House Building in the Hadhramaut

Abstract

D URING a recent tour in the Hadhramaut my wife and I collected some notes on the building of houses. Each town in the country has its own individual characteristics. Although the houses of coastal towns are all of the familiar Arab type, built of stone rubble and whitewashed, there is a wide difference in the aspect of the towns themselves. Makalla, for example, is a miniature edition of Zanzibar-tall houses and narrow streets, sometimes not 6 feet across, while Shihr is a town of lower houses, wide streets, and open spaces. In the Wadi Do'an the tall mud-built houses climb up the banks of the wadi. They are close packed, but it is in their interiors that they merit attention. The colour scheme is black and white and rusty red. Although there is practically no whitewash on the outside of Do'an houses the interiors of the better-class dwellings are spotlessly white. The ceilings of the rooms, which are lofty, are supported by carved pillars of 'elb I wood, and all interior woodwork is of this material. The doors are set in wide heavily carved frames and the whole ornamented extensively with iron nails, 2 inches across the heads, burnished with lead, which shine like polished dollars. It is a modern development of Do'an houses that every room in the house should be provided with its own ablution room, and as a consequence they are really self-contained flats. The entrance door gives on to a passage into the flat, and there is usually not a door into the main living room but a Moorish arch either in the whitewashed wall or of stained 'elb wood again studded with burnished nails. The ceiling is held up on rafters of 'elb wood supported by the pillars previously referred to, the mud floor of the next storey above being laid over slats of date wood very attractively arranged in herring-bone pattern. In Terim the principal feature is the large number of enormous dwellinghouses in a style copied from Malaya but built of mud bricks. The exterior of these houses is decorated with blue, green, yellow, and pink, which is not at all unattractive. Interiors are fitted with every up-to-date contrivance, electric light and fans, telephones, ice plants, and modern European conveniences in the bathrooms. Whereas in Do'an and Shibam there is scarcely a chair to be found these houses are replete with European furniture, albeit some of a rather florid style. Living in such houses as these one is struck at every moment with the reflection that there is hardly a thing in the house that has not had to be transported on camel back over the mountains for six days, and while I mention this it is worth recording that there are sixty cars in Terim itself, each of which has been transported in parts by twelve camels from the coast. The principal structural detail that the wealthy Seyyids of Terim and Seyyun have to contend with in their building operations is the difficulty of getting long enough timber. The 'elb or sidr tree trows to no great height, and although we found 'ariata trees growing to 50 feet or more in height some days' journey down the Wadi Maseilah, they cannot be transported by