From Kordofan came red pepper, gum, “allob” nuts (from the “heglig” tree, eaten as a dainty and considered a remedy for flatulency), blue cambric, leather ropes, leather sacks of ox hide, seamless water buckets, wooden bowls and ostrich feathers.
-The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan, Harold MacMichael
That is quite a shopping list, but KhairAllah carried none of that. David and I sold the donkey saddles we’d bought in Nahud to the Egyptians, they didn’t want the broken bits of petrified wood and ostrich eggs we’d picked up along the Wadi al-Milk but they did buy all our Ibl, which after forty days I never once thought of as Dainties.