In the night the Moors burnt the body and the fumes drifted through the camp. The Lieutenant’s men had no food. Water was low. They remembered the question asked of the General in Chauen, “Do you have meat?” They remembered his reply, after sticking a hand under his arm and producing three lice. “These are the only cattle here.” Lieutenant Zamora’s men ate their lice. They drank vinegar, cologne and ink, and urine stirred with sugar. And so they waited for their betrothed.

One morning they saw in the sky the swollen shape of a dirigible. They flashed a mirrored message at the silver balloon. Later a plane chirred over the mountain. The Moors opened fire. The plane tilted in a circle over the garrison, dropping two objects from its belly. One, a sack, fell onto the garrison’s corrugated roof. The other was a huge white bar of ice, the size of a bath. The ice landed twenty yards outside the wall. They watched its whiteness darken the sand. They rushed onto the roof. They tore open the sack. Medals clattered over the hot tin. Engraved on the medals they saw the same disagreeable profile that had decorated the Colour Sergeant’s leg.

The General’s relief came three days later. The General found Lieutenant Zamora’s body in the dust, a goat chewing on his still-growing beard and onions in his eyes. His legs had been soused with kerosene and burnt, his tunic was growing into his skin and his hands had been tied with his bowels. One hand closed over the medal now in the glass cabinet. He smelled of cologne.

Lieutenant Zamora had been awarded the Medalla de Africa. Palajox laudenus viros gloriosos.

The medal, the uniform and a cuirass were the museum’s only relics. Otherwise the Zamora Room contained nothing but newspaper reports and photographs of items on permanent loan to the Museo Militar in Cadiz – a further source of Senator Zamora’s gripe.

Longingly he lingered over the black and white reproductions of his father’s straw slippers, of his binoculars, of an unused match erect beneath a glass dome, of his watch captured at four minutes past twelve, and of the full-length portrait, also in Cadiz, of the Lieutenant leaning on his sword, one hand inside his tunic.

The most substantial exhibit hung on the wall, beneath the sign for silence. In a florid ode composed by Captain Panteco’s grandfather was celebrated the world’s cruel ignorance of Lieutenant Zamora’s glory.

“O Zamora! Tu solamente Zamora! La sangre que corre por defender a la patria/ no corre inutilmente,” it began. In a concluding image, the sky over Abyla reddened with the Lieutenant’s blood and the sea grew green with his laurels.

“He died to keep Abyla Spanish,” whispered Zamora, standing with bowed head before the cabinet.

“Can we go now to Plaza de los Reyes?” said Pablo whose concentration had strayed to a corset on the wall in the next room and a cabinet containing the pickled left eyeball of Abdel Akbar. But Zamora had not finished. He was caressing the glass, tracing the contours of a badge, a globe ridden on eagle’s wings. “Our family motto,” he said. “You know what it means?”