ABSTRACT
Five hundred skyscrapers, standing back to back, their heads whitewashed as though going grey with age, leaning inwards to increase their basic strength, combine at first glance into one tremendous family mansion containing about fifteen thousand inhabitants. In fact, the best description of the capital of the Inner Hadhramaut might be to call it the world's mightiest block of flats. If Grosvenor House, made somehow of mud and with loopholes for windows, stretched the length of Park Lane, it would give some idea of how Shibam arrests the eye in the distance: a walled city without walls, the houses themselves supplying the fortification, their sides sheer, their tiny windows spaced at uniform distances; not a city in the accepted sense of the
I34 word, for it is the great houses that form the wall, four square and impregnable to the hostility of rifle fire. The windows are high set and any tribe setting out to storm the city would find no foothold whereby to make an ascent, while defenders would have the advantage of being able to pour things down upon the heads of the attackers in the manner of the Middle Ages.
