Davis, Eileen "The Blue Mosque"

Women’s escapist fiction, set in 1928 (“a far, far away season”), which opens and closes aboard an Italian liner — the fictitious COUNT D’AZURE — in the eastern Mediterranean, with intervening sections in the equally fictitious Sultanate of “Bussorah.” Davis’ only allusion to the actual time period in which she was writing this piece comes early on, with her protagonists (wealthy, handsome Mr. Montgomery and lovely, unattached Miss Eldon) still aboard their luxury liner sailing on Mediterranean seas in which “the small black spots dotting the crests of the too blue waves were seagulls, not periscopes.”