" Be still and leave Vengeance to God. Vengeance hates its victim, cannot distinguish the innocent and does not respect the true wishes of its owner. Like the creeper-weed, it goes where it is not sent, crawling into farmlands of enemies and friends alike and soon follows an unusual path to creep into the homestead of the one who sent it." Chukwu, the supreme God, blesses Udego with a lovely baby girl. Four months later, the baby goes missing-stolen! Her sorrow knows no bounds. The entire land mourns with her. After a long wait for another child in vain, she goes to Orashi Okija, the great River and pleads with its goddess, “If one who is weary finds nothing to lean on, he leans on his own knees...a child is what I ask. I care not how beautiful or ugly, rather than starve the mouth, let it eat the bad yam”. Orashi responds with Adamma, of whom the narrator says, “ ... was the fairest of all maidens-the type I have never seen, the type I may never see, because I am an old man, for who has seen so much beauty in balance with perfection, in balance with nature...” For her extreme and unearthly perfection,every man wants Adamma for a wife,every woman wants her for a daughter in law, every child wants her for a sister, but four girls want her dead! So they plot. And soon Ada is in the throes of death, and there is confusion in the land. Anukporonku, the priest, sees the ugly hands of four maidens, maidens whose identity is made a mystery to him, because a powerful water goddess wants it so. He also sees poison, a deadly poison, whose antidote is buried in the leaf of the sacred ogirisi plant, which lays deep in the Evil Forest, and only Adamma’s father can journey into the dark forest, as tradition allows, to pick the sacred antidote . But Emenike, her father had died many years ago. This clears Udego, her mother, to do the journey, but the question of how Emenike died soon arises and must be answered before she embarks on the journey!The oracle thinks his death, after all, might not have been the death of his Chi brought about by mortal fever; and the woman could not go into that forest with hands stained with her husbands blood, no one of course said she killed her husband, but just to be sure, it wouldn't hurt asking, and Anukporonku, the most powerful dibia in Azia does just that: “How did your husband die?”. The eager crowd, gathered at the shrine, holds it breath,Udego loses her speech, as time begins to run out on Adamma the perfect one.