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We were four. George (I never discovered his surname) was forty-sevenish, greying. ‘Met’ concealed Corporal Hornsey Metcalfe who shunned his Christian name, was thirty-seven, well spoken. Sergeant Charlie Hildretch, also thirty-seven and almost bald, rarely spoke and rarely moved a muscle of his face.

All were Yorkshiremen, all employed before the war in the Engineer Office of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, all acquaintances of ten years' standing or more. Now they were Royal Engineers. Then there was me.

We had emerged from Biskra's railway station. It was midnight. We were here because a sad little man in Algiers had become less sad when the war in North Africa ended. Before 1939 he had been Thomas Cook's representative, shepherding hundreds of tourists across Algeria and Tunisia. Now he was back in business and we four, on seven days' leave, were among his first customers. We had each paid £15 to go to the edge of the Sahara via Biskra and Touggourt.

An atmosphere of unreality began with clouds of locusts descending on the fields between Algiers and Constantine. It continued in Biskra. So strange to enter an unknown town by night, to traverse unfamiliar streets, the buildings seen dimly by starlight amid a scented warmth and the sound, far away, of someone playing a pipe - high, plaintive and clear. A woman was singing in shrill alien cadences.

Then the hotel... which welcomed my companions but disclaimed all knowledge of me. The French manageress was vague and dreamy-eyed. Never before nor since have I met a 'vague' French manageress. I suspected hashish. She drifted to a telephone, drifted back again and silently ushered me into what seemed the throne-room of Abdul the Damned.

Rich Persian carpets covered the tiled floor and were draped down the walls. A huge divan loaded with cushions in native-made covers occupied the centre of the room. A curiously ornamented bronze lamp of Arab design hung from the ceiling while low brass-topped tables were scattered around. There were rosewood cabinets, a full-length cheval glass, leather pouffes... nothing lacking save a troop of dewy-eyed maidens in yashmaks. After fifteen hours of travel I slept well. In the morning I discovered that I had been given the hotel owner's bedroom.

Biskra, that oasis of a million palm-trees, was explored with Said, a town-wise Arab employee of Cook's. Many buildings were constructed of sun-dried mud. More unreality - Biskra owed its existence to a stream which flowed through it... such a little stream, rarely more than two feet wide and less than a foot deep which fed the myriad, tiny, irrigation channels crisscrossing the plantations of male and female palm trees. We watched an Arab cut the pollen-bearing pistils from the one and plunge them into the 'ovaries' of the other.

There was once a popular novelist - Robert Hichens - whose best-seller was 'The Garden of Allah' set in Biskra (later made into a film with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer). Now to the Garden of Allah we came, reaching a summer-house of Moorish design. Within dwelt a celebrated soothsayer, or sand-diviner. He had a little monkey-like face beneath his red fez. He spoke a curious English, asked me to place my left hand in his little tray of sand. He examined the impression with some care, brushed the sand clean, then began to make row upon row of impressions with his forefinger. These he studied attentively and without moving his eyes from them, spoke: 'You were born - when?' I replied. He began to speak again:

'You are under the sign of Venus and you love beauty very much, above all things. You are very clever. In a foreign country, far away, I see people who worry about you very much - you are worrying about them too.' So far, all too obvious. But then...

'You have worked, and you will work where there is much machinery, all the time I see machinery - machinery above, machinery below. You will be over many men there. You will become wealthy and one day live in a house overlooking the sea. You have a woman whom you love very dearly and when you return home you will be closer to her than you have ever been. From her you will have either one, three, or five children - never, two, four or six. You have been a great traveller and you will travel - Europe, Asia, Africa will know your feet. Whether the war is finished or not you will return to your home in either seven or nine months from now. You will live to a good age - your illnesses will be minor ones. I see no more.'

He was right about one thing - The Sporting Life’s printing presses were in the basement and our linotype machines on the top floor. The sub-editors' room lay between. As for the rest... time would tell. 'Met' submitted to the soothsayer but Charlie and George had no time for such folly. Hibiscus bloomed beside the summer-house. I plucked a bloom, almost stupefied by its scent. This, I thought, I will press and send to Minna. Weeks later Met told me something which I passed on to Minna: 'On the subject of the Biskra seer, here is something which will amuse you. Met was told that after the war he would have a great friendship with a wealthy woman on purely Platonic lines. I saw him yesterday and he told me that when he arrived back, a bulky letter was awaiting him. It was from a girl he had known years back. She was very wealthy and was serving in the W.A.A.F. The letter ran to sixteen pages! He had had no news of her since the outbreak of war!'

We reached a street with precarious wooden balconies... our Arab guide grinned, stretched a few curves in the air with his hands. This was the Rue des Ouled Nail - the name of a desert tribe where girls are trained from childhood for dancing and prostitution. Alone among Arab women they go unveiled. At eighteen or earlier they retire from the profession with enough jewels and gold coins for a dowry on marriage. The ladies who stood in doorways seemed well past that age.

Biskra was a kind of halfway house between France and the real South. In Biskra I sensed the shades of thousands of vanished tourists. I was little nearer understanding the Arab. Two days in Biskra. Now we would travel to Touggourt - by train.

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