of his heavy
footsteps, and perceiving his troubled face, plunged underneath their
bedclothes in terror; in front of the doors stood the dumb eunuch
sentries, leaning on their spears like so many bronze statues.

He rushed down into the garden to the end of the familiar walks, and
when he came to the gate was amazed to perceive that the drawbridge
which separated his palace from the dwellings of his sons had been let
down and nobody was guarding it. The topidshis, the negroes, knowing
that Ali always turned into his harem on the Feast of Bairam, had gone
across to the palace of Mukhtar Bey, who was giving a great banquet in
honor of Vely Bey and Sulaiman Bey, his brothers. All three had
brought together their harems to celebrate the occasion, and while the
masters were diverting themselves upstairs, their servants were making
merry below. Music and the loud mirth of those who feast resounded
from the house; every gate of the citadel was open; slaves and guards
lying dead drunk in heaps, victims of the forbidden fluid, cumbered
the streets. A whole hostile army, with drums beating and colors
flying, might easily have marched into the citadel over their
prostrate bodies.

Wrath and the cold night air gradually gave back to Ali his soul of
steel. Wary and alert, he entered the palace of Mukhtar Bey.

CHAPTER III

A TURKISH PARADISE

Ali Pasha himself had built the whole citadel of Janina, and had been
wise enough, as soon as the fortress was finished, to at once and
quietly remove out of the way all the builders and architects who had
had anything to do with it, so that he only knew all the secrets of
the place. There were secret exits and listening-galleries in every
part of the building, and each single group of redoubts which, viewed
from the outside, seemed quite isolated, was really so well connected
together by means of subterranean passages, that one could go backward
and forward from one to the other without being observed in the least.
At a later day Ali Pasha's enemies were to have very bitter experience
of these architectural peculiarities.

One could go right round the palace of the three Beys, both above and
below, by means of a secret corridor, and not one of the inhabitants
of the building had the least idea of the existence of this corridor.
It was in the midst of the fathom-thick wall between two rows of
windows, and within this space invisible doors opened into every
apartment, either betw