europe and America. 'Around the curving shore of the Bay and upon the sides of three hills, which rise steeply from the water, the middle one receding so as to form a bold amphitheatre, the town is planted and seems scarcely yet to have taken root, for tents, canvass, plank, mud and adobe houses are mingled together with the least apparent attempt at order and durability.' However, the appearance of the city is fast improving—for churches and schools and public buildings are springing up on every side, and substantial edifices are fast taking the place of the more ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... with large brick houses and small adobe houses. Pointed cobbles form the pavement, and leave a dirty open sewer ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... a low stool over to Craig's side. He was sitting in a rough chair tilted back against the adobe wall of the saloon. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... 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 ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower

... letter with some photographs, and she showed it to me. It's a desolate place in the sage bush he's living in, and there's not a white man, except the boys he can't talk to, within miles of him, while from the picture I saw of his adobe room I scarcely think folks would have it down here to keep hogs in. Jake Cheyne was fastidious, too, and there was a forced cheerfulness about his letter which had its meaning, though, of course, ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... autumn dusk could not subdue the color of this land. Shadows here were not gray or black; they were violet and purple. The crumbling adobe walls were laced by strings of crimson peppers, vivid in the torch and lantern light. It had been this way for days, red and yellow, violet—colors he had hardly been aware existed back in the cool green, silver, ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton

... 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 falling ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... is nothing left of it but the outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a copious fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's Spring, is the site of the oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... every word exchanged by the storekeeper and a chance customer. Presently two cowboys clumped in, joshed with the store-keeper, bought tobacco and ammunition—a most usual procedure, and clumped out again. Young Pete strolled to the door and watched them enter the adobe saloon across the way—Tony's Place—the rendezvous of the riders of the high mesas. Again a group of cowboys arrived, jesting and roughing their mounts. They entered the store, bought ammunition, and drifted to the saloon. It was far from pay-day, as Pete knew. It ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... 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 the attacks of the roaming and ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... manufacture of pottery, extends to the time of the domestication of animals. The middle status includes not only the domestication of animals in the East but the practice of irrigation in the West and the building of walls from stone and adobe brick. The upper status is marked by the use of iron and extends to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and literary composition. At this juncture ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... was as unlike the adobe mansions of the old grandees as was the eucalyptus the palms. It was large, square, two-storied, and although of wood, of massive appearance. It was, indeed, the most solid-looking structure in California at that time. A deep verandah traversed three sides of the house, its roof ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... of August we anchored off Mazatlan, a picturesque and ancient adobe town in old Mexico. The approach to this port was strikingly beautiful. Great rocks, cut by the surf into arches and caverns, guarded the entrance to the harbor. We anchored two miles out. A customs and a Wells-Fargo boat boarded us, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... a Catholic graveyard with high adobe wall and are at the Hospital Municipal, our objective point. A dark young man in ill-fitting clothes receives us and shows us about this primitive refuge. The floors are tiled and all the appointments are rude, ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins

... house in Manila, close to the embankment of the Pasig River, on the Binondo side, opposite Fort Santiago and the Walled City, there is an ancient adobe building thatched with nipa. Its narrow door opens on the waterfront. High and narrow windows, devoid of glass or shell, are mere slits cut through the walls. Seen from the river, they have a striking resemblance to the gun-ports of an ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore

... attempt 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. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... 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 lantern, stood on ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler

... clatter of dishes, a long interval of silence, and then the sun like a flaming disc topped the mountain wall to the east. The square adobe houses cast long black shadows across the whitened dust of the street and as the man burrowed deeper to keep out the light the door of the stone house slammed. The day seldom passed when Bunker Hill's wife did not cook for three or four hoboes but when Old Bunk called a man in ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post, a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected hides—vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast—or a whaler called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark and one ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... 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 is ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... 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

... the people then on earth were of the Digi{COMBINING BREVE}n, only a few had god-like powers, particularly First Man, First Woman, Yolkai Estsan, and the Winds. The lesser Holy Ones worked much in clay, making pottery and adobe houses. The designs they used in their earthenware, however, were of a sacred nature, to be used only in ceremonials, and when the Fox, Wolf, Badger, Bird, and many other people repeatedly employed sacred symbols to adorn their ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... those 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 ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper

... reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I dare to think that we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears of things" ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... dim 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 ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... the wilds," said Ajax, "and it may surprise you to learn that not so very long ago the Spanish-Californians who owned most of the land kept thousands of pounds in gold slugs. In the attic over this old 'adobe,' Don Juan Soberanes, from whom we bought this ranch, kept his cash in gold dust and slugs in a clothes-basket. His nephew used to take a tile off the roof, drop a big lump of tallow attached to a cord into the basket, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... 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 ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth

... purple slate, which splintered into bits that were both slippery and sharp to the feet of our poor animals. Just as the sun was setting and dusk fell, we reached the miserable pueblo of Santa Maria Albarradas. It was situated on a terrace or shelf, and its little houses were made of red or purple adobe bricks, and thatched with grass. Little garden patches and groups of cultivated trees surrounded the houses. The church was little larger than the dwellings, and was constructed of the same clay, thatched with the same grass. Near it was the town-house. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... 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 sound recommenced, and stopped. Then the four fingers of a hand, palm downwards, ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... loungers like the pricking of liliputian arrows, and invaded even the cactus hedges. The hot air visibly quivered over the dark red tiles of the tienda roof as if they were undergoing a second burning. The black shadow of a chimney on the whitewashed adobe wall was like a door or cavernous opening in the wall itself; the tops of the olive and pear trees seen above it were russet and sere already in the fierce light. Even the moist breath of the sea beyond ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... 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, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... 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 ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... ship from New York to 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

... 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 ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... experiences that came into my own life with the Army in the far West, whether they be about Indians, desperadoes, or hunting—not one little thing has been stolen. They are of a life that has passed—as has passed the buffalo and the antelope—yes, and the log and adobe quarters for the Army. All flowery descriptions have been omitted, as it seemed that a simple, concise narration of events as they actually occurred, was more in keeping with the life, and that which came into it. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... person, and invited Cogan to eat with him, and Cogan went. Ten or a dozen bull-fighters boarded in one place near the bull-ring—a large, square, two-story adobe house; a grand house, with walls painted in colors and splendid high rooms arranged around ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly

... though we are among fields of wheat and maize, we are in the tropics after all. As the road rises we get views of the broad valley, with its lakes and green meadows, and the great white haciendas with their clumps of willows, their church-towers, and the clusters of adobe huts surrounding them—like the peasants' cottages in feudal Europe, crowding up ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... the ancient wharfs, that dated from the days when Porto Banos was a receiver of stolen goods for buccaneers and pirates, were rows of thatched huts, streets, according to the season, of dust or mud, a few iron-barred, jail-like barracks, customhouses, municipal buildings, and the whitewashed adobe houses of the consuls. The backyard of the town was a swamp. Through this at five each morning a rusty engine pulled a train of flat cars to the base of the mountains, and, if meanwhile the rails had not disappeared into ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis

... 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, and I had found ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson

... 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 ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... 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 ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... clear sun everything was sharply defined. From the Mexican end of town,—the old "plaza,"—which antedated coal-mines and Americanisms, gleamed the little gold cross of the adobe Church of San Antonio. Around it were green, tall cottonwoods and the straggling mud-houses and pungent goat-corrals of its people. Toward the canyon rose the tipple and fans of the Dauntless colliery, banked in slack and slate, and surrounded by paintless mine-houses, while to ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... her, Red Snake and the medicine man in the center of the adobe, the lesser chiefs behind them, and in another circle ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard

... the interior of a long shed, adobe-walled and thatch-roofed, with small barred windows set high above the earth floor. It was cool and shadowy, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of citrus fruits. There were bins along the walls, some partly full of oranges, ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper

... people before the vista of a faintly lit, narrow, ascending street. The dim twilight of the closing day lingered under this roof of fog, which seemed to hang scarcely a hundred feet above them, and showed a wall or rampart of brown adobe on their right that extended nearly to the water; to the left, at the distance of a few hundred yards, another low brown wall appeared; above it rose a fringe of foliage, and, more distant and indistinct, two white towers, that were lost in ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... 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 ball could hit him, wearing, he supposed, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle

... a fat prairie dog which he had shot, and he was carrying it around by a hind leg looking for Compadre and calling "Kitty, kitty, kitty," in the most seductive tones of which his desert-harshened vocal chords were capable. He looked under the squat adobe cabin which held all the odds and ends that had accumulated about the place, and which he called the "ketch-all." He went over and looked under the water tank where there was shade and coolness. He went to the stable, and from there he returned to the adobe house, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower

... horseback and reached Johnson's Ranch about the same hour in the day. As we approached, the little colony of emigrants which had settled in the neighborhood the previous Autumn crowded in and about the two-roomed adobe house which Mr. Johnson had kindly set apart as a stopping place for the several relief parties on their way to and from the mountains. All were anxious to see the sufferers for whose rescue they ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... would change her mind when they got to the school building, and he even stooped to praise it in a kind of contemptuous way as they drew up in front of the large adobe building. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... was composed of four large rooms, with plastered adobe walls, and a two-room wooden ell. A twenty-feet-wide "gallery" circumvented the structure. It was set in a grove of immense live-oaks and water-elms near a lake—a long, not very wide, and tremendously deep ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... 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 ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... it "her" house? It is the mother bird who seems to do the plastering. Both birds work on the structure, but it appears to be the female who carries most of the mud and who uses her faded red apron for a trowel as she moves round in her nest pushing her breast against the round wall of the adobe dwelling to spread the mud evenly. The work on one particular nest was done in late April when there was nothing on the elm but the seed fringes to screen the builder as she worked. Then the four light greenish-blue eggs were laid. A red squirrel ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... long and the short of it was that I was captured and condemned to be shot. I need not go into my emotions at the time. Suffice it to say that I was led out and placed with my back against an adobe wall. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... houses are built of bluish-gray adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine cottage homes which promise simple comfort within. They are set well back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost every one has a thrifty ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... our ever-faithful half canteens, and nothing wherewith to wall the wells. But a firm clay was reached a few feet below the surface, which afforded tolerable strong sides for the lower part, ana furnished material to make adobe bricks for curbs to keep out the sand of the upper part. The sides were continually giving away, however, and fellows were perpetually falling down the holes, to the great damage of their legs and arms. The water, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... enter the city of Tenoctitlan or Mexico, the mightiest city that ever I had seen. The houses on the outskirts, indeed, were built of mud or adobe, but those in the richer parts were constructed of red stone. Each house surrounded a courtyard and was in turn surrounded by a garden, while between them ran canals, having footpaths on either side. Then there ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... with keen interest. The white walls of the old adobe church reflected back the morning light in a whitish glare. About the place he observed a rank growth of weeds and evil cacti, the only touch of life to be seen being the birds that were perched on its crumbling ridges, ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin

... now beyond the line of haphazard shacks and adobe buildings that bordered the one street, into the jungle of mesquite and cactus growing in the dry waste of sand that almost surrounded the settlement—and he ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... 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 two apartments by an unpainted partition of timber framing, decorated with ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood

... the settlement. This was applied also, as we have learned, to Goat Island. The pueblo was then insignificant and apparently with no prospect of expansion or grandeur. There were only a few houses there, chiefly of adobe construction, clustering about the Plaza. The Presidio, west of the stray hamlet, and the Mission Dolores, to the southwest, were all that relieved a dreary landscape beyond. There were the hills covered with chaparral and the shifting sands all around, and far ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey



Words linked to "Adobe" :   adobe lily, adobe brick



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