were going to be married at once, though
mother was half dead with fatigue and excitement after her long, hurried
journey; but on their wedding eve she was taken ill, and became
delirious. It was typhoid fever. She had got it somehow on the journey.
She had come without stopping to rest, from Dublin to Touggourt, where
father was stationed. They say it's wild there even now. It was far
wilder then, more than twenty-one years ago. He nursed mother himself,
scarcely eating or sleeping: not taking off his clothes for weeks. One
of his aunts--my great-aunt--told me the story. It came to her from a
friend of father's. He never spoke of it. For three months mother wasn't
out of danger. Father was her nurse, her doctor, not her husband. But at
last she was well again. They had their honeymoon in a tent in the
desert. She loved the desert, then--or thought she did. Afterward,
though, she changed, for I was coming, and she was ill again. By that
time they were stationed still farther south. She grew so homesick for
the north that my father got leave. They started to travel by easy
stages through the desert, with a small caravan. Their hope was to reach
Algiers, and to get to France long before the baby should come; but the
heat grew suddenly terrible, and one day they were caught in a fearful
sandstorm. My mother was terrified. I was born two months before the
time. That same night she died, while the storm was still raging; and
before she went, she begged my father to promise, whatever happened, not
to leave her body buried in the desert. He did promise. And then began
his martyrdom. The caravan could not march fast because of me. A negro
woman who'd come as mother's maid took care of me as well as she could,
and fed me on condensed milk. Strange I should have lived.... My father
had his men make for my mother's body a case of many tins, which they
spread open and soldered together, with lead from bullets they melted.
In the next oasis they cut down a palm tree and hollowed out the trunk
for a coffin. They sealed up the tin case in it, and the coffin
travelled on the camel mother had ridden when she was alive, in one of
those beautiful hooded bassourahs you must have seen in pictures. At
night the coffin rested in my father's tent, and he lay beside it as he
had lain beside my mother when she lived, and they were happy. Because
she'd been a Catholic, and because she'd always hated the dark, father
burned candles on the coffin alw