[الدكتور أحمد باذيب]

[the sides or backs of the houses run sewerage chutes. These begin below the bathrooms as vertical ducts behind the outer wall; but some distance above the ground each begins to appear on the outside face, often as a series of rectangular openings of increasing size, or as a tall recessed niche in the wall of the building. Each ends at Street level, above waist height, in a horizontal plastered platform where the waste matter collects. Traditionally, the solid waste was covered with ash night and morning by workers whose responsibility this was, and at periodic intervals it was cleared away to be used as fertilizer in the fields outside the town. In modern times the bottom of the chute was closed up with wire fly-screening.


Shibam. The roof terrace of a fine recent house. Opening off the main majlis, which is to the left.
Liquid wastes were discharged at bathroom level, away from the face of the building, by the use of long wooden waterspouts, often made of split date-palm trunks. Where water was discharged in this manner at the sides or behind the houses, sloping plaster collecting platforms were constructed on the ground below the spouts, and the liquid was led away through open drains to pass outside the city walls, or into cesspits. But in cases where bathrooms overlooked city streets, as may have happened through a lessening of strict controls at the end of the last century, foul water was sometimes allowed to fall unexpectedly on the heads of people below, and there were no proper means provided for draining it away.