What is "tumble-down"

Usage examples of "tumble-down".

And when he had passed out of the province of Tetuan into the bashalic of El Kasar, the bareheaded country-people of the valley of the Koos hastened before him to the Kaid of that grey town of bricks and storks and palm-trees and evil odours, and the Kaid, with another notion of his errand, came to the tumble-down bridge to meet him on his approach in the early morning.

The clachan, through which he presently passed, was sodden, shabby and tumble-down, like a city slum transported to a sour upland.

The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows.

Scrub pines, rusty ironwork, a maze of tumble-down tombstones with inscriptions that only the thistles and wild oats could read.

From some of the tumble-down buildings came cacklings and titterings as the maimed caroused with the crippled and the degenerate and corrupted coupled with their crones.

Tedium was a backwards-leading road that wound through the tumble-down structures of old memories-memories of times before he had become a cyberdetective, memories of people he would rather forget, of involvements he would just as soon not recall.

Nor had he, as had some of his colleagues, ardently photographed the tumble-down shanties and corrugated metal huts of the Puerto Rican poor during a bus excursion from a luxurious beachfront hotel to the Arecibo Observatory.

He unlocked a door and vanished into a tumble-down brick house with filthy, broken glass windows.