₦airaland Forum

The Story of Tin Tin Abouti.

CHAPTER ONE. THE PRESENT... THE DAY OF THE DARKENED SUN

The tuareg dragged himself on. All around him was desolation. And drought. The kind that only a desert, in the time of thirst, could bring to one. Beautiful but teacherous, the Sahara was nobodys bit.ch.

The Sun, scorched the earth and held it in a fiery embrace. Its hold locked everything in place and even the air seemed like microwaves. The wicked lover burned anything that moved on its mistresses back.

And, the Sun smote the tuareg.

He was beaten. He knew it. All that was left was to lie down and die. Lie down and expire. Let death bring respite. Maybe death will quench this fire.

Vultures, crows and other strange birds circled the tuareg. Screeching in unearthly voices, they yelled at him to die. Get it over with. Give in to the darkness or the light.

He had lost everything. His status, his money and his friends. He had nothing more to lose. Maybe except his mind and his life, but both were ebbing away. And very surely too.

A crow flew down and perched itself "yanga-ishly" on a ledge of a sand dune and eyeballed the tuareg. It observed him with one eye and then the other. When it was convinced that the man still drew breath, it scratched its head vigorously, with its talons and proceeded to sharpen same claws with its beak.

The message was clear. This animal obviously, was higher up the foodchain. And it knew. The tuareg crumpled on the ground. He was flattened by the sheer force of the pure hostility of all the elements with which he was faced.

Now, at this point, the tuareg lost his mind.

And for someone so cultured, so educated as the Calabari crown prince, losing his mind was worse than death.

For if only the bird knew, that its intended feast was not a tuareg, or a nomad, but a Calabari prince, the legitimate heir, Obong Tin Tin Abouti, Gwam Attah of Karembu Kingdom, in the south side of the Savanah rainforests, a place now known as Nigeria.

The year was 1032. The place was the Sahara desert. So a Calabar prince from the Savanah lost his mind dressed as a tuareg in the Sahara.

As promised, i present to you, stories my mama told me. Fantastic tales of far away, told with the magic of a midsummer day. Of times when faires sat in the trees, drank plum wine and played their games, and horses galloped free, everyone of them wild, with the sun in their manes.