AILMENTS, CAUSES AND REMEDIES 231 



18. Exhaustion is more or less the last stage, and Exhaus- 

 was commonly the sequence of debility, diarrhoea, and 

 dysentery. In most instances, once it sets in death 

 quickly follows. I have spoken more fully on it in 

 chapter v. 



19. Guffa. The first time I came in contact with 

 this form of disease was on my way up the Mle, and 

 from what I could make of it the symptoms seemed to 

 me to be very similar to an acute attack of colic. My 

 knowledge of Arabic then was very limited, and I never 

 could clearly understand whether the natives said that it 

 arose from eating a poisonous herb or from the bite of 

 a ^poisonous fly. Some natives at Abu Fatmeh told me 

 that it was brought on by marching too quickly in a hot 

 sun (overpacing, in other words) or from cold, the two 

 extremes in fact. Symptoms violent pain in stomach, 

 slight running from eye and nose, foetid breath. Eemedy 

 ground dourra mixed with ' hameera ' (yeast), or the 

 stalks of ' loobieh ' (beans). This sickness, as we have 

 previously seen, is put down by some Arabs to the tsetse 

 fly. It seems doubtful whether the camel is impervious 

 to the sting of this fly or not, though I am inclined to 

 think that it is. Livingstone, in his ' Last Journeys,' 

 says ' that the camel did not seem to feel the fly, but that 

 in one that died in shiverings and convulsions, though the 

 symptoms were not like those observed in horses and 

 oxen, yet the blood had an arterial appearance similar to 

 that in other animals killed by the fly.' The Eev. C. J. 

 Wilson, in his ' Uganda and the Egyptian Soudan,' writing 

 on transport in Central Africa, states : ' The presence of 

 the tsetse fly prevents the employment of the system of 

 bullock waggons in vogue in South Africa, and renders 



