Everyone there breeds and trades camels, drinks their milk and burdens their back, and gives them great care. They prize them most highly, steal them from each other, and sell them to merchants who drive them to Egypt.
-A Pleasant Excursion for One Longing to Cross the Horizon, companion text to Tabula Rogeriana, King Roger II of Sicily’s Map of the World, Muhammad al-Idrisi (1110-1165)
Al-Idrisi wrote these lines about the land he called Al-Habash, which we call Ethiopia today, but likely then considered anyplace far enough up the Nile. Kordofan would be close enough for this world geographer who never himself went south, and he certainly was correct about how camels there were treated- with care, like money. KhairAllah could have told al-Idrisi all that eight centuries after his own time, but the excursion on the Darb to Egypt was never pleasant.
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