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All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall. Filing to the left a few yards, the emigrants found a deep fissure through which the animals stumbled one by one over mounds of crumbled adobes. Thurstane, entering last, looked around him in wonder.
The brick is of a uniform drab color, more pleasing to the eye than the reddish hue of the adobes of New Mexico or the buff tinge of many of those in California. In size it is about double that commonly used in the States. The clay, also, is of very superior quality. The principal stone building in the Territory is the Capitol, at Fillmore, one hundred and fifty miles south of Salt Lake City.
Under the keen merciless supervision of the padres, the cleverest body of men who ever set foot in America, they were mixing and laying the adobes, making nails and tiles, hewing aqueducts, fashioning great stone fonts and fountains. De la Torre speculated, after his habit, upon the future of a country so beautiful and so fertile, which a dozen priests had made their own.
The town of Lost Springs if such a tiny settlement could have been called a town sprawled in a valley of cottonwoods, a scattering of low-roofed adobes. To find such an oasis, after traveling the heat-tortured wilderness to the east or the west, was such relief to the wayfarer that few missed stopping.
The city is two miles long from east to west, and only a mile and a quarter wide from the bridge to the walls; the latter, twelve feet in height, ten feet thick at their base, are built of adobes, a kind of brick dried in the sun, and made of potter's clay mingled with a great quantity of chopped straw: these walls are calculated to resist earthquakes; the enclosure, pierced with seven gates and three posterns, terminates at its south-east extremity by the little citadel of Santa Caterina.
On the buildings in question the adobes on the upper stories are laid lengthwise, and will average about ten inches in width, which gives the thickness of the walls. On the first story or ground rooms the adobes are in most places laid crosswise, thus making the thickness of these walls just the length of the adobe, which averages about twenty inches.
Having safely landed our horses and mules, we picked up and rode to San Rafael Mission, stopping with Don Timoteo Murphy. The next day's journey took us to Bodega, where lived a man named Stephen Smith, who had the only steam saw-mill in California. He had a Peruvian wife, and employed a number of absolutely naked Indians in making adobes.
Barstow swung his leaders skilfully and narrowly around the broken corners of old adobes and slammed on his brake before the store, that is to say, half-way between saloon and hotel. He climbed down, Longstreet after him. Finally came the loiterers, Helen and Carr and Howard.
And Ramon, accustomed to the meagerly furnished adobes of old Mexico, thought that the ranch-house was beautiful indeed. Waring ate with the men in the new bunk-house that evening. After supper he went over to the larger building and sat alone in the living-room, gazing out of the western window. His wounds ached, and in the memory of almost forgotten trails he grew young again.
In 1808 the venerable Buenaventura Sitjar, one of the founders of the Mission, and who had toiled there continuously for thirty-seven years, passed to his reward, and was buried in sight of the hills he had loved so long. The following year, or in 1810, work was begun on a newer and larger church of adobes, and this is doubtless the building whose ruins now remain.
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