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men whenever the forward traffic yielded an inch. In all known such encounters in the past between taxi and private drivers the taxi always won, its decisive weapon the certainty that the owner-driver will sooner concede his place than risk a dent on his smooth, precious carapace. But today, for the first time in the traffic history of this land, a taxi driver had met more than his match. This crazy owner-driver adversary failed altogether to live by the norms of his kind. One look at the condition of his car might have forewarned the other; but he either did not look or looked but failed to see.
    “What shall I tell Mama-John?” a middle-aged civil servant was fabled to have wept when a taxi drew an ugly gash along the entire length of the shining side of his new Volvo. Well, Ikem had no wife to fear at home and no child called John, James or any other name. So the contest was more than equal. Grimly oblivious of the car beside him riding with its two legs in the bush, Ikem pursued the red brake-lights ahead like a randy he-goat sniffing the bottom of his mate.
    After fifteen minutes of dangerously close brushes the contender-driver conceded victory with a heavy curse, pulled back and returned again to second place behind the victor thanks to the cooperation of the bronze medallist who halted for him to resume his original position.
    Ikem heaved a very deep sigh and then, gallant in victory, pronounced it the work of the sun. We are parboiled as farmers dotheir rice to ease the shelling. Thereafter we take only five minutes to cook.
    That night he composed his Hymn to the Sun:
    Great Carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty: Single Eye of God! Why have you brought this on us? What hideous abomination forbidden and forbidden and forbidden again seven times have we committed or else condoned, what error that no reparation can hope to erase?
    Look, our forlorn prayers, our offerings of conciliation lie scattered about your floor where you cast them disdainfully away; and every dawn you pile up your long basket of day with the tools and emblems of death.
    Wide-eyed, insomniac, you go out at cock-crow spitting malediction at a beaten, recumbent world. Your crimson torches fire the furnaces of heaven and the roaring holocaust of your vengeance fills the skies.
    Undying Eye of God! You will not relent, we know it, from compassion for us. Relent then for your own sake; for that bulging eye of madness that may be blinded by soaring motes of an incinerated world. Single Eye of God, will you put yourself out merely that men may stumble in your darkness. Remember: Single Eye, one-wall-neighbour-to-Blindness, remember!
    What has man become to you, Eye of God, that you should hurt yourself on his account? Has he grown to such god-like stature in your sight? Homeward-bound from your great hunt, the carcass of an elephant on your great head, do you now dally on the way to pick up a grasshopper between your toes?
    Great Messenger of the Creator! Take care that the ashes of the world rising daily from this pyre may not prove enough when they descend again to silt up the canals of birth in the season of renewal.
    The birds that sang the morning in had melted away even before the last butterfly fell roasted to the ground. And when songbirds disappeared, morning herself went into the seclusion of a widow’s penance in soot and ashes, her ornaments and fineries taken from her—velvets of soft elusive light and necklaces of pure sound lying coil upon coil down to her resplendent breasts: corals and blue chalcedonies, jaspers and agates veined like rainbows. So the songbirds left no void, no empty hour when they fled because the hour itself had died before them. Morning no longer existed.
    The trees had become hydra-headed bronze statues so ancient that only blunt residual features remained on their faces, like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.
    Household animals were all dead. First the pigs