Thus, the stay in Ogoja had become a gem for me, a radiant past that I could not lose. And so I remembered the shimmering red earth, the cracked paths made by the heat of the sun, the barefoot race across the savannah to the fortresses of the termite mounds, the approach of the evening storm, the loud, raucous nights, our cat mating with wildcats on the corrugated iron roof, the stupor that followed the fever's heat in the early morning hours when cool air seeped through the mosquito net. This sultry heat, this burning, this trembling. The foreign yet magical world of Africa, as he experienced it at the age of eight in 1948 during a trip, would never let J.M.G. Le Clézio go. A world whose sounds and colors, freedoms and dangers he vividly brings closer to us.