The couple arrived in Abyla at the end of March 1924. Genia expected to find lions and elephants with long teeth and vegetation that towed the houses back into the jungle. She did not believe Ernesto when he described his city as a donkey-grey fugue on the banks of Africa.

They stepped through the black veil of flies into a city under siege. There were no lights. The water supply had been cut off and Abdel Akbar perched on the brow of La Mujer Muerta whose slopes crumped with mortar fire.

Genia’s first impression was the silver dirigible above the church from which a man with a mirror directed the mortars (including the shell which late in the war plummeted onto the bell tower of Santa Maria).

“Qu’est ce que c’est que ça?” she asked, opening the window onto the balcony.

“A dead cat, it looks like,” said Ernesto.

“A dead cat!”

“Someone’s shot it through the head.”

A great hollering rose from the street below. Genia leaned over the balcony. She saw a man in a corset brandishing a sabre.

She hated Abyla from that moment, this rare and ugly orchid which sprouted on what was, without any argument at all, the wrong side of the Mediterranean. Five centuries of Europe in Africa, she would remind herself, peering down over the General’s terrace and his handkerchief tree – for this!

The feeling that she was tantalised by something in which she could not participate was not exclusively an Abylan emotion, but the Straits, and the fact she could see Gibraltar across them, encouraged it. From the very first, Evgenia Nikolaevna judged a day by whether she could see Europe.

Neither was there solace to be found in the church where Padre Ruiz married them. Santa Maria de Africa had been converted into a granary. To scare the rats away, Padre Ruiz had permitted a number of the city’s cats to seek refuge from the General’s shotgun. His bell tolled to warn of an enemy attack as often as it tolled for prayer. Twice in her first month, Genia Ortiz solemnly made her way to the Plaza de Africa believing she had been summoned to a late Matins.

When she learned to read the newspapers, her feeling that she was trapped was confirmed. She was trapped between a Europe that no longer existed, a continent of midday darkness, and this Africa of Abdel Akbar. Beyond La Mujer Muerta they tumbled over themselves to embrace death. To what end? It was all as pointless as the heroic end of Lieutenant Zamora who died to keep Abyla Spanish.

Genia stood on Calle Camoes and watched the General lead the Lieutenant’s body through the streets. He was cheered loudest by Abyla’s women. Were the Moors to breech the massive ramparts of the fortress of San Felipe, a group of Abyla’s richest wives had decided to flee to a cave in La Mujer Muerta where they proposed to live on the same deciduous barks as the apes.