Through clouds of fever she remembered an enormously obese Polynesian nurse in a white uniform. She turned out later to be an actual Pomare princess from Tahiti. The nurse conversed with Mitch in halting French, then lifted her in arms as thick as Lindy’s legs and laid her gently on an operating table. When Lindy doubled up in cramps, she eased a rectal thermometer in and, when she read it, gasped. She shook it and tried again. The last thing Lindy saw that night was her shocked liquid eyes full of fear.

She shared a stucco-walled hospital room with an injured Marquesan sailor off an island freighter. A full-blown brown-skinned nymph, wearing a pareu below and a lacey bra above, padded in on bare feet to attend her. She wore a flower behind her ear. She stood staring. Her name was Tiare. When Lindy’s temperature rose high enough, she would bring in her friends to stare too. She spoke no French that Mitch could recognize. Her deathwatch was absolutely immobile. Lindy would remember her as standing for three days by the door, never averting her gaze, never leaving except to guide her to the oriental tiled toilet, a simple hole in concrete with squat-steps and no toilet bowl, and to support her there impassively during her impressive seizures. There were no bedpans.

Mitch tried, through the gendarme, to reach the island doctor, but he was treating the chief of a tiny village on Ua Huka, beyond radio recall. From the nuclear monitor ship, Mitch got a Navy doctor, who was puzzled and prescribed immense French charcoal pills which she could hardly get down. The ship weighed anchor and she was doctorless again.

Waves of delirium shook her and passed. She saw everything from a seat somewhere outside herself, in dissolves and fades like a bad horror movie. The enormous Pomare nurse would inflate to three times life size, and then diminish in the distance; Mitch would be cooling her forehead one moment and be a hundred yards across the room the next.

In the daytime a horse grazed outside her paneless window and at night invisible no-nos feasted on Mitch, who usually stayed ashore and slept on a sleeping bag on the floor. They left bites which did not begin to itch for hours but always became infected.

Dr. Clary, the island medico, returned from Ua Huka. He was a gentle young military surgeon, quiet and whimsical, with a tiny Van Dyke beard. He began to pump antibiotics into her. He prescribed food—although not fish—from the restaurant which had poisoned her in the first place, because he thought the hospital native fare would make her worse. Mitch would trudge across the village to get it and bring it back on a tray, under a fresh white napkin, and then she could hardly touch it.