Lazar. An island to the east of Malta. To the north: mostly mountains obscured by scrub pine, myrtle, olives and aromatic shrubs. In the centre: a valley of orange orchards and farmland. On the south coast, in a narrow strip of sandy beaches: a tourist industry, based around the historic capital, Sainte-Fleur, a town founded by the Crusaders. I understand Sainte-Fleur is a beautiful city. It is a city of high cobbled streets, alleys smelling of urine and geraniums, a city of brothels, roof gardens and cafés. The WHOM Geography Subsystem reveals that it has a nineteenth-century Templar Cathedral, round, like the original one, and a first-class Victorian hotel right in the middle of the Espanade Touristique, overlooking the best beach in Lazar. Also a bakery specialising in hot doughnuts and cheese danishes, originally opened to serve the US bomber pilots stationed there during the war - surviving presumably because the inhabitants have acquired a taste for hot doughnuts and cheese danishes - lending its own perfume to the Mediterranean air. It has a disreputable dockyard area known as Saint-Sépulcre, an area of oil drums and cranes, where the alleys are narrower and the smells stronger, not just urine and geraniums, but also cumin, basil, seaweed, frangipani, tar. It has its own cuisine: snapper and olives, goat's cheese with red peppers, spiced orange salad.

          The island of Lazar attracted Jimmy Ruggins, partly because of its curious religions, but mostly because of its long-running civil war, which consists mostly of denials.