‘Mami, I myself say, this child will live. Now himself he is too small. Yourself you must not eat meat. You must not eat fish from the sea, Friday, Sunday. You hear?’ She nodded in reply. ‘He himself, if he is about ten years,’ and he counted ten by flicking the five fingers of his left hand twice over, ‘if he is about ten, tell him he must not eat meat and fish from the sea, Friday, Sunday. If he himself he does not eat, you Mami Fanti, you can eat. You hear?’

She nodded again.

‘Now, the child he will live, yourself you must stop weeping. If you do that it is not good. Now you have the blue dye for washing?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured.

‘And a piece of white cloth?’

‘Yes, but it is not big. Just about a yard and a quarter.’

‘That does not matter. Yourself, find those things for me and I will do something and your child he shall be good.’

She did not say anything.

‘Did you yourself hear me, Mami Fanti?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now take the child, put him in the room. Come back, go and find all the things.’

She took the thing which might once have been a human child but now was certainly looking like something else and went back with it to the room.

And she was thinking.

Who does the Mallam think he is deceiving? This is the third child to die. The others never looked half this sick. No! In fact the last one was fat. . . . I had been playing with it. After the evening meal I had laid him down on the mat to go and take a quick bath. Nothing strange in that. When I returned to the house later, I powdered myself and finished up the last bits of my toilet. . . . When I eventually went in to pick up my baby, he was dead.

. . . O my Lord, my Mighty God, who does the Mallam think he is deceiving?

And he was thinking.

Ah . . . llah just look, I cannot remain here. It will be bad of me to ask the woman for so much as a penny when I know this child will die. Ah . . . llah, look, the day has come a long way and I have still not eaten.

He rose up, picked up his bag from the ground and with a quietness and swiftness of which only a nomad is capable, he vanished from the house. When the woman had laid the child down, she returned to the courtyard.

‘Papa Kramo, Papa Kramo,’ she called. A goat who had been lying nearby chewing the cud got up and went out quietly too.

‘Kramo, Kramo,’ only her own voice echoed in her brain. She sat down again on the stool. If she was surprised at all, it was only at the neatness of his escape. So he too had seen death.