Short answers, pulled from the story.
Masonry is the craft of building a structure with stone, brick, concrete, or similar material, often laid in, bound, and pasted together by mortar. The term can also refer to the building units themselves, such as stones, bricks, and concrete blocks.
The common materials of masonry construction are bricks and building stone, including granite, marble, and limestone. Masonry also uses cast stone, concrete blocks, glass blocks, and adobe.
Masonry walls rely mainly on their own weight to stay in place, with each block only loosely connected to the next by a thin layer of mortar. When a building is shaken horizontally during an earthquake, load-bearing masonry walls often collapse, and heavier buildings suffer more damage.
Ashlar masonry uses dressed stones, while rubble masonry uses irregularly shaped stones. Both can be laid in coursed rows of even height through careful selection or cutting, though a great deal of stone masonry is uncoursed.
Masonry can withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and direct exposure to fire for up to 4 hours. Concrete masonry keeps fires contained to their room of origin 93 percent of the time and holds the highest flame spread index classification, Class A.
A crinkle-crankle wall is a brick wall that follows a serpentine path rather than a straight line. Its curve makes it more resistant to toppling, so it can be built from a single wythe of unreinforced brick and may be more economical than a straight wall despite its longer length.
Concrete Masonry Units, or CMUs, are blocks of cinder concrete, ordinary concrete, or hollow tile that are usually much larger than ordinary bricks and faster to lay. Their voids can be filled with concrete and steel rebar to add tensile and lateral strength, often forming a bond beam at the top course.