He rubbed at the fingertips and leaned his head against the earth bags.

Kaelin settled his back against the earth bag wall and glanced at the line of bushes some three hundred feet away.

In recent years, building with earth bags has become one of the increasingly practiced techniques in natural building.

Although it is not known exactly how long, Earth bag shelters have been used for decades, primarily as implements of refuge in times of war.

Kaelin Ring and eight hundred Rigante moved stealthily forward to the line of earth bags guarding the open ground between the hills.

Gaise had placed a two-hundred-yard wall of earth bags there, packed to a height of four feet, behind which musketeers would defend the open ground.

German architect Frei Otto is said to have experimented with earth bags, as is more recently Gernot Minke.

From here he could see the formations, the two main ridges occupied by Beck and Mantilan, the infantry spread out thinly behind earth bags, or within trenches.

Cob-like mixes are also used as plaster or filler in several methods of natural building, such as adobe, earth bags, timber frames, cordwood, and straw bales.

Other materials commonly used in natural building are: earth (as rammed earth or earth bag), wood (cordwood or timber frame/post-and-beam), straw, rice-hulls, bamboo and stone.

A group of artists, builders, architects and engineers are working to build permanent, creatively designed structures utilizing the techniques of Super Adobe earth bag construction and dome architecture.

The outer walls in the majority of Earthships are made of earth-rammed tires, but any dense material with a potential to store heat, such as concrete, adobe, earth bags, or stone, could theoretically be used to create a building similar to an Earthship.