Adobe

a-do'ba, from a Spanish word meaning to daub or plaster. Adobes are sun-dried bricks made of clay, mixed sometimes with straw to give strength. The bricks made by the children of Israel under Egyptian taskmasters were adobe. The earliest buildings in the valley of the Euphrates were of adobe, made of the sticky clay found in that region. The walls of the Alhambra are built of red adobe. The natives of Arizona and New Mexico construct their dwellings of adobe. When a new house is needed or an additional room, the women folks are set at work carrying water, and the neighbors are invited in. The clay of the front dooryard is mixed with water until it has the consistency of putty; it is then molded into bricks, about 18 x 9 x 4 inches in size. These are piled up in the sun to dry, and when thoroughly hardened, are built into walls. The roof is composed usually of poles and brush, covered with grass and earth, or turf, if it may be had. Adobe dwellings are cool and dry, two essentials in a hot climate. Adobe is suitable for use only in a practically rainless region. Heavy, continued rains would convert an adobe cottage into streaming rivulets of mud. Where the average rainfall is not great, structures built of adobe last indefinitely with reasonable repair; the greatest amount of disintegration being at the base of the walls during seasons of rain, although prolonged sand storms erode the surfaces. For the sake of appearance, as well as to aid in protecting it against weathering, adobe masonry is often plastered, the Indian women using their hands as trowels. The interior walls, and sometimes also the borders of the windows and doors, are whitewashed with gypsum. Adobe soil covers many thousand square miles of the arid west. When watered, it is fertile. It is a limy clay loam of a gray-brown color, fine as flour and free from grit. In places adobe soil, thousands of feet deep, is considered a wind deposit. Extensive areas are covered with fine volcanic dust which shades off into coarse soil like crushed coke. See Brick; Cliff Dwellers; Pueblo; Alamo