Although one cannot see the interior of the Arab houses of Sanaa, a fair estimate of their size can be gained from the outside; and even to us English, who are used to great houses, many of those of Sanaa appear immense. It is impossible to describe the style of architecture in which they are built, for it is a style that exists nowhere else. It is purely and essentially Yemenite, though in some cases gateways and windows are found of Byzantine and Gothic form. There is one house at Dhamar, built of red brick and faced with white stone, with a stone porch, that, were it set down in an English country district, would pass for Elizabethan. The house, too, forms an E, and although I could find out nothing about its history, it seems impossible that the strange building could be an accident; and I am inclined to believe that it must have been erected by one of the many renegades who, in the middle ages, sought their fortunes in the wealthy cities of Arabia. At Sanaa I saw no houses of this kind, the style of architecture, with the exception of the decoration of doors and windows, being more or less uniform. Many of the larger houses are built of stone and brick and cement, the lower two storeys perhaps being of well-squared stone of various colours, arranged so as to form designs, the upper portion being of brick covered with a hard cement that takes a fine polished surface, not unlike the material used in Cairo, and corresponding to the _tabbia_ of Fez. Many of the upper storeys are built overhanging the streets, but this is not carried out to nearly such a large extent as in many of the oriental cities; while the _musher-ibeyeh_ work of Cairo is rare here, its place being taken by long narrow windows filled in with stained glass in designs. From the outside the pattern is often inappreciable, as the chips of glass are simply stuck into the plaster framework. From within, however, only such of the glass is exposed as fits in between the solid pattern, and the designs are often exceedingly fine. The same can be seen in the tomb and mosque of Kaït Bey, one of the tombs of the Caliphs at Cairo, and again some specimens of the work exist in the museum of Arab antiquities in the same city. What carved wood there is used for window-screens does not in the least resemble that of Egypt, but is arranged in geometric designs, much more in the style of Chinese and Japanese workmanship, with which some of the designs are identical.