Throughout the highlands of Yemen, there are villages of square, stone towers with white-painted window lattices and totem-like designs, providing a strong visual impact. In this ancient country still stand the oldest skyscrapers in the world.

Seeing my suspicion, Ali drew close to me, placed his fingers in front of me and pointed again. "See that?" he asked emphatically.

"Wow!" I gasped as I saw stone towers standing erect on top of the tall mountain. My eyes opened wide.

A Yemeni proverb goes, "However tall the mountains are, that is how tall the houses will be." As we drove along winding mountain roads in the northwest region, we often encountered four- or five-story tall towers standing on soaring mountaintops or rising out of steep cliffs. The houses are made of rough, unprocessed stones piled on top of each other.

The buildings blend in well with the environment because they are usually built of rock found at the site. Reflecting the sunlight, the white totem designs on the window lattices stand out in the homogeneous environment. Legend has it that the reflected light can keep evil away.

The tall buildings are constructed without blueprints. Like big boys playing with Lego blocks, construction workers pile up stones into four- to six-story towers. I asked a worker how long it took to build a house. His said, "It varies, from half a year to five years. It depends on whether the building materials can be obtained easily or not. Some houses have been under construction for decades. People have moved in already, yet the construction is still proceeding. If they want to rebuild the house, all they have to do is take the stones down and reassemble them."

Each floor has its specific function. The ground floor is used for storage and for housing domestic animals. The second floor contains the living room and bedroom. The kitchen is usually located on the third floor. The top floor contains a large room called the mafrai. That is where the owner of the house meets his friends, and it is usually the only decorated room in the house. At night the man of the house invites friends to come to his mafrai and chew qat leaves, which contain mild stimulants.

These towering houses are the main sights in the highlands of northwest Yemen. Once you descend the mountains, you experience not only dramatically different climate and terrain, but also different architectural styles, as if the less than one-hundred-mile distance took you to another country.


The oldest skyscrapers

The Hadhramaut Desert stretches three to four hundred miles from Marib to Sayun. Houses here are build with mud-and-straw bricks fifty centimeters long and seven centimeters thick [20x3 in]. When the mud brick walls start to erode, they are mended with new bricks of the same material. Yet it is difficult to tell the newly mended part from the old. Shibam Oasis offers an example.

Since the third century, Shibam has been the capital of Wadi Hadhramaut. The houses here are ancient, most built in the sixteenth century, and have been mended many times. However they look magnificently new. It is said that Shibam has the "oldest skyscrapers in the world." I felt as if I were in Hong Kong or New York. Shibam has been tabbed as "the Manhattan of the desert." Recognizing the city's cultural value, UNESCO designated Shibam a World Heritage site in 1982.

Shibam has an area of only half a square kilometer [0.2 sq mi], but it contains about five hundred four- to seven-story buildings, all of which stand within the rectangular city wall. The houses are mainly made of tree branches and mud bricks, which are not strong enough to hold much weight. In order to make the narrow buildings tall and not collapse, many houses were built together with one leaning against another.

Another World Heritage site in Yemen is Zabid, which is situated in the narrow, torrid Tihama plain that adjoins the Red Sea. The building material here is neither stones nor mud bricks, but baked bricks. Along the streets are walls as high as an adult person. These long walls guarantee some privacy for the residents of the houses, so that activities and furnishings in the houses will not be easily observed from outside. Zabid used to be a rich city, so residents at that time adopted this design to disguise the wealth they possessed.

On the long walls are tortuous paths leading into each compound. The interior is like a little community containing camel and sheep pens and one- or two-story brick houses scattered here and there. Each house has a front yard where most family activities take place. Woven grass beds are placed in the yard where people can sit and enjoy the cool air or sleep under the starry sky.

Due to constraints caused by geographic distances and difficult travel, ancient Yemenites could only use one or two kinds of available raw materials to construct houses, such as stones, mud bricks or baked bricks. They rarely could use more than two of these kinds of materials. For example in Rada, the central region of Yemen, house foundations are usually made of stones, while portions above the second floor are made of mud bricks. In Sana'a, the capital, all three materials are used. Each creates a unique style of its own.

Yemen was governed by Turkey and Great Britain for hundreds of years, but the Europeans were ill suited to the climate and terrain of this country. So instead of dominating or reversing the Yemeni culture in accordance with their own, British colonizers put most of their effort into influencing the local politics and economy. Fortunately, the foreign rulers left few marks on the architecture of Yemen.

Even as we celebrate the survival of traditional Yemeni architecture, the relentless onslaught of modernity is threatening its continued existence today. The radiance of traditional Yemeni architecture has attracted many tourists from Europe and America, and consequently local Yemenites have more or less started to recognize the valuable cultural treasures they possess. Yet the government's pursuit of modernization has brought in new building materials such as cement and steel to big cities like Sana'a, al-Hudayda, Taizz and Aden. Moreover, modern buildings have become a symbol of wealth in this country. Although traditional Yemeni architecture remained virtually intact during the period of colonization, it now has yet to survive the glare of its worst enemy--modernity.