مسالك الابصار في ممالك الامصار 2.29

2.29

sugar cane, it is plentiful and common throughout all these lands. One kind is black, dry and hard of stalk; it is the best for sucking, not for pressing, and is found nowhere else. From its other kinds a great deal of sugar is made, cheap, both rock sugar and ordinary sugar, but it does not solidify; rather it is like white semolina. There is rice there — as Shaykh Mubārak b. Majd Shādhān told me — of twenty-one kinds. They have turnips, carrots, gourds, aubergines, asparagus and ginger, which they cook when it is green, as carrots are cooked, and it has a fine taste that nothing equals. There are chard, onions, garlic, fennel and thyme, and kinds of fragrant plants: roses, water-lilies, violets, the bān, which is the willow, the narcissus, which is the ʿabhar, and henna blossom, which is the fāghiya. Likewise sesame oil, from which comes their lamp fuel; olive oil reaches them only as an import. Honey is more than plentiful, but wax is found only in the Sultan's palaces and no one is allowed it.