# Urth Digest, Vol 73, Issue 51 *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 26 Sep 2010* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Andrew Mason *26 Sep 2010, 19:42* > David Stockhoff wrote: > Another fantastical theory to explain this could be based on ?Dorcas having a basket ("not small > yet not large either") with her as she mourns the boatman. Perhaps Severian impregnated her with > himself, and some time travel trick ensued. I think Dorcas's basket is meant to make you _think_ of babies, but if you do the maths, it turns out it can't contain one. (Unless she has already done a time travel act, jumping back just a few months from her child's birth - but what would be the point of that?) If I remember rightly, the length of Severian's journey is still very vague at the time he sees Dorcas with the basket, and it's only later specified that it has taken only a few months. It does look, when we link this with the Mandragora's words and with the fact that Frog and Fish were carried in a basket, that there is meant to be some link between babies and baskets, but like you I don't know what to make of it. > Also regarding the screaming baby memory, Severian says he remembers being "encircled by brown walls". > I think the Matachin Tower cells have walls of gray. Typhon's room is circular but has shiny metal > walls. Not only does the Matachin tower have grey walls, but Severian specifically mentions this in his other infant memory, of breastfeeding. Those brown walls mean something. (There is a boring solution - that the memory is Thecla's, or, perhaps more plausibly, the Old Autarch's - but I guess it's more complicated than that.) I agree that the Mandragora did not in fact ask specifically about Severian being in a basket - it just made a comparison - but this somehow stirred up Severian's memory. ---