Mud hut

“ 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. ”

“ At an elevation of five hundred feet above our waggons were the mud huts of the people, and up here every night they drive their cattle into extraordinary rock stables for safety. Perched on the rocks are countless circular granaries, constructed of bright red mud and thatched with grass. One would think that a good storm of wind would blow them all away, so frail do they seem. ”

“ Ducks which have hitherto flown sky-high in order to cross the danger-zone will now pass quite low along the new waterway, and even prefer it to crossing the cover at hazard, however high.
A typical day’s fowling in mid-marisma may be described. The night has been spent in a reed-built hut charmingly situate on a mud-islet half-an-acre in extent, and commanding unequalled views of flooded and featureless marisma. At 4 A.M. we turn out and by the dim light of a lantern embark in a cajon (punt) , serenaded by the croaks and gabbling of flamingoes somewhere out in the dark waters. ”

“ The mud habitation is characteristic of Hausaland. Persons in Europe may think of them as thin, weak structures, run up in a few hours and liable to be blown to bits by a strong wind. Nothing of the sort. A mud house which you folks at home would look upon as a mere hut, properly made may be the ideal form of domicile, away from the perfectly-constructed stone bungalow with scientific ventilation—punkahs, air-fans, etc., etc.—and electric light. And I am not at all sure that I do not prefer the mud dwelling. ”

“ The inner walls of the hut are often ornamented by rough [Pg 24] scrollwork in different coloured clays. A small aperture serves as window, and over the entrance is hung a reed mat, made by lashing together with the sinews of cattle a number of dried reeds. The floors are of mud, beaten down till perfectly hard and fairly even. They are smeared over afresh every week or ten days, in order to preserve them, and also as a matter of cleanliness, much as an English housewife scrubs her floors. In the more wealthy dwellings the floors are from time to time smeared over with bullock's blood. ”

“ Beyond the difficulties of entrance and exit the hole is no darker than an ordinary hut. But a more horribly insanitary place of abode for human {135} beings it would be hard to find. As could only be expected, it was very damp, and the occupants were condemned to stand and sit in several inches of mud, and to support the drippings of the snow melted by the heat of their fire. ”

“ It is a miserable hamlet of low windowless mud hovels, with uneven mud floors, one or two feet lower than the ground outside, built in yards with ruinous walls, and full of heaps and holes. It is an olla podrida of dark, poor, smoky mud huts; narrow dirt-heaped alleys, with bones and offal lying about; gaunt yelping dogs; bottle-green slimy pools, and ruins. The people are as dirty as the houses, but they are fine in physique and face, as if only the fittest survive. There is an imamzada, much visited on Fridays, on an adjacent slope. The snow lies here five feet deep in winter, it is said. ”

“ Usually four men would go in together and build a little hut out of logs, sticks, pieces of boards or whatever they could pick up, chinking the cracks with Virginia mud, which, when hardened, no amount of rain or wind would loosen. ”

“ Besides the forts, which in themselves are dreary enough, there are but a few Chinese mud huts and an hotel, principally patronised by pilots; and the French are cut off even from these by the Peiho, than which no more filthy little stream ever defiled a sea. Its banks at the mouth are vast plains of mud, lying flush with the water, and so bleak and sad-looking that one almost wonders that the very wild-fowl should be induced to stop there. Mud forts, mud houses, mud fields, and muddy river—everything is mud. ”

“ It is a dead level of rich black loam, and produces rice, maize, sugar-cane and millet. Here and there the sand has blown over it, and large spaces are given up to a sort of coarse, wiry grass. The villages are miserable collections of mud huts, but the date-palms which shadow them and the strings of camels that slowly pass to and fro, render even their unsightliness picturesque. In two or three places we passed mud machines, driven by steam, for the purpose of cleaning the Canal. ”

“ Sometimes the hunter builds a wooden hut, and the nearest neighbors in the wilderness help cut the timber, build the log hut, fill the crevices with mud, put on the roof and put in windows and doors, and in return the owner pays them with a gallon of brandy, and by a like good service in turn. ”

“ The bustees, or native villages, are a collection of mud huts, cramped together on the damp earth, devoid of ventilation and drainage. They are often built round a tank or pond, which serves as a deposit for their filth and refuse, the water being used at the same time for cooking and washing purposes. During the rains the natives suffer much, their mud huts, without foundations, settling about them, and the miasmic vapours of the over-populated village [257] causing a yearly epidemic of cholera. ”

“ The situation is much exposed in the winter time to the cold south-west blasts, and the natives accordingly make comparatively strong huts. Their dwellings are formed of a framework of sticks, over which is plastered a thick layer of turf and mud. In addition to this they heap over the hut a great quantity of the sand and shells of which the ground is chiefly composed, so that the houses of the Milmendura look like mere mounds or hillocks rising from the sandy soil. ”

“ Twenty miles perhaps from the place where you first perceived indications of real mud, the land will be firm enough to sustain a few piles supporting a fisherman's cabin or pilot's hut. Ten miles further on and you may see signs of life and cultivation. ”

“ The mud huts which constituted the dwelling-places of by far the greater portion of the inhabitants have disappeared, and their materials overlie the rocky plain and form the support of a scanty and sparse vegetation. ”

“ But they were conservative in architecture as in other things, and the new mud huts, set as far out from the dreaded mountain-sides as possible, wherever inhabitants remained, were built in exactly the same shape as the caves, with an arched mud roof and the general appearance of having been dug out of the mountain and carried to the new setting. Such innovations will no doubt continue to be erected in this region until a new generation has forgotten and prefers to tempt fate again rather than go to the extra labor of building houses where it is so much easier to dig them. ”

“ Some of them also are accustomed to leave a part of their holding untilled in memory of their former and more prosperous life. In many villages they have not yet built proper houses, but continue to live in mud huts thatched with grass. They consider it unlucky to inhabit a house with a cement or tiled roof ”

“ Fawcett as having two rows of huts parallel and facing each other. "Huts," he writes, "are generally built of upright pieces of wood stuck in the ground, 6 or 8 inches apart, and the intervals filled in with stones and mud laid alternately, and the whole plastered over with red mud. Huts are invariably built a few feet above the level of the ground, often, when the ground is very uneven, 5 feet above the ground in front. ”

“ The villages themselves are mostly mere collections of mud huts, looking when partially broken down very like anthills; and some villages are surrounded by rude mud walls dating from older and less settled times, and having a very primitive appearance. The people on the whole (after Southern India) look rather dirty in their unbleached cotton, but here and there one meets with bright colors and animated scenes. ”

“ It consists of some twenty-five or thirty mud huts scattered over the surface. The inhabitants are very poor and ill-favoured, and the men especially very dark and ugly. Some of the young women I saw were comely ”

“ Harlech Dump stood in the corner of a field where the Rosières road crossed the railway line. The farm-house to which the field had belonged showed as a red ruin against the background of a wood of poplars. The dump had all the dreariness, the bald, boot-worn manginess of such places. There was a stodge of mud about it that was drying with the March wind and changing its colour from brown to a yellowish grey. Two rusty Nissen huts faced each other across a roadway made of cinders. Duck-board tracks lay about the place like huge dead worms oozing into the sludge and the slime of the soil. ”

“ The villages are clusters of mud hovels, scarcely distinguishable from the wastes, and many of them are ruined and deserted, oppressive exactions or a failure of water being common reasons for a migration. These dismal ruins are shapeless heaps of mud, the square towers of the square walls alone retaining any semblance of form.
Long lines of choked kanaats, denoted by their crumbling shafts, attest the industrious irrigation of a former day. Tracks wind wearily among shrunken villages, or cross ridges of mud or gravel to take their unlovely way over arid stony plains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ It is a mistaken notion, that the wood-work is first completed and then plaistered; for the whole of their houses, as well as their dams, are from the foundation one mass of wood and mud, 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; and though their fore-paws are so small, yet it is held close up between them, under their throat, {234} that they carry both mud and stones; while they always drag the wood with their teeth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the time the Rhone has reached Arles all its gravel has been champed up and reduced to impalpable mud. That blue crystalline flood that gushed from the Lake of Leman, unsullied by a particle of earth, is now a river of brown mud—thick as pea-soup, and as nutritious. The stones that would have killed all vegetation have been pounded into a condition so attenuated, that they form rich alluvial matter. The river now seeks to deposit all this mud. ”

“ 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. ”