Shibam packs roughly five hundred mud-brick towers inside a single wall on a rock spur in the Wadi Hadhramaut. Five to eleven storeys, one or two rooms per floor, mud brick faced in mud-and-straw plaster — warm brown — with the top storeys, parapets and window surrounds coated in white lime.

The system takes that reading literally: a brown ground, white lime as figure, tall narrow blocks standing shoulder to shoulder with a shadow gap instead of whitespace, and openings that are small, deep and punched. Rain erodes the walls, so households re-mud them; the surface is never one flat tone.