"Adobe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... calling it Starvation Peak, he told a story of how Indians had once driven Spaniards up there and starved them. Bo was intensely interested, and thereafter she watched more keenly than ever, and always had a question for a passing trainman. The adobe houses of the Mexicans pleased her, and, then the train got out into Indian country, where pueblos appeared near the track and Indians with their bright colors and shaggy wild mustangs—then ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... Station 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 ball could hit him, wearing, he supposed, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... 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 larger ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... well to do, and they brought with them a good-sized retinue of ranch- and herdsmen,—mainly Mexicans,—plenty of "stock," and a complete "camp outfit," which served them well until they could raise the adobe walls and finish their homesteads. Curiosity led occasional parties of officers or enlisted men to spend a day in saddle and thus to visit these enterprising neighbors. Such parties were always civilly received, invited to dismount, ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... while, in the new light that creeps in with years, I began to rearrange my picture of things up there; and Benton crept a wee bit closer—until I could see its four adobe walls and its two adobe bastions, stern with portholes, sitting like bulldogs at the opposite corners ready to bark at intruders. And in and out at the big gate went the trappers—sturdy, rough-necked, hirsute ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 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. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... south of San Jose, tucked in the 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, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... wave upon wave, till their 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 their children ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the 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 ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... the shore. The city was to be called Isabella, in honor of the queen who had made possible the discovery of the new lands. Streets were laid out, a fine church and a storehouse were planned to be built of stone, and many private houses, to be built of wood or adobe or any convenient material, were to be constructed. All this was very fine in plan; but when the men were called upon to do the hard manual labor that is required for building a town and planting gardens and fields in an utter wilderness, many of them murmured. ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... wall 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 ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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
... that Agust'n, overlooking the making of adobe bricks at the clay pits a mile from the Mission, needed to send a message to the Father on some point concerning the work; and, Magdalena having been sent to carry their midday meal to the brick-makers, he entrusted her with the errand. Failing to find the Father in his private ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... many: condensed foods—German erbswurst, or army rations of ground peas and meat; dried potatoes; eggs in powdered form; preserved and salt meats; hard tack; tea and coffee; flour; and evaporated fruits. The water was already arranged for and the wagon containing the casks was at Buck's adobe house. ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... entirely enclosed by a wall of adobe ten feet high and whitewashed. To the outside it presented a blank face. Only corrals and an alfalfa patch were not included. A wide, high gateway, that could be closed by massive doors, let into a ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... of interest about the old cabin. The thatch had half blown off; the adobe-plastered stone fireplace and chimney had tumbled down, and sand had drifted in past the broken wattle door. But when Lennon went in to take advantage of the patch of shade that was offered, he was shocked to find the skeleton of a woman ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... agreed, though they had come so close that from the back of the bank it must have been possible to make out the outlines of the horses. The bank itself was a broad, dumpy building with adobe walls, whose corners had been washed and rounded by time to shapelessness. The walls angled in as they rose; the roof was flat. As for the position, it could not have been worse. A dwelling abutted on either side of the bank. The second stories of those dwellings commanded ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Los Angeles, where the old plaza church fronts the little square of green turf and cabbage-palms, you can still find a few of the one-story adobe buildings which lined the streets on the July afternoon when Joaquin Murieta whispered into Deputy Sheriff ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... 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, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... approached he found the Indians 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 ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... village of Las 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 ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... wind whipped up little puffs. The houses along this street were all low, square, flat-roofed structures made of some kind of red cement. It occurred to her suddenly that this building-material must be the adobe she had read about. There was no person in sight. The long street appeared to have no end, though the line of houses did not extend far. Once she heard a horse trotting at some distance, and several times the ringing of a locomotive bell. Where were the mountains, wondered Madeline. Soon ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... 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 roar of the water dwelt as in a shell upon the chimney," we had our ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... colonists arrived at the hacienda they found the ground covered with snow. They were crowded into small, leaky, adobe houses, without floors and with doors which could not be closed tightly. The remainder of the winter and the following spring proved unusually rainy and unpleasant; the food which they were given was probably of a somewhat inferior quality; and their tools were clumsy ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... 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 ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... long-horned cattle that ran from their approach gave place to feeding mustangs with the mark of the saddle upon them. Later, an adobe wall confronted them; and this they followed through a grove of great live oaks and up a grassy slope beyond, to where the long, low adobe house sat solidly upon a natural terrace, with the valley lying before and the ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... have canyon stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it is to see on the Colorado. The canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. The channels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobe soil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... 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
... New 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 lawns of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... 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 ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... corner. Great place for holdups, that!" This was a joke, and Jean smiled obligingly. "First the United States holds you up, and then the Mexicans. You get it coming and going. Well, Nogales don't have to stand. It squats. It's adobe mostly." ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... 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, and similar wants, ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... 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 ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... "New 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... traces of its previous occupancy to disturb him with its memories, and for the same reason it gained in cleanliness and freshness. The dry, desiccating summer wind that blew through it had carried away both the odors and the sense of domesticity; even the adobe hearth had no fireside tales to tell,—its very ashes had been scattered by the winds; and the gravestone of its dead owner on the hill was no more flavorless of his personality than was this plain house in which ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... 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, and many natives came along side, bringing ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... of alkali and adobe there was no living thing but these two. No air was astir, and a pitiless sun beat upon them unmercifully. Philip's lips were cracked, his tongue was swollen, and the burning dust almost choked him. He began to see less clearly, and visions of things he knew ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... passengers say, explained the late danger of a raid. It would be as "easy as falling off a log" for a party of ill-advised Mexicans to make a dash across the river, and already there had been small private expeditions of cattle stealers. Staring out of the windows at little adobe villages, their huddled houses turned from brown to cubes of gold by the afternoon sun, we listened to all sorts of disquieting gossip. According to the travellers, who talked loudly to each other across the car, the "scare" was suddenly on again. ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... excellence) is 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 ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... 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, has more than a superficial regard for the natural charms of its ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... known cereals, maize excepted. The middle period of barbarism shows us, in the East, the ever more extensive domestication of animals; in the West, the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation. Here also begins the use of adobe-bricks and of stone for house-building. The domestication of animals promotes the rearing of herds, and leads to the pastoral life. The necessity of larger quantities of food for men and beasts leads ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... 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 and ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... (brick) still survives in the Arabic Tob, and, perverted to the Iberian Adobe (Et-tob) it has ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... buckskins sat on the ground in the shade of the adobe stockade at old Fort Laramie, his knees high in front of him, his eyes fixed on the ground. His hair fell over his shoulders in long curls which had once been brown. His pointed beard fell on his breast. He sat silent and motionless, save that ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... 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 ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... all tower the 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), and am introduced ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... came out 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 ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... not common even in California; but on account of its comparative inaccessibility, few people visit Pala, and the village has been left much to itself in these latter days of American life in the state. The Indians live the life of the poorest class of Mexicans, dwell in adobe huts, and pursue ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... horse carrying Barbara passed through the streets to the outskirts of the city, where the adobe houses of the earlier days, with tents and shacks of every description, were scattered in careless disorder to the very edge of the barren Mesa. Beyond the wagon yard Barbara turned Pilot toward a whitewashed house that stood by itself on the extreme outskirts. Her approach was ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... 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, and piles of wicker ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... of the adobe ranch house much time had been wasted in cross-questions and foolish answers. Stella Vorhis had been banished to her own room and Sheriff Matt Lisner had privately told off a man to make sure ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... colt. The fight that followed the Greer entry had nothing at its initiation to do with the Mormon settlers. Assaulted by the Mexican police and populace, eight of the band rode away and four were penned into an uncompleted adobe house. Jim Vaughn of the raiders was killed and Harris Greer was wounded. On the attacking side was wounded Francisco Tafolla, whose son in later years was killed while serving in the Arizona Rangers. It was declared that several thousand shots had been fired, but there was a lull, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... equalize advantages, a tariff was established, as to the value of labour and materials. These materials consisted of lumber, including shingles, stone, lime and bricks; bricks burned, as well as those which were unburned, or adobe. Nails were also delivered from the ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... according to the district or country. In the hot low lands (tierras calientes) it is usually built of bamboos, with a thatching of palm-leaf; higher up, on the table lands (tierras templadas) it is a structure of mud bricks unburnt (adobe's); while still higher, upon the slopes of the forest-clad sierras, it assumes the orthodox shape of a log cabin, though in many respects differing ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... 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
... drew a low stool over to Craig's side. He was sitting in a rough chair tilted back against the adobe ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... east wing of the squat adobe house. About midnight there was a vigorous and persistent shaking ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... the 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 ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring—a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret. A little chapel, which my father ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... followed without difficulty the path indicated. A few hours' walk over the mountain pass brought us to a little straggling village of adobe houses, sleeping ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and so useful! But Julia, gliding about noiselessly, did not think much of the eggs, did not give much attention to the hens scratching for wheat kernels amongst the straw, nor to the barn swallows chattering over the adobe dwellings which they were building among the rafters above her. She had often listened to the love-talk of these last, but now her heart was too heavy to hear. She slid down to the edge of one of the mows, and sat there a ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... 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 ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... after the great earthquake of that year, I made a trip across the Sierra to Camp Independence, which had been destroyed, to consider the question of rebuilding that post. Of the buildings, brick or adobe, not one remained in condition to be occupied. Very fortunately, all in the garrison had received timely warning from the first shock, so that none were injured by the second and third shocks, which tumbled everything to the ground. Some thirty people living in small adobe houses ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... 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 ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... the sun touched them and they gleamed back a spotless white. Helen was all eagerness to come to the main building; from afar, here of late having seen others of its type, she knew that it would be adobe and massive, old and cloaked with the romance of another time; that even doors and windows, let into the thick walls, would be of another period; that somewhere there would be a trellis with a sprawling grape-vine over ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... 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
... 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. This ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... 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
... bequeathed him when the Great White Father at 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
... 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 ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... 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 herders. Each home maintained a small garden ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... thus apostrophized in ear and flesh, shook its head obstinately as if the question was by no means clear to its mind, but nevertheless started into a little trot, which presently brought it to the low adobe wall of the courtyard of "The Innocents," and entered the gate. A few lounging peons in the shadow of an archway took off their broad-brimmed hats and made way for the padre, and a half dozen equally listless vaqueros helped him to alight. Accustomed as he was to the ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... forty-mile "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— ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 remnants of the wind now and then ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... coming of an 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 ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... 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 grew in ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson
... and we go to the Tabernacle, in the morning. The Tabernacle is located on — street, and is a long rakish building of adobe, capable of seating some twenty-five hundred persons. There is a wide platform and a rather large pulpit at one end of the building, and at the other end is another platform for the choir. A young Irishman ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... 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 were blighted, and ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... sand gave way to rocks. 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 sort of ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... hedge, 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 their arms folded, and holding their blankets firmly about ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... 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 returned with ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... as we entered, was filled with empty palanquins and coolie servants waiting for the different mandarins who had come on official visits. The yamen itself consisted of low one-story structures, built in the usual Chinese style, of wood and adobe brick, in a quadrangular form around an inner courtyard. The common Chinese paper which serves for window-glass had long since vanished from the ravages of time, and the finger-punches of vandals. Even ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... the Old Pecos Church which was probably owned by the Roman Catholics at one time, but which was in ruins when I first saw it, as I drove by with my stage coach to Santa Fe. It stood twenty miles east of Santa Fe on the old trail. The walls were built of adobe, the doors were round-topped and built of solid hewed timbers, with wooden hinges, wooden latches. When I first saw the old ruins it had a belfry on the top of it with a rounded topped opening in it the same as the doors below. This church was built on the plan of a fort. When it was originally ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... 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
... lived near 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 ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... look as languid as a consumptive girl. What has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens? They are coursing through ravines and over mountain tops. Their tracks are visible in every direction. Occasionally a horseman will dash among us. His steed betrays hard usage. He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to the District Recorder's. In the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. Why, the fellow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 Hunter Austin
... lay along one deliberate, crooked street, because the arroyo along which it straggled was crooked. Its buildings were mostly of adobe, with earthen roofs, so low that when one saw a rainstorm coming in the rainy season (when it rained invariably once a day), he went forth with a shovel and shingled his roof anew, standing on the ground as he did so. There were a few cabins built of logs, but very few. Only one or two stores had ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... Fort William after William Bent, was built of adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two diagonally opposite corners were bastions ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... this ther' 's only blossom-snows; So, choosin' out a handy crotch an' spouse, He goes to plast'rin' his adobe house." ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... It was the third day after the 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 ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... 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 it easier and ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... on the asphalt; and when their friend next poked his head and shoulders around the corner, they fired. They saw the adobe plaster spatter from a corner of the building just under the man's chin; but that wasn't getting him. They jacked their sights up 50 yards, making it 800 yards; and when next the native showed around the corner they both got him—one ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... 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
... 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 ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... be a quaint, straggling Mormon village with a touch of modern enterprise; south of Cedar City the villages lack the enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and many of them are half a century old and more. Dilapidated square forts, reminders of pioneer struggles with the Indians, are seen here and there. Compact Mormon churches are in every settlement, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... was known that many would be assigned to the artillery, to which Cadet Graham had been recommended by the Academic Board. But all his boyhood had been spent on the frontier; his earliest recollections were of the adobe barracks and sun-dried, sun-cracked, sun-scorched parade of old Camp Sandy in Arizona. He had learned to ride an Indian pony in Wyoming before he was eight; he had learned to shoot in Montana before he was twelve; and he had ridden, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... 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
... smote down upon a dusty road. A heat-haze lay upon the arid land that stretched away upon either hand toward gray-brown hills. A little adobe hut, backed by a few squalid outbuildings, stood out, a screaming high-light in its coat of whitewash, against a background that was ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 search of the ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... 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. ...
— 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
... that this beautiful warbler confines itself to backyards in the city of Nashville simply because Wilson discovered it near there and gave it a local name, for the bird's actual range reaches from the fur trader's camp near Hudson Bay to the adobe villages of Mexico and Central America, and over two thousand miles east and west in the United States. It chooses open rather than dense woods and tree-bordered fields. It seems to have a liking for hemlocks and pine trees, especially if near a stream ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... and 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 in the chase and attached to the plaster while ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... 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 even ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... or to get wood, or to wait for the high winds to abate; after perils by water and danger from roving Indians, the Far West swung around the last curve of the river and behold—Fort Benton. The passengers cheered; the crowds on the levees answered, while fluttering flags blossomed from boat and adobe fort and trading posts as wild ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... seemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings was somewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for a village with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We entered boldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a genial landlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album of quite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which a week of traveller's fare had amply ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... there, to take long rides with him into the San Mateo Hills; and, after he had gone, shorter excursions in the vicinity of the town. Or else to walk with Abby in the morning down the broad Embarcadero Road to the little wharf on the bay. It was charming enough there when all was idle, with white adobe huts, and dark faces sleeping in the sun, and the lap of the tide on the breakwater. But when a ship was coming in, or was loading to get out, the Embarcadero filled the eye,—carts backing up with vegetables; casks being rolled out on the wharf ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... 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 years ago, and now the apparatus was stored away, nobody ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... of unseen brooks is heard, 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 the San Leandro turnpike,—a few miles later to rise ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... most friendly 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 ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... back along the road the stage-coach had just brought him. It was badly paved and hollowed in the middle with the worn ruts of a century of slow undeviating ox carts, and the passage of water during the rainy season. The low adobe houses on each side, with bright cinnamon-colored tiles relieving their dark-brown walls, had the regular outlines of their doors and windows obliterated by the crumbling of years, until they looked as if they had been afterthoughts of the builder, rudely opened by pick and crowbar, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... an adobe building. In the doorway stood a woman leaning against the jamb. She was smoking a cigar. June looked twice at her before she believed ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... streets were covered by a growth of thick, rank grass, which was kept to a navigable shortness by the machetes of the police. Stone sidewalks, little more than a ledge in width, ran along the base of the mean and monotonous adobe houses. At the outskirts of the village these streets dwindled to nothing; and here were set the palm-thatched huts of the Caribs and the poorer natives, and the shabby cabins of negroes from Jamaica and the West India islands. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... 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, ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... 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 of the town, on horseback and on ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... 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 a clump of yuccas and fan palms to the right, while down to the road and along the front ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison |
