CHAPTER I

I was dreaming my dream again. Always the same dream–at least, ever since that day at Rabat–with the plane plunging and shuddering and the sleet hissing past the windows. The rough going hadn’t scared our little gang particularly. We had had more than one such on our tour of the war areas–crossing the Irish Sea to Belfast, for instance, or our flight in the sirocco from Gib to Casablanca.

That terrifying dream. Always the same scene. Jack, peering into his cards and joshing me out of the corner of his wry comedian’s mouth, and Laura and Dirk across the gangway, helping Diana with her crossword puzzle. I would always wake up before the actual crash, but filled with such a sense of impending disaster that I would lie there gasping with fright.

This time, somehow, the dream was different. I was still playing gin rummy with Jack, but he was shouting at me, and in such a curious voice. It was high-pitched and hoarse, and seemed to come from a distance...

Then suddenly I was awake. I gazed about me wildly. This wasn’t my little hospital room where I had groped my way back to consciousness. All was dark about me save for a panel of starry sky in the open window at the foot of my bed, but I could make out gay curtains and bright leather cushions on a couch against the wall.

Memory came struggling back. The long, cold bus-ride from Rabat; Captain Stracer, who met me at the terminal, warning me that I was to dine with the American General before my concert; dinner at the General’s and the thrill of being the only woman in a roomful of officers vying with each other to make a fuss of me; and to crown all, the shabby movie-house, crammed from floor to roof with men in uniform, the never-ending encores, the charming friendliness of everyone. As a final reminder, the slender tower of the Kutubiah beyond my window, which Stracer had pointed out to me on my arrival, told me that I was at Marrakesh and that the voice quavering out of the dark was the muezzin calling to dawn prayer.

The hotel had given me one of a series of ground-floor rooms, each with its own little porch looking out across the hotel gardens at the city and the snowy Atlas peaks beyond. In dressing-gown and slippers I ran outside. The air was frosty and still, its emptiness filled by that disembodied voice reverberating against the mountains across the jumble of minarets and domes and flat-topped houses dimly white beyond the gardens. “La illaha illa’llah!” it flung in a closing challenge to the paling sky and ceased.

Silence then. Already, over to eastward, the sky was faintly lemon. The birds were stirring in the palms below the porch and little sounds began to mount from the city, waked into life by the muezzin’s call. This was the real Orient, I told myself, not the bogus thing, debased and defaced by the West, which I had found at Algiers. My spirits soared. I was at Marrakesh and I had a whole week in which to explore this magic city.

For so the doctor at Rabat had stipulated when the Special Service people had come along with this emergency date at Marrakesh: they wanted me to fill in for a party of entertainers held up somewhere along the route. I h