مهرة

مهرة

A sandy and barren land that only its camels can cross, famed for their speed. Al-Idrisi gives its length as about nine hundred miles and says its people live on dried fish, dates and milk and know little of wheat. ¹ Al-Hamdani calls them 'the desert-dwellers', soft-hearted lovers of star-lore who magnified and prostrated to the sun, and preserves the famous lore of their ambergris camels: on the shores of the Yemen sea, a camel that catches the ambergris scent kneels upon it and will not rise until its owner misses it and comes to scrape it off ².