In the beginning, there was the myth. Or was it the truth? The story goes that there were two men and two women. This was after Chukwu, the chief god woke up from his deep sleep and glanced around him. And every glance became a star. And the stars lengthened into nebulae, into galaxies and into vast stretches of light.

　　One day, the men asked one another, “how big is the world?”, but neither knew. That was why they asked.

　　In the beginning—this beginning, man had not come to serve objective truth. He plunged with unbridled passion into pools of mystery. Sometimes, he found his feet on alien dry ground. Other times, most times, he bobbed up and down, arms flailing in distress.

　　So, the men with their women— beings supple in form, firm of bosom and fair to look upon— decided to travel in opposite directions on a quest to find out how big the world is. Not before they put an udala seed beneath the earth on which they stood.

　　Each man travelled and travelled. Through lands of scorching suns, rivers of roaring rapids, lands of numbing ice, into the deep and into the wilds. Suns dimmed into moons, moons lengthened into seasons and seasons morphed into years.

　　Soon enough, on a certain day, each of these men saw a shadow in the distance. And as he got closer, the shadow became substance, and the substance was a crowd. As he beheld the crowd, he saw his partner, the other man of the beginning—now bent with age, with his woman—now a mass of bones and graying hair. But there were other things—other men and women—men thick in limbs and straight as arrows, women supple in form and fair to look upon.

　　Each man stood in wonder as he beheld the nation his friend had become, and rubbed the trunk of the great udala tree in bewilderment . Both were in awe of how majestic it was and in astonishment at how big the world is.