The length of Nubia following the Nile is a two month march. Nubians live well and are well fed…Dongola is its capital, there they make a drink from Dhurra, Millet, their meat is camel, either fresh or sun-dried, and they do their cooking in camel milk.
-The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons, Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100-1165), A Companion Text to his Tabula Rogeriana, the world map engraved on a six foot diameter silver disc by Roger II of Sicily
After twenty days in the sands we looked forward to our resupply stop in Dongola but we knew already that the trip would be different from there forward to Egypt. The long stretch of Nile-side villages and farmers, their fields of beans and peas, the fresh dates and Dhurra…it would no longer be just us and the drovers and their Dabouka. This was the known world, the mapped world, and we were no longer on the horizon’s far side
Tabula Rogeriana, redrawn and relettered in Latin alphabet by Konrad Miller, 1928