United States or Niue ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I ordered the dragoman Mahomet to inform the Faky that I was a doctor, and that I had the best medicines at the service of the sick, with advice gratis. In a short time I had many applicants, to whom I served out a quantity of Holloway's pills.
The Arab style of doctoring is rather rough. Should a man be attacked with fever, his friends prescribe a system of diet, in addition to the Koran of the Faky: he is made to drink, as hot as he can swallow it, about a quart of melted sheep's fat or butter. Young dogs, as a cure for distemper, are thrown from the roof of a house to the ground a height of about ten feet.
His grave was beneath a clump of mimosas that shaded the spot, and formed the most prominent object in the foreground of our landscape. This hole was about two feet deep from continual scratching, and must have been very near the Faky. Although thus reverent in their worship, the Arab's religion is a sort of adjustable one.
I adopted for this latter a specific I had found successful with the mange in dogs, namely, gunpowder, with one fourth sulphur added, made into a soft paste with water, and then formed into an ointment with fat. It worked like a charm with the coorash. Faith is the drug that is supposed to cure the Arab; whatever his complaint may be, he applies to his Faky or priest.
Such spells are generally verses copied from the Koran by the Faky, or priest, who receives some small gratuity in exchange. The men wear several such talismans upon the arm above the elbow, but the women wear a large bunch of charms, as a sort of chatelaine, suspended beneath their clothes around the waist.
"Right there I began to be ashamed of our game, and it hasn't got any less, I'll tell you. "It was hard work getting the job to runnin', and I didn't have much time for pokin' into things. When I did git room to turn around, I went through that whole house pretendin' to take inventories. I didn't find a thing that looked out of place, or faky.
Not only are relics upon a pocket scale conveyed by pilgrims and reverenced by the Arabs, but the body of any Faky who in lifetime was considered unusually holy is brought from a great distance to be interred in some particular spot.
There are few animals that the Arabs of the Nubian provinces will refuse; the wild boar is invariably eaten by the Arab hunters, although in direct opposition to the rules of the Koran. I once asked them what their Faky would say if he were aware of such a transgression.
We were regularly "sold" by the cunning Faky, who, not wishing to be incommoded by our party, had got rid of us in a most gentlemanly manner. At length we arrived at a village, where we had much difficulty in procuring provisions for ourselves and people.
This is his complete pharmacopoeia: his medicine chest, combining purgatives, blisters, sudorifies, styptics, narcotics, emetics, and all that the most profound M.D. could prescribe. With this "multum in parvo" stock-in-trade the Faky receives his patients. No. 1 arrives, a barren woman who requests some medicine that will promote the blessing of childbirth.
Word Of The Day