The women appear to be very careless mothers, leaving the children very much to look after themselves. It is noticeable that swing cradles, such as are to be seen in some other parts of North Africa, are quite unheard of in Dakhla Oasis.
Crime, in its more serious forms, is very rare indeed. The chief misdemeanours are petty thefts of food, the result probably of extreme poverty. Squabbles about the irrigation water sometimes lead to assaults, but weapons are scarcely ever used. Illegitimate children are very numerous and are occasionally destroyed. A very large percentage of the women are immoral, but this, as a rule, is taken as a matter of course, and little jealousy results in consequence.
Albinos, epilepsy and deafness were said by one doctor to be unknown; but the man who followed him in office knew of one case of epilepsy at Qasr Dakhl.
There were one or two cases of insanity known in the oasis, and one instance of St. Vitus’ dance, in the case of a partial idiot.
There were said to be four or five cases of dumbness among the population of Mut.
There was only one case of phthisis—a man who had been for some time in the Nile Valley, but who had fallen ill on his return to Dakhla.
The commonest complaints were malaria, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, the last two being largely due, according to the native doctor, to weakness of the lungs caused by smoking hashish and in some cases opium. Bronchitis and bronchial pneumonia were also among the commonest complaints among children. Venereal cases, considering the character of the population, were extremely rare, the natives apparently being almost immune from them. Digestive troubles were extremely common, and were largely due to the extremely strong tea they consume at every opportunity.
As might be expected with such a primitive race as the natives of these oases, the remedies used in case of disease are sometimes rather curious. If a man, for instance, has an attack of fever, one of his friends will sometimes invite him to come for a walk, during the course of which he will lure him unsuspectingly to a pool of water and suddenly push him in. It is said that the nervous shock, combined with the sudden immersion in cold water, not infrequently effects a cure—but it sounds a drastic remedy.
Ophthalmia—a rather common complaint in these “islands of the blest”—due probably to dirt and the irritation to the eyes caused by the dust during the frequent sand storms, is treated by poultices formed of onions and salt, or of raw tomatoes; occasionally, too, a vegetable called borselain, that I was unable to identify, is used pounded in the same way.
A plant called khobbayza[15] is sometimes pounded and applied as a poultice to a sting of a scorpion in Dakhla, and is said to give considerable relief. It is interesting to note that in the oases they say that the sting of a “thirsty” scorpion, i.e. one that lives far from water, is much more likely to prove fatal than the sting of one living near a well. It is possible that this may point to the existence of two different varieties.