In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad al-Shalali, a Nubian i worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola -- the capital of medieval Nubia, a culture lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians of old reached a zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as the "bowmen of the glance."

Halima, Awad's wife, deals with the reality of today's Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad have been modernized and now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors, and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile and its reservoirs. Left to tend Awad's sick mother and dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: "Time you are a traitor -- what have you done with my love?"

Through his characters' pain and suffering, with wit and a keen sense of history's absurdities, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned loves.