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The same meaning is extended in the woman's dream in which she saw
herself on top of a mountain-high wave in a narrow channel; so narrow
that she could stretch out her arms and touch the shore on either side.
She screamed, but her screams were stifled by loss of breath. In her
plight, she invoked the !spirit of Wad Hamid. "As I looked", the woman
recounts, "I saw a man with a radiant face and heavy white beard
flowing down over his chest, dressed in spotless white and holding a
string of amber prayer-beads. Placing his hand on my brow he said: "Be
not afraid", and I was calmed. .... I looked to my left and saw fields
of ripe corn, water-wheels turning, cattle grazing, and on the shore
stood the doum tree of Wad Hamid. The boat came to rest under the tree
and the man got out, tied up the boat, and stretched out his hand to
me. He then struck me gently on the shoulder with the string of beads,
picked up a doum fruit from the ground and put it in my hand. When I
turned round he was no longer there." (lines 124-144) The woman's
friend commented: "That was Wad Hamid. You will have an illness that
will bring you to the brink of death, but you will recover. You must
make an offering to Wad Hamid under the doum tree".
Such were the deep-rooted religious superstitions the village
people staunchly believed in. Other practices, such as making
offerings and regular pilgrimages to the tomb under the down tree could
not be dissociated from the deop-seated religious convictions of the
uneducated peasants. The episode is conceived in a socio-cultural
perspective.
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