While she was none the worse for wear, it was not a package tour she cared to repeat anytime soon. She had to keep shaking herself in order to realize she had survived the journey and was actually there. Major John D. MacDonald,* the commanding officer of the small OSS camp in Colombo, found her a bed for the night and filled her in on the events up in Kandy, the resort town in the mountains where Mountbatten had reestablished his command. Judging by the pea-soup quality of the air in the port city—her body was covered in a sticky film of perspiration seconds after landing—she could see why Mountbatten might want to seek relief at a higher elevation. The news of their little OSS contingent in Kandy was not good. Shortly after Julia, Ellie, Cora, and company arrived, they all contracted dengue fever and were laid up in the hospital. “Breakbone fever,” as Jane remembered all too well from her own bout with it in Batavia, was a painful mosquito-born viral disease that began with a high temperature that typically lasted three to four days.
