*Pero Moniz was presumably a fellow soldier of Camões, whose own experience when stationed in the Gulf of Aden, near Mount Felix, is recorded in one of his Songs. The “rotten air” of the first tercet refers, perhaps, to a disease that took the speaker’s life. Alenquer, a small town north of Lisbon, is mentioned elsewhere in Camões’s poetry, leading biographers to wonder if he might have been born or partly raised there.