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The eldest sister Princess Hatice, who was nearly thirty, and the slightly younger Princess Fehime had both agreed to this condition, while nineteen-year-old Princess Pakize had initially refused to leave her father and mother’s side. But within two years the matter had been smoothed over, with Abdul Hamid’s last-minute intervention securing Princess Pakize a husband too (even if he was “only a doctor”). The three sisters had got married together at the Yıldız Palace, and in fact Princess Pakize—unlike her sisters—was happy with this sudden match (perhaps, some might say, because she wasn’t as beautiful or ambitious as her sisters were).

As they passed the time in their cabin, talking and getting to know each other, Princess Pakize would look at Doctor Nuri’s wheat-colored skin, at his large, plump, hairy body, and experience a delicious thrill she had never even known could exist. Watching her husband perspire as he spoke of something that excited him, or even listening to him inhale and exhale through his nose in moments when his breathing quickened, the Princess—as she wrote to her sister Hatice—was filled with a feeling of absolute bliss. Sometimes when her doctor husband got out of bed to fetch a jug of water, she would stare in astonishment and wonder at the backs of his fleshy legs, at his feet so small she couldn’t imagine they could look good on any man, and at his enormous bottom.

Husband and wife spent most of their time in bed, making love. In the hours that remained they were content to lie quietly side by side in their hot and humid cabin, temporarily out of reach of any mosquitoes. If they happened to touch upon a difficult but important topic, they took care to soften the mood, afraid of how the other might react. Sometimes they would get out of bed and put on their best clothes to make conversation, but whenever any dangerous subject was broached, they stopped talking about it.

For Princess Pakize, these dangerous subjects were, of course, her hatred of Abdul Hamid and the many years she had spent imprisoned inside a palace. Prince Consort Nuri saw that his wife wanted to talk about these things and open up to him, but he was also worried that this could mar their contentment, so he reined in his curiosity and did not press the issue. Doctor Nuri also felt that if his wife was going to tell him all her most sorrowful stories, then he should tell her too of his own harrowing experiences as a quarantine doctor, of all the horrors he had witnessed in the Hejaz, and of what the pilgrims who went there were put through, even though he was concerned that these harsh tales might shock and disturb the Princess. Even so, he yearned to share his inner world with the intelligent, self-assured woman he had married. He wanted his wife to be aware of what was happening in those far-flung provinces that were slipping away one by one from under the rule of her uncle’s Ottoman Empire, and he wanted her to know how the people there were being decimated by these epidemics.

The morning of their third day in Alexandria, Doctor Nuri went out into the city. He visited the Greek watchmaker from Istanbul whose shop was situated just behind the Mehmet Ali Pasha Square, in the same street as the Zizinia Hotel, where British quarantine doctors and clerks usually stayed (and which had now stationed men with disinfectant spray pumps at its entrance). After asking him for all the latest news from Istanbul, the watchmaker began as he always did to tell the curious Ottoman doctor of the day when British warships, ostensibly sent to quash Ourabi Pasha’s anti-Western and anti-Ottoman nationalist uprising, had shelled Alexandria for hours. He described how terrifying the noise of those bombs had been, how the whole square had collapsed and been covered in a cloud of white dust, and how even British and French buildings had been hit. Christians and Muslims had taken up arms and started killing one another on the streets, and the watchmaker recalled how for a time it had been unsafe for Christians living in outer neighborhoods to even wear hats when they left their houses. Some time after the fires and the looting had ended, the watchmaker had met Gordon Pasha here. Having yet again told Doctor Nuri the story of how he had personally repaired and handed back to Gordon Pasha the very same Theta watch the Pasha wore the day he was killed in Khartoum by the Muslim armies of the Mahdi of Sudan, the watchmaker summarized his thinking in the following terms: “In my view neither the French nor the Ottomans nor the Germans can rule Egypt; only the British can!”

In their previous meetings, Doctor Nuri would have corrected the watchmaker whenever he disagreed with his statements. “No, the Ottomans did not hand Egypt over, they were already having trouble ruling it and the British just needed an excuse to take over!” he might have said; or he might have politely pointed out that Christians had already been beating and killing Muslims before the Arabs had started murdering Christians. But ever since his marriage a month ago to the niece of that same man whom the watchmaker had just referred to as “the Sultan” and as “Abdul Hamid,” he had forbidden himself from raising these kinds of objections and indeed from expressing any kind of political opinion.

That day the Doctor and Prince Consort did not enjoy the watchmaker’s conversation, nor his visit to Alexandria under quarantine. There was a new life ahead of him now, though he could not quite make out what it was going to be. He soon began to feel restless and started to make his way back to the port.

When he had gone through customs and stepped back on board the Aziziye, the cabin boy informed him that a Thomas Cook ship had just delivered two encrypted telegrams for him.

Just before the Aziziye had departed from Istanbul, a palace clerk had presented Doctor Nuri with a special codebook from the Sultan. It was the kind of codebook Abdul Hamid issued to ambassadors, local chieftains, and spies of all nationalities when he wished to establish a closer rapport and a direct line of communication outside the bureaucratic channels of the Sublime Porte.

Doctor Nuri embraced Princess Pakize and told her the news, then retrieved this codebook from the depths of his valise and turned eagerly to decoding the first telegram, letter by letter and digit by digit. But he had not done this in a long time, and as he leafed through the pages of the codebook looking for the letters and words that corresponded to each number, he found that he was struggling. His wife had been hovering around him as he worked, so he asked her to help. They soon discovered that certain commonly used words had been rendered as two-digit numbers, and after that they quickly unscrambled the telegrams.

The first telegram had come directly from the palace. It decreed that the Doctor and Prince Consort had been commissioned, upon the death of Bonkowski Pasha, to oversee the fight against the plague in the province of Mingheria and its capital, Arkaz, and ordered him to proceed immediately to the island. It also ordered the Russian captain of the Aziziye to take Princess Pakize, Prince Consort Nuri, and Major Kâmil to the island of Mingheria without delay. The second telegram, which also came from the palace and was expressly presented as an order from the Sultan himself, referred openly to the possibility that Bonkowski Pasha might have been “assassinated” and requested that the Doctor and Prince Consort should act “as a detective” and assist Governor Sami Pasha in his investigations to elucidate the matter.

“I told you my uncle would not allow us to enjoy this journey!” said Princess Pakize. “I have no doubt that he is the one who had poor Bonkowski Pasha killed.”

“You must not be so quick to come to conclusions!” said the Doctor and Prince Consort. “Before you make your mind up, let me first tell you of the state the international quarantine establishment finds itself in.”

The Aziziye promptly set sail from the port of Alexandria with its three passengers on board and journeyed north all night. After nightfall, as the ship’s progress was slowed by a strong northeasterly poyraz wind, the Doctor and Prince Consort felt it was time for him to introduce in his wife’s mind the likelihood that it might not have been her uncle Abdul Hamid who’d had poor Bonkowski Pasha killed, and that it was at the very least possible that some other force could have been involved. So as they sat in their cabin, he began to describe to his wife the politics of global quarantine operations.

In 1901, the British, the French, the Russians, and the Germans, who were enjoying at the time a position of global military, political, and medical dominance, believed that plague and cholera spread to Europe and the rest of the world from Mecca and Medina and that the people who brought these diseases to the West (to western Asia, southern Europe, and North Africa) were Muslims who came on pilgrimage to the Hejaz. In other words, the sources of the world’s plague and cholera epidemics were China and India, while their distribution center was considered to be the Hejaz Province of the Ottoman Empire. Doctors and quarantine experts working in every corner of the Ottoman Empire, be they Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, knew deep down that from a medical perspective, this claim was sadly true. But some of them, particularly the younger Muslim doctors, also believed that Western powers exaggerated this contention for political purposes and used it toward the intellectual, spiritual, and military humiliation of the peoples and nations of the world outside of Europe. When the British declared, “If you cannot protect our Indian subjects from disease while they are on the hajj, then we will!” everyone in the Ottoman camp—including Sultan Abdul Hamid himself—knew that this was not just an expression of disdain toward the Ottomans’ handling of medical matters, but a military threat too. This was why Abdul Hamid (“Your uncle!” said Doctor Nuri, looking into his wife’s eyes) had spent so much money on setting up quarantine facilities in the Hejaz. He had built new quarantine stations, military outposts, and docks on Kamaran Island at the mouth of the Red Sea and sent his brightest doctors to work there.

The quarantine station set up in the Yemen Province of the Ottoman Empire, on the island of Kamaran in the Red Sea, was at the time the world’s largest quarantine facility, both in terms of capacity and of surface area. As he described his first trip there seven years ago during an outbreak of cholera that had flared up at the height of hajj season, Doctor Nuri did not conceal his emotions. In those early years the suffering of the mostly Indian and Javanese pilgrims stuffed into the bowels of rotting, hulklike vessels, usually sailing under the British flag, had frequently brought tears to his eyes. In time he would see the conditions on all pilgrim ships setting sail from any Indian port become even more desperate. British travel companies in Karachi, Bombay, and Calcutta made it compulsory for passengers to purchase return tickets, but in those years one out of every five Indian pilgrims who embarked on the hajj either died there or couldn’t come back.

Doctor Nuri had seen how, in spite of the high ticket prices pilgrims were charged, passenger ships on the Bombay–Jeddah route that might have been designed to carry four hundred people at most could end up sailing with anywhere between one thousand and one thousand two hundred aspiring hajjis on board, packed in like sardines all the way down to the cargo hold. Rapacious steamship captains would squeeze pilgrims into the most unthinkable spots, such as the railings around the upper deck, which were the narrowest parts of the ship, and even on the flat roof of the captain’s cabin, so that those who found a spot in which to stand had no room to bend down and sit, and those who could sit or were lucky enough to have space to lie down knew that if they stood up they would lose their spot, and therefore avoided moving altogether. As he told this story, the Prince Consort imitated the manner in which pilgrims on these ships would curl up to sit.

Peering out from his quarantine officer’s boat as it edged slowly toward those rusty, sunbaked ships that seemed to lose parts as they sailed and looked like they might sink at any moment, Doctor Nuri would be amazed and even a little alarmed at the sight of the multitude of male heads staring at him from decks and portholes and any other available gaps. Once he had climbed on board for his inspection, escorted by soldiers, he would quickly realize that every available surface was covered in pilgrims sitting or lying down, that there were likely to be three times as many people hidden out of sight inside the ship as there were in the doomsday throngs he could see from the outside, and that every one of these aspiring Indian hajjis was worn out and exhausted, if not already sick.

The monstrous crush of hopeful pilgrims would be so dense that there was hardly any room to walk in, and Doctor Nuri described how sometimes he would have to call upon his armed guards to help him cleave his way through to the captain. To a query from his wife he responded by explaining that most of these ferries were actually cargo ships with no seating room for any passengers. Descending into the dark and putrid bowels of the hold, he would feel in that vastness without portholes or windows the squirming and the humanity of hundreds of terrified pilgrims, hear some of them moaning or praying, and see others still watching him in inquisitive silence. These cargo holds could get so dark that quarantine doctors had been forbidden from entering them after sunset. “But I must not talk too much of these matters and distress you unduly!” said Doctor Nuri.

“Please do not keep anything from me!” replied Princess Pakize.

Doctor Nuri could see that to his wife, these people he had described seemed destitute and desperate, and faced with this misconception, he couldn’t help but tell her the truth: pilgrims who undertook the hajj were, in fact, relatively wealthy in the countries they came from. Some would have sold their land or their homes to pay for the journey; some would have spent years saving up for it; some would make the journey a second time even though they knew how arduous and expensive it was. Over the past twenty years, the introduction of steamships and the fall in ticket prices had multiplied the number of yearly pilgrims to the Hejaz, bringing it close to a quarter of a million. Never in history had Muslim men from all over the world, from Java to Morocco, congregated and communicated in such vast numbers. Doctor Nuri recalled one religious festival day during which he had gazed out at a vast assembly of pilgrims’ tents and parasols and thought of how this prodigious sight would have delighted “your uncle” Abdul Hamid, who was eager to harness the power of Islam and of the caliphate.

“It is sweet of you to try and make me see my uncle in a kinder light!” said Princess Pakize. “I suppose we are beholden to him for orchestrating our meeting.”

“Your uncle himself is sending us to Mingheria to solve the murder. You shouldn’t say that he had Bonkowski Pasha assassinated.”