Mud wall

“ With the rude implements of the Indians, houses of the driest blocks of mud, though covered with cement and painted with colored wash, could easily have been thrown down; but gunpowder or iron bars would have been necessary to overturn a wall composed either of stone or tepetate and cement. Villages built of dried mud are often imposing in their appearance, and are yet most perishable; for the first overflow of waters, that shall cover but a few inches of the walls of the houses, will in a few hours reduce a whole village to a mass of ruins. ”

“ The tops of the mud walls are generally in bad repair, and here and there we come across a jagged hole that has been made as a short cut into the garden by the gardener. In such cases the pieces of mud and sun-dried bricks, when they have been taken out, lie in the street. Where the surface of the thoroughfare has not been taken up for bricks, which by the way are left to bake in the sun in the middle of the road, it is generally used for drying manure that has been kneaded with a modicum of earth. ”

“ There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Easing her round sharp reefs, pushing through swift little passages where the current spurts deeply between larger stones, she may be pushed up to a huge tree trunk lying along the shore, surrounded by the deliciously soft and fluid mud loved by country urchins, the mud that schloops when one withdraws the sunken foot. ”

“ It is by no steady and rapid movement that waste is swept from the shore to its final resting place. Day after day and century after century the grains of sand and particles of mud are shifted to and fro, winnowed and spread in layers, which are destroyed and rebuilt again and again before they are buried safe from further disturbance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Next the slackening speed makes even the sand too heavy a weight, and that in turn falls to line the river-bed, while the now broad and placid stream carries only the finer particles of mud suspended in its waters. Soon it reaches the ocean, and the flow being there checked by the incoming ocean-tide, even the mud can no longer be held up, and it also sinks slowly in the shallows near the shore, forming sometimes broad mud-banks dangerous to the mariner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every little rill that flows down the mountain side is charged with finely-powdered sediment which it is ever wearing away from the surface of its own bed. Every great stream, besides the immense quantities of mud and sand which in times of flood it carries along in its turbulent course, has its channel strewn over with pebbles at which it never ceases to work, rounding off the angles and polishing the surfaces; and these pebbles, what are they but the fragments of old rocks and the elements of new,—the rubble-stone of Nature’s edifice on its way from the quarry to the building? ”

“ Recollect what I said in my first paper: that water drops its pebbles and coarser particles first, while it carries the fine clayey mud onward in solution, and only drops it when the water becomes still. Now currents of such tremendous violence as to carry these boulder stones onward, would have carried the mud for many miles farther still; and we should find the boulders, not in clay, but lying loose together, probably on a hard rock bottom, scoured clean by the current. That is what we find in the beds of streams ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even living birds were coated with mud, while for some days after the eruption the poor bewildered cattle roamed about this dreary wilderness mad with hunger and thirst, gnawing boughs of trees or decayed wood, bellowing pitifully, and with eyes bloodshot and nostrils choked with greasy slate-coloured mud, which lay an inch thick all over their coats. ”

“ The wind-driven sand fills the cracks in the muds and is even drifted under the edges of the upcurled plates, filling the spaces completely. Over this combined fluvial and æolian deposit is spread the next layer of mud, which frequently is less extensive than the earlier deposits, thus giving abundant opportunity for the observation of the exact manner of burial of the older sand-covered stratum. ”

“ First, they soften the ground they flow over and make mud. The mud mixes with the water and goes along with it. Stones are loosened and rolled along, too. Fill a big gold-fish bowl with this muddy water at- the mouth of the brook, and let it stand awhile to settle.
Stones from same cliff after they have been worn and rounded by rolling about in the current of the river. Through the glass you see clear water at the top, then mud, then sand, then gravel. The gravel falls the lowest because it is the heaviest. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Know, then, innocent eastern friend, that in benighted regions of the west, where the mud is of unfathomable and sublime depth, roads are made of round rough logs, arranged transversely side by side, and coated over in their pristine freshness with earth, turf, and whatsoever may come to hand, and then the rejoicing native calleth it a road, and straightway essayeth to ride thereupon. In process of time, the rains wash off all the turf and grass aforesaid, move the logs hither and thither, in picturesque positions, up, down and crosswise, with divers chasms and ruts of black mud intervening. ”

“ Taking the existence of this semi-fluid mud-stratum resting upon the Port Hudson clay and buried by the delta sands and silts throughout the lower delta, for granted, the mechanism of mudlump upheaval at once suggests itself; for the rapid advance of the heavy and extended load of river sands and silts of the bar over the mud stratum would not permit the escape of the slow-moving mud to seaward. ”

“ 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 ”

“ This delightful watering-place is filled with beauty and fashion, there being lots of large curls and small bonnets in every portion of the town and neighbourhood.
We understand it is in contemplation to convert the mud on the banks of the river into sand, in order that the idea of the sea-side may be realised as far as possible. Two donkey cart-loads have already been laid down by way of experiment, and the spot on which they were thrown was literally thronged with pedestrians. The only difficulty likely to arise is, that the tide washes the sand away, and leaves the mud just as usual. ”

“ Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war. Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud ”

“ For years and years, for centuries and centuries, mud had been deposited on top of him, thousands and tens of thousands of years had put other rock strata above the mud and then, in a later age, there had been a rising of the earth and it was all dry land once more. ”

“ At the edge of the dry mud lay a derelict fish-trunk around which a group of bare-legged boys had gathered—and all along the shore, on the faded grass, on the dry mud and wading in the soft slime, the human water-rats were to be seen, turning over drift-rubbish, prying under stranded boats or grubbing in the soft mud. ”

“ Seen from the station, the volcanoes appear like dark specks almost upon the horizon, but in reality they are not far away, and an hour's brisk walk will bring us to them. The mud springs, which are scattered over an area of several hundred acres, present many strange and interesting features. There are holes in the earth with bubbling mud at the bottom, cones from the tops of which streams of muddy water issue, and ponds of mud, in some cases as thick as molasses, in others thin and watery. ”

“ The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. ”

“ The mud which is spread on the permeable bottom does not soil the scoria, but leaves it perfectly clean, while the water flows clear from the end of the drains. After two or three days, according to the weather, the mud will appear cracked at some points, and finally over the whole surface. After a week it will have acquired consistency enough to be cut with a shovel. A cart is then brought into the basin, and after a few hours it is emptied and is ready to receive a new charge of mud. ”

“ Built of sun-dried mud blocks, it gives off an atmosphere of dust with every whiff of wind. It comes to our mind always with the thought of dry barrenness, heat, sun, dust, shadeless fields of maguey, prickly nopals, broad sombreros, and leather-clothed rancheros. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The bubbling mud in the bottom of the pan, as well as the hot water in many of the springs, makes it easy to imagine that we are standing upon the top of a great cooking stove in which a hot fire is burning. As the gas with which the water is impregnated comes up through the mud, it forms huge bubbles which finally break and settle down, only to rise again. In this way concentric mud rings, perfect in form, are made to cover the entire surface of the pool. ”

“ In tiling a roof, the boarded roof is first roughly and thinly shingled, and upon this surface is then spread a thick layer of mud, into which the tiles are firmly bedded. The mud is scooped up from some ditch or moat, and is also got from the canals. In the city one often sees men getting the mud for this purpose from the deep gutters which border many of the streets. ”