Humar an Noom

Sudan Studies, Number 15 (January 1994)

The condition known as 'noctambulism', which is less obscurely defined in dictionaries as 'somnambulism', and is spoken of in the English speaking world as 'sleep-walking', finds expression in northern Sudan in a colloquial phrase about a donkey.

This 'donkey of sleep' (humar an noom) first blundered across my path on a clear night, on the east bank of the Nile, between the villages of Argo and Burgeig. I was staying with a family who occupied one of a small cluster of government houses. The father and several of his sons worked at the nearby pumping station which poured gallons of Nile water into the irrigation channels (jadwalls) of farmers up and down the river.

On the first day of my visit I was introduced to the neighbours and after a swim in the Nile was taken on a guided tour of the area, visiting the family's cattle and the huge water pump itself. In the evening we dined on fish which had been stranded in a bend in one of the pump's massive pipes. The fish was delicious but the water with which we washed the meal down contained a hint of benzene. It too had been drawn from the metal guts of the machine.

It was an oppressively hot evening, the final nuance of discomfort being provided by squadrons of 'dive-bombing' mosquitoes, whose tormenting screeches and whirrings, greatly surpassed the itchy swellings resulting from a bite, as a form of mental torture.

At night when I was expecting to be shown to a bed somewhere in the yard, I was instructed to go after my male hosts who inexplicably clambered onto the roof of the house. On following I was surprised to find six beds (angarebs) laid out under the open skies on the narrow iron roof. The house could hold all of this on its head because it was government built and constructed of corrugated iron. The mud and jariid roofs of locally made houses could not have supported such a weight, jariid being nothing stronger than straightened palm branches stripped of their leaves.

As we lay above the mosquitoes, gazing at the stars and enjoying the breeze, I tried to explain, in an attempt at humour, that I hoped I did not walk in my sleep, to be woken unceremoniously after falling to the street below. My host, Mohammed, choosing to overlook the joke, implored me to descend if I really thought it likely that humar an-noom would take possession of me during the night.

Being less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a night at ground level, deprived of the wafting breeze andd at the mercy of the mosquitoes, I elected to stay on the 'head' of the house (rass al beet) and in doing so, gained a lasting memory of my visit, after sleeping more like hajar an-noom - the stone of sleep - than the donkey.