Shibam is a walled town of some five hundred mudbrick tower houses, up to eleven storeys and thirty metres high, standing on a rock spur above the Wadi Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen, and it has been called the Manhattan of the desert because its skyline of packed towers is five hundred years old. The town was built upward for defence: a single wall rings the whole spur, and the towers stand so close that the town became one fortress against Bedouin raids, crossed by rooftop as well as by street; a flood in 1532 swept away the older town on the valley floor, and the rebuilding on the spur gave Shibam its vertical form. The houses are mud. Sun-dried brick laid on stone foundations, rendered with mud plaster and crowned with white lime, and a mud tower survives only as long as someone keeps mending it, so the walls are re-rendered by hand after every rain; left unattended, even a five-century-old house can slump and dissolve within a few years.
The streets are slots. Alleys barely wide enough for two people wind between towers ten storeys tall, daylight narrowed to a bright strip far overhead, with carved wooden doors at street level, animals kept on the ground floor, families above and the roof terraces on top, from which the whole town is a maze of flat roofs at different heights. A belt of date palms separates the walls from the wadi floor, and the walk around the outside through the groves gives the view the town is famous for: at sunset, once the far cliffs cut off the direct sun, the whole skyline of towers glows orange, the pale lime crowns holding the light longest. Shibam has been on the World Heritage list since 1982 and on the danger list since the war in Yemen began, with floods and neglect eating at the mud, and almost no outsider has seen it in a decade. Shibam is a skyscraper city made of earth, and it stands only because its people keep patching it.