MERAWI IN 1897 able one in its place. Whether the Sudani folk ever think this matter out it is hard to say, but their belief in medicines is unbounded.

It was impossible to send every sufferer over to the camp for treatment, for the doctors were overworked, and medicines and bottles were by no means plentiful. I found the stock of tabloids with which my friend, Mr. Henry Wellcome, of the hrm of Burroughs and Wellcome, had furnished me most useful, for I was able to supply the natives with medicine for weeks. They did away with the necessity for weighing and measuring drugs, and it was a comfort to feel that the old medicine case, with its breakages and leakages, was a thing of the past. Fortunately the complaints commonest in the villages were the result of injudicious food and of chills, and as I had a good store of simple medicines and quinine many patients were relieved. Some of the older men applied for " cognac," and my reputation as a medicine-man suffered when I said I had none ; one applicant went so far as to declare that I was no Englishman, as I had no boxes of inaya kawwl, or " strong waters," with me. We discussed this matter one evening over the fire, and the greybeards said that Muhammad the Prophet permitted his people to drink water in which dates had been soaked, and the juice of the grapes, but the obvious answer to that was that the Prophet himself declared that there was both sin and advantage in wine, as in games of chance, but that the sin was greater than the advantage. One of the party then observed that I must be a fiki, or religious teacher, which was strange; for it seemed that, although some were ready to deny me my nationality because I had no cognac, others considered me sufficiently good to be a religious teacher ! A little learning went a long way in Barkal.

Another class of troublesome " patients " were the older men who begged for hashish (i.e., cannabis Indica, or Indian hemp), and the juices of cucumber seeds and poppies, opium, &c. When obtainable these drugs are used as intoxicants, and when mixed with honey or raisins, and swallowed, after the recital of certain prayers, they are said to form powerful aphrodisiacs, and both men and women in. the East have for many centuries taken them with the view of obtaining large families. In the days when the 221