ot one of the fallen crowd reappeared on the surface of
the water, while the water itself gradually grew redder and redder,
till at last it was a bright crimson, painted by the blood of the
corpses below.

And opposite to them stood the fast-barred gate.

Ah--ha! 'Tis not so easy to capture Tepelenti as ye thought.

Everywhere else ye have triumphed; ye have triumphed up to the very
last point. And now ye _have_ come to the last point, and your
victories are worth nothing, for the last point is still to be won.

The fortress is unapproachable. The bastions are built in the middle
of the lake, and from their dark quadrangular cavities rows of guns
(each one of them a sixty-pounder) sweep the surface of the water, so
that it is impossible to draw near in boats. On the land side one
hundred cannons defend the bastions, and who can surmount the triple
ditch?

Ye will never capture Ali there. He has sufficient muniments of war
to last him for an indefinite period, and to show them how determined
he was, he caused the solitary gate of the fortress to be filled with
masonry and walled up. So the fortress has no longer a gate. Even
desertion is now an impossibility.

There he will remain, then, walled up as in a tomb, buried alive! The
only roads from thence lead to heaven or hell; the exit from the land
side is guarded by the Suliotes; even if he could fly he could not
escape from them.

The campaign is ended. The victorious Gaskho Bey proclaims himself
Pasha of Janina. The whole of Epirus does homage to him, and deserts
the fallen Vizier. In Stambul thanksgivings are offered up in the Ejub
mosque and the church of St. Sophia for the accomplished victory,
which is proclaimed, amidst the roaring of the cannons, by heralds in
the great market-place; and all the newspapers of Europe amazedly
report that the mighty and terrible adventurer, the ever-victorious
veteran of seventy-nine, the party-leader who grew to such a height
that it was doubtful whether he or the Sultan were the real ruler of
Turkey, the man who had been the ally of the great Napoleon, who a few
months before had sent as a present to England a precious
dinner-service of pure gold worth 30,000 thaler, who had heaped up
more treasures than any Eastern nabob--is suddenly crushed,
annihilated, shut up in a fortress! It now only remains for him to
die.

And not very long afterwards he did die. One night a couple of bold
Albanian horsemen descended the basti