In one of the ceremonies he attended, the natives let him see Olanna, a distant niece of the Priest-King of Nri. The royal family, it was believed, had descended from a celestial being. The kingdom no longer existed: not long before, in 1911, the British Empire’s troops had forced the king to renounce his ritual and political power. With the help of some priests, Olanna had escaped to Ibadan. She was fifteen years old, fragile, her forehead marked by scars, a maze of inflamed skin forever above her eyes. George Mathers fell in love with her, but at first he could not speak to her, they couldn’t communicate. And Olanna, a priestess from a noble family, would never have touched a white man. The portrait George drew of Olanna, very delicate and retouched several times—you can see the erratic lines, later retraced neatly—shows a teenager with a tired gaze.

They called her She Who Brings the Night. Also, the Serpent of the Moon. With the scant English that his guides and friendly chiefs spoke, plus the little he had learned of the native language and a few more phrases in dialect, George Mathers understood that Olanna was not just a priestess possessed by spirits. She was the one who communicated with the occult gods, the ones who slept underground, in the riverbeds, and between the stars. What his family, who belonged to the Order, referred to as a medium. In the first ritual they let him witness, in a clearing in the woods at night, drunk on palm wine, he watched as Olanna’s body moved with impossible fluidity under the priest’s hand, and how she bled. The women participating bled too; they, unlike Olanna, were clothed. The meaty, metallic smell filled the woods and left him dizzy and excited. After the rituals, Olanna was taken away by the local healers and carried to her spacious hut: she was burning with fever and sometimes refused to drink, which only worsened her condition. When she recovered, she allowed George to take her hand and she told him about other gods, many others, as well as a secret forest. George Mathers learned from her, took notes, sometimes even refused the woman assigned to him as a nighttime companion so he could write alone in his bed, protected by the white mosquito net. The priests told him about Sopona, the deformed god of illness who appeared in the form of mosquitoes and flies; they didn’t understand how he remained untouched by the deity All his companions had suffered some form of illness, and many had died from malaria. George had only gotten a bit thinner and darker since he’d left London. He paid little attention to the business of the National African Company, but no one demanded he tend to the enterprise. He still went to the offices every day, even when he was very tired. He listened to his colleagues talk about the Niger River, the rebel tribes, the country’s riches, and relatives and friends who had been killed in Europe during the Great War.