All of the dust that I’ve been swallowing this last few days has got onto my lungs and making me cough like a smoker. And now my tongue has swollen up and it’s rubbing against a broken tooth, so I’m in agony right now, there’s a blister on my tongue and I can’t swallow. Consequently I’ve not eaten very much at all today.
Apart from that, it was 10:30 when I woke up this morning to the most glorious day I’ve seen since I was in Greece. If I had somewhere outside that wasn’t covered in rubble or junk I would have sat outside and had my breakfast there.
Today I read some more of my book, John Bourke’s On the Border with Crook
It’s a fascinating book and written in a style in which I would dearly love to write –
“X and Y were determined that thay would farm down in the bottom of the river valley. The Apaches were equally determined that they would not. Consequently X and Y were never lonely down in their little river valley”.
But what is interesting is Bourke’s account of his first visit to Tuscon. In 1848 when Mexico lost this area to the USA they withdrew all of their priests from the area. The Pope made an appeal throughout Europe for priests to go out there and one of the priests who volunteered was a certain Jean-Baptiste Salpointe. Salpointe was born in the “lieu-dit Salpointe”, which is just a few kilometres from here at St Hilaire près Pionsat.
Some people around here are researching Salpointe and his activities in the New World and here in Bourke’s book, written in 1891, is a mass of information about the time Bourke met Salpointe in a restaurant in Tuscon.
As I keep on saying, the world is a terribly small place.
