Mud house

“ Unpaved, without sidewalks, pulverized mud in the streets, the houses of heavy logs, unpainted, and straw-thatched and black with age, with grotesque looking people in the doorways or seated on earthen stoops extending across the whole front of the house. ”

“ So far as the mud-houses are concerned, probably more than half the officials, except at places like Zungeru and Kano, live in mud-houses to-day. The Resident at Naraguta, for instance, lives in a leaky mud-house, while the Niger Company’s representative at Joss, five miles off, has a beautiful and spacious residence of brick and timber. A good mud-house is not to be despised, but the money to build even good ones is quite inadequate. I could give several examples where officials have spent considerable sums out of their own pockets to build themselves a decent habitation of mud and thatch. ”

“ Every now and then with a whisper and whistle rising into a great buffeting flap, a sudden whirlwind of dust would scour some twenty yards along the road, and then break like a shore-quenched wave against one or other of the mud walls or throw itself heavily against a house and fall in a shower of sand. ”

“ The whole trousseau of the Vicomtesse is lost, and her maid has 4000 francs in her box, which can still be seen floating open.... But the waters are slowly going down. Many bodies have been found, but there are still many more beneath the mud. In the lower rooms of this house the mud is a yard deep, and most horrid in quality, and the smell of course dreadful. I spend much of my time at the window in hooking up various objects with a long iron bed-rod—bits of silver, teacups, even books—in a state of pulp. ”

“ Hardy, Hans, and the two peons were to work at the house, and Seth was to finish the well, which, although begun, had been stopped during the press of more urgent work, and the water required had been fetched from the stream in a barrel placed in a bullock-cart. The way in which adobé or mud houses are constructed is as follows:—The mud is prepared as for brick-making; but instead of being made into bricks, it is made at once into the wall. ”

“ I can not recall to my memory any foundation of this kind in the mud houses of India. Village houses in the northwest of that country are usually built on a chabootra, which is a raised platform of mud, about a couple of feet in height, and this forms the floor of the house. This platform, by raising the foundation of the walls above the ground, may perhaps serve some of the purposes of the layer of stones in the Persian foundations. ”

“ All day long men, women, and children were plodding about the desolate waste looking in vain to locate the boundaries of their former homes. Nothing but a wide expanse of mud, ornamented here and there with heaps of driftwood, remained, however, for their contemplation. It is perfectly safe to say that every house in the city that was not located well up on the hillside was either swept completely away or wrecked so badly that rebuilding will be absolutely necessary. ”

“ The man who had built his house of mud was sad of heart as he sat in shelter, and his head cooled with shame as he thought of his empty boast. When therefore the rain ceased, he set himself with speed to build a house like unto his neighbour's, and from that day even until now is mud contemned and our houses built of rei as it was in the beginning. ”

“ The houses are built of sun-baked mud bricks, kneaded by mares that splash and trample through the oozy substance for hours to mix it well. The poorer people build ranches of long, slender canes or Indian cornstalks tied together by grass and coated with mud. These are all erected around and about the most imposing edifice in the place—the whitewashed adobe church.
All houses are hollow squares. The patio, with its well, is inside this enclosure. Each house is lime-washed in various colors, and all are flat-roofed and provided with grated windows, giving them a prison-like appearance. ”

“ The primitive houses of the earliest settled peoples were doubtless built of mud, as are those of their descendants to-day, and it would be difficult to imagine anything less attractive than the interior of an Upper Egypt, or Nubian or Mesopotamian house (which is to-day the exact counterpart of those we find on the paintings and bas-reliefs which have come down to us from the oldest times) , with mud walls, mud floor, mud roof, all of a uniform dingy brown, and without furniture of any kind to relieve the eye. ”

“ It is a mistaken notion that the woodwork is first completed and then plastered; for the whole of their houses, as well as their dams, are, from the foundation, one mass of mud and wood, mixed with stones, if they can be procured. The mud is always taken from the edge of the bank, or the bottom of the creek or pond near the door of the house ”

“ At the entrance of each house a stone slab is thrown across to the doorway so as to cover the ditch. Only the foundations of the town houses are made of solid stone, well cemented, but in the case of country dwellings these are extended upwards so as to make up one-half of the whole height, the upper part being of mud, stuck on to a rough matting of bamboos and split canes. ”

“ The villages are not generally defended: each house has its own straggling direction, is built of mud, and the roof is generally dome-shaped, and it has its own enclosure within a mud-wall. The houses are very low, and indicate poverty, and want of ingenuity. The better order appear always with arched roofs, and none are without picturesque ribs and recesses. ”

“ The houses were only one story high and seemed built of mud of a gray color, the roofs flat, and the streets almost deserted. Occasionally a man could be seen, sometimes a dog, and now and then an Indian, sitting with his back to the house. The whole view indicated a thinly populated place, and the entire absence of wagons or animals was a rather strange circumstance to us. It occurred to us at first that if all the emigrants were gone our reception might be a cool one in this city of mud. ”

“ The wet season certainly puts mud houses to severe trial, and those of the jerry-built order sometimes succumb. Even the strongest, having walls two or three feet thick, have to be repaired and patched after continuous rain—as it rains in Northern Nigeria—and the time for general exterior overhauling is also at the close of the wet season, if the threatened habitation will stand so long.
Mud houses are quite common for Europeans near Kano City; in fact, with the exception of brick bungalows in the official element quarter, all whites have that type of dwelling. ”

“ It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the early spring. ”

“ The city abandoned us with reluctance, struggling along for a way in closely crowded shops and dwellings, then straggling more and more until it dwindled to a single row of mud houses on either side, finally to little clusters of huts strung together like loose strings of beads, and breaking up at last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like into the cliffs of dry fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and beyond us. ”

“ Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up to the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind—what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets again. ”

“ Particularly the people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off which the soft white coating had slid; their contours were as painful to see. And the mud—oh, God, the mud! It spread itself over every inch of the way; the roads were rivers of filth, which spattered and splashed; at the sides of the streets, the slush was being swept into beds. ”

“ Silence reigned again—only the splash of the oars was heard and the beating of the water against the skins. Nothing broke the monotony; the river wound its way slowly in and out round mud banks; the country as far as one could see was unbroken, endless mud; the water one drank and washed in and floated on was diluted mud; the occasional village on the banks was built of mud, the inhabitants were mud colour; the very sky gave one a feeling of mud. ”

“ The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road, evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey, wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. ”

“ He was then making the best of his way home to lines again, expedited by William and the mallet.
So now we are messless; now we crouch shivering in tents and talk lovingly of the good old times beneath our good old tin roof-tree, of the wonderful view of the mud we used to get from our window, and of the homely tune our shell boxes used to perform as they jostled together of a stormy night.
And sometimes, as we crouch shivering in our tents, we hear a strange sound stealing uphill from the lines. It is the mules laughing. ”

“ There are, as all know, mud-holes that are but blotchy remnants of man’s interference—mere accidents, as it were, which do not concern us; and also those deeper scars where the fair face of the landscape has been wounded severely, as when the ice-gorged river bursts its proper bounds, leaving a shallow pool in my pasture meadow: such as these are never beneath the notice of a contemplative rambler. The truth is, in the valley of the Delaware the average mud-hole is eminently respectable. Giving the matter a sober second thought, one will see that mud is not necessarily offensive. ”

“ This is humorously named by Kate the Rotomahana Hotel, and is the place where lunch is usually devoured.
Up a steep, muddy hill now, and at the top we emerge on the mud flat, where many boiling mudholes repeat the phenomena we have already seen, only substituting liquid boiling mud instead of water. We look down, and see a seething mass of molten mud in incessant motion. It rises up in great circling domes and plastic cupolas, which seethe, and expand, and swell, and then break with a lazy, hissing, escape of steam ”

“ The hideous lanes, bordered by these dirty huts, are not paved; the least shower hollows out the ground and forms stinking puddles, which resemble reservoirs, destined to collect the liquid mud which the rain drives before it. ”

“ Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues of leafless trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the stones that clatter us and shake us ”

“ But it was even worse in the bystreets, where an attempt at sweeping had been made, where the mud lay in a thick slimy, shiny tide between the narrow ridges of footpath, where the tall houses, so close together that they completely filtered the air and light and retained nothing but the darkness and the dirt, were splashed with mud to their first-floor windows, and whose inhabitants or visitors desirous of crossing the road had to proceed to the junction with the main street, and, after tacking across in comparative cleanliness, commence their descent on the opposite side. ”

“ But a traveller rarely lies awake, and to-day by keeping my feet on a box, and living in a mackintosh, I am out of both drip and mud. Such a room as I am now in is the ordinary room of a Persian homestead. It is a cell of mud, not brick, either sun or kiln dried. Its sides are cracked and let in air. Its roof is mud, under which is some brushwood lying over the rafters. It has no light holes, but as the door has shrunk considerably from the door posts, it is not absolutely dark. It may be about twelve feet square. Every part of it is blackened by years of smoke. ”

“ Each one is guided into an adobe pen, or mud hut, about ten Feet square, and in the mud floor of which a hole is sunk about six feet by three. An attendant living in another mud hovel furnishes you with a towel and a sheet, and then you take your choice of an arsenic, a sulphur, an iron, or a magnesia spring, or of another in which all these elements are compounded, with a resultant stench that is completely overpowering, even in this land of evil odors. ”

“ Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds.
A world without colour. No other colour to be seen beneath the sky but mud. The very buttons on the men’s coats painted to make them look like mud. ”

“ We passed through several villages of farmers who live in very primitive habitations, built of mud, looking as if the mud had been dabbed upon the framework with the hands. The walls sloped slightly inwards, the thatch was rude, the eaves were deep and covered all manner of lumber; there was a smoke-hole in a few, but the majority smoked all over like brick-kilns; they had no windows, and the walls and rafters were black and shiny. Fowls and horses live on one side of the dark interior, and the people on the other. ”