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of a finger before it met hard soil. Occasionally the rain subsided suddenly as if to listen. Only then was it possible to see separately the giant trees and the undergrowth with limp, dripping leaves. But such lulls were very short-lived; they were immediately overrun by new waves of thick rain.
Rain was good on the body only if it lasted so long and stopped clean. If it went on longer the body began to run cold. This rain did not know the boundary. It went on and on until Ezeulu’s fingers held on to his staff like iron claws.
‘This is what you have earned for your trouble,’ he said to John Nwodika. His voice was thick and he cleared his throat.
‘It is you I am worried about.’
‘Me? Why should anyone worry about an old man whose eyes have spent all their sleep? No, my son. The journey in front of me is very small beside what I have put behind. Whenever the flame goes out now I shall put the torch away.’
Another gust of rain came and smothered John Nwodika’s reply.
Ezeulu’s people were greatly worried when he came in numb and shivering. They made a big fire for him while his wife, Ugoye, quickly prepared camwood ointment. But first of all he needed some water to wash his feet which were covered with red mud right up to his ozo anklet. Then he took the camwood paste from the coconut shell and rubbed his chest while Edogo rubbed his back. Matefi whose turn it was to cook for Ezeulu that night (they had kept count even in his absence) had already started preparing utazi soup. Ezeulu drank it hot and his body began gradually to return to him.
The rain was already spent when Ezeulu got home and soon stopped altogether. The first thing he did after he had drunk his utazi soup was to send Nwafo to tell Akuebue of his return.
Akuebue was grinding his snuff when Nwafo brought him the news. He did not wait to finish his grinding. He transferred the half-ground snuff into a small bottle using a special thin knife-blade. Then he swept the finer particles to the middle of the grinding-stone with a feather and transferred them also to the bottle. He used the feather again on the big and the small stones until all the powder had gone into the bottle. He put the two stones away and called one of his wives to tell her where he was going.
‘If Osenigwe comes to borrow the stones,’ he said as he threw his cloth over his shoulder, ‘tell him I have not finished.’
There were already a handful of people in Ezeulu’s hut when Akuebue arrived. All the neighbours were there and every passer-by who heard of his return interrupted his errand to greet him. Ezeulu said very little, accepting most of the greeting with his eye and a nod. The time had not come to speak or to act. He must first suffer to the limit because the man to fear in action is the one who first submits to suffer to the limit. That was the terror of the puff-adder; it would suffer every provocation, it would even let its enemy step on its trunk; it must wait and unlock its seven fangs one after the other. Then it would say to its tormentor: Here I am!
All efforts to draw Ezeulu into the conversation failed or achieved only limited success. When his visitors spoke about his refusal to be white man’s chief he only smiled. It was not that he disliked the people around him or the subject about which they spoke. He enjoyed it all and even wished that Nwodika’s son had stayed on to tell them about all the things that had happened; but he had only stopped for a short while and then gone on to his own village to pass the night before returning to Okperi in the morning. He had even refused to wash the mud off his feet.
‘I am going out in the rain again,’ he had said. ‘Washing my feet now would be like cleaning the anus before passing excrement.’
As if he knew what Ezeulu was thinking about at that moment one of his visitors said: ‘The white man has met his match in you. But there is one side to this story which I do not understand – the rôle played by the son of Nwodika in Umunneora. When the matter has cooled down he must answer one or two questions.’
‘I stand with you,’ said Anosi.
‘Nwodika’s son has already explained,’ said Akuebue, who had been acting as Ezeulu’s mouth. ‘What he did was done in the belief that he was helping Ezeulu’.
The other man laughed. ‘He did? What an innocent man! I suppose he puts his bowl of foofoo into his nostrils. Tell me another story!’
‘Never trust a man of Umunneora. That is what I say.’ This was Ezeulu’s neighbour, Anosi. ‘If a man of Umunneora tells me to stop I will run, and if he tells me to run, I shall stand where I am.’
‘This one is different,’ said Akuebue. ‘Travelling has changed him.’
‘Hi-hi-hi-hi,’ laughed Ifeme. ‘He will only add foreign tricks to the ones his mother taught him. You are talking like a small boy, Akuebue.’
‘Do you know why it has rained all afternoon today?’ asked Anosi. ‘It is because Udendu’s daughter is going on uri. So the rain-makers of Umunneora chose to spoil their kinsman’s feast. They not only hate others, they hate themselves more. Their badness wears a hat.’
‘True. It is pregnant and nursing a baby at the same time.’
‘Very true. They are my mother’s people but all I do is peep fearfully at them.’
Ifeme rose to go. He was a short, stoutly built man who always spoke at the top of his voice as though every conversation was a quarrel.
‘I must go, Ezeulu,’ he shouted so loud that those in the women’s huts heard him. ‘We thank the great god and we thank Ulu that no bad story has accompanied your travel. Perhaps you were saying to yourself there: Ifeme has not come to visit me, I wonder whether there is a quarrel between us. There is no quarrel between Ezeulu and Ifeme. I was thinking all the time that I must visit Ezeulu; my eyes reached you but my feet lagged behind. I kept saying: Tomorrow I shall go, but every day gave me a different order. As I said before: Nno.’
‘It was the same with me,’ said Anosi. ‘I kept saying: Tomorrow I shall go, tomorrow I shall go, like the toad which lost the chance of growing a tail because of I am coming, I am coming.’
Ezeulu moved his back from against the wall where it had rested and appeared to be giving all his attention to his grandson, Amechi, who was trying in vain to open the old man’s clenched fist. But his mind was still on the conversation around him, and he spoke a word or two when he had to. He looked up momentarily and thanked Ifeme for his visit.
Amechi’s restlessness increased and soon turned to crying even though Ezeulu had allowed him to open his fist.
‘Nwafo, come and take him to his mother. I think sleep is coming.’
Nwafo came, bent down on both knees and presented his back to Amechi. But instead of climbing on he stopped crying, clenched his little fist and landed a blow in the middle of Nwafo’s back. This caused general laughter, and he looked round the company with streaks of recent tears under his eyes.
