PROLOGUE Black curtains draped from one window to the other, giving the entire room a darker tint

than it usually took. Just beyond the room leaves of black brown barked trees shivered ferociously as a slow breeze passed. The atmosphere was pregnant with a tension that nipped at every nook and cranny of the menacing fortress and the environment around it. The house stood tall in and proud amongst the thatched homes of the commoners, from a aerial view one could see it was a pin in the haystack. Not one of the villagers in the land knew what held within the mysterious walls. All they could see was the green moss and spirogyras spiraling their ways up the walls of the worn cement building. In spite of this green tyranny, the clash of colors made the house stand out, an enigma. No one dared to entire. Only the elders who had been present to experience the arrival of the foreigners had ever seen the white skinned apes before and o=it was only a moment. It was only once in the dim night a villager caught in the cast of a candle light, a shadow lurking behind the heavy curtains covering the windows. It was a quiet solemn day when a ship visited the shores of the village. The villagers in theirs raffia skirts, some pounding yam others farming fervently, dropped their hoes, cutlasses and pestles and sprung up on their bare feet quickly to see what was going on at the brink of the island. The waves washed a ship into their land. The wooden burnished surfaces of the ship with its golden mermaid at the edges awed the villagers.