By John Laing, Bangkok
Constantinople — The words, crisp and menacing, seemed to vibrate against the humid Cairo air. Reginald sighed. The Ottoman Empire. It sounded like a vast, dusty wardrobe, filled with moth-eaten fez hats and the faint scent of old rosewater.
Reginald, a correspondent for The London Clarion, was, to put it mildly, ill-suited for adventure. His greatest thrill was alphabetizing his spice rack, and his most daring expedition involved a harrowing trip to the local bazaar for a fresh supply of cardamom.
Now, he was to embark on a journey into the heart of… whatever the Ottoman Empire actually was.
He consulted his meticulously organized notebook. “Ottoman Empire,” he muttered, flipping through pages filled with tea stain-induced annotations. “Vague boundaries… numerous pashas… possibly a sultan?… and, oh dear, the ‘Eastern Question.’”
The Eastern Question, to Reginald, sounded less like a geopolitical conundrum and more like a particularly difficult crossword clue.
His first attempt at research involved asking a local coffeehouse owner, a man with a magnificent mustache and an air of profound weariness.
“The Ottoman Empire?” the man said, swirling his coffee. “It is… everywhere. And nowhere. Like a dream. Or a very large, slightly confused cat.”
Reginald, scribbling furiously, wrote, “Empire resembles… feline abstraction?”
His subsequent attempts were equally fruitless. A camel driver offered a cryptic explanation involving “many hills” and “much taxation.” A fortune teller, after peering into his teacup, declared, “I see… turbans. And… a great deal of paperwork.”
The London office, meanwhile, was growing impatient. Telegrams arrived with increasing frequency, each one a miniature thunderclap. “Report! Detail! Now!” Reginald, his spectacles perched precariously on his nose, felt a growing sense of panic.
He decided to take action. He packed his valise with spare spectacles, a phrasebook titled “Conversational Turkish for the Mildly Perplexed,” and a generous supply of digestive biscuits. He boarded a steamer, his heart pounding like a trapped hummingbird.
His journey was a series of bewildering encounters. He met a man who claimed to be a tax collector, but spent most of his time reciting poetry. He attended a political meeting where everyone spoke in elaborate metaphors involving figs and dates. He saw a building that was, he was told, both a palace and a bureaucratic office, depending on the time of day.
He sent back reports, each one more confused than the last. “The Empire,” he wrote, “appears to be a complex system of… possibly… hats. And… a lot of tea.”
Back in London, the editors of The Clarion were tearing their hair out. “Featherbottom,” they muttered, “is reporting on the weather! We need substance!”
Reginald, meanwhile, was sitting in a dusty café, sipping tea and trying to decipher a map that seemed to have been drawn by a drunken goat.
He sighed. The Ottoman Empire, he concluded, was not so much an empire as it was a state of mind. A very, very complicated state of mind. And he, Reginald Featherbottom, was hopelessly lost in it. He reached for a digestive biscuit, and another telegram arrived, “Detail the nature of the Sublime Porte! Is it a door, a person, or a particularly ornate doorknob?”
Reginald’s spectacles fell off his nose. He began to alphabetize his biscuits, a task he understood.
The True Tales of Reginald Featherbottom, Correspondent of The London Clarion
Chapter I. Reginald Featherbottom and the Great Suez “Camal” Mystery | Cairo (Jan. 15, 2024)
Chapter II. Reginald Featherbottom and The Holy Land | Jerusalem (Feb. 15, 2024)
Chapter III. Reginald Featherbottom Visits the Ottoman Empire | Constantinople (March 15, 2024)
Chapter IV. Reginald Featherbottom and the Audacious Dudley | Cairo (April 15, 2024)
Chapter V. Reginald Featherbottom Befriends a German Spy | Cairo (May 15, 2024)
Chapter VI. Reginald Featherbottom Visits the Berlin Zoo | Berlin (June 15, 2024)
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