She did all this while Gorlias was gone, and before he came back the afternoon was half over, though the spring days were growing long. He told her that the Tartar was safe in his quarters, where he would probably sleep till midnight at the very least, to the infinite rage and disgust of his men. They had expected him to return laden with gold or with the secure promise of it, and he had come back not only empty-handed, but hopelessly drunk; and as they knew him well, but did not know that he had swallowed a dose of opium that would have sent a tiger to sleep, they meditated in gloomy thirst on the quantity of strong wine he must have absorbed during an absence which had only lasted two hours. What he had told Zoë of their coming to fetch him if he stayed too long had been a pure invention to frighten her; they did not even know where he had been, for he had merely announced his intention of going out to collect Zeno's ransom from the Venetian merchants, and his reputation for strength and ferocity was such that they had not dreamed of his needing help. Thus much Gorlias had found out, and he had also ascertained that the men were in a thoroughly bad temper in consequence of the turn affairs had taken, and much more inclined to murder Zeno than to let him out. As for his whereabouts, Gorlias only knew that he was in one of the many dry cisterns, which existed under old Constantinople, and which had never been in use since the crusaders had cut the aqueducts and sacked the city more than a hundred and seventy years earlier. The men who had shut up Zeno knew where he was, but it was very likely that they had not told their comrades. In those last days of the Empire the foreign mercenaries were little better than bands of robbers, half-trained at that, who preyed on the peasant part of the population, obeying their officers only when it was worth the trouble, and not even practising thieves' honour in the division of plunder. Not a day passed then without brawl and bloodshed amongst the soldiery; hardly a night went by without some act of violence and depredation for which they were responsible. They had stolen under Johannes, they robbed under Andronicus; under Johannes restored, they would steal again. And they drank perpetually. If Sultan Amurad had been the man that Mohammed the Conqueror turned out to be, the Turks would have been in possession of Constantinople fully eighty years before they actually stormed it, and with a tenth of the loss.