Anthony lost his prestige; that of Lady Hester increased in proportion. Tripoli, where Lady Hester occupied, for several months, an uninhabited convent of the Capuchins, had as military governor Mustafa Aga Barbar. Of very low origin, the son of a muleteer, he had, at the head of a band of resolute fellows, captured the fortress of the town by surprise. The people, who detested the janissaries, had risen in revolt with him, and a firman of the Porte confirmed him in the post which he had usurped, for in the East the strongest reason is always the best. He received Lady Hester with a homely simplicity which contrasted with the stiff politeness of the Turks. She made on him a lasting impression. In January 1815, Lady Hester returned to Mar-Elias. Scarcely had she alighted from her donkey than she received horrible news, brought back from Bairout by Beaudin: a Capugi Bachi had arrived, demanding her with hue and cry! Everyone knows that a Capugi Bachi does not come into a province except to give orders for strangulation, hanging, imprisonment and the bastinado, never for an agreeable object. Lady Hester smiled slyly and sent a pressing message to the Capugi Bachi, who arrived at the end of dinner. Beaudin and Meryon, who had decorated their girdles with pistols, regarded with a hostile eye this little man who came to disturb their digestion. They were far from expecting the reality. An attack of plague would have sufficed as occupation to the average woman; nevertheless, it was during her illness that Lady Hester drew up a plan of campaign around an old manuscript which had fallen by chance into her hands, and which indicated the site where fabulous riches had been concealed in the ruins of Sidon and Ascalon. Treasures? Nothing was impossible. In the East the inhabitants possess no certainty of preserving their property. Deprived of banks, deprived of paper-money easy to handle, subject to the arbitrary will of avaricious governors, living in the midst of perpetual wars and troubles--in twenty years Tripoli had been besieged five times and five times sacked--they have only one resource: a good and mysterious hiding-place, unknown to all and particularly to their women. Moreover, the people divided European travellers into three categories: exiles, spies and treasure-seekers. Lady Hester strongly suspected the Porte of laying a trap for her, but it was too dangerous to place herself in the first categories of foreigners, and she played the part of one who believed in the manuscript. A little time afterwards, she was to believe in it in reality and blindly.