The enemy lay in ambush everywhere. Every rock concealed an assailant. Every abyss enticed death. It was necessary to carry the mountain piece by piece, tree by tree, house by house. Booty and blood rendered the fanaticism of the Turks the more violent. The old men and children who fell into their clutches were pitilessly massacred, the women sold as slaves. As for the prisoners, there was none of them. The mountaineers, surrounded in their lairs, cut off in their last fortresses, perceived with horror that the fierce renown of the Ansaries was crumbling away. Mustapha Barbar ventured to attack one of those savage fortresses at the Kalaat el Kaf, which stood out like a defiance on a cluster of sharp-pointed rocks. Jealously the mountain concealed it, surrounded it, fondled it. For it, it sharpened its broken stones, it made denser its thickets. For it, it multiplied its traps, its slippery burrows, its deep ravines, its treacherous marches. All that Nature could invent to oppose to the march of man, she had lavished in its defiles. Three torrents defended the approach to it, and their beds were deadly and their high banks precipitous. Nevertheless, Mustapha Barbar, in traversing the bottom of the valley where the foot sank as in a pulp of slimy and poisonous toad-stools, evoked the clear-skinned and blonde Englishwoman, his lady. He took the fortress; he destroyed it from top to bottom and razed its ramparts. He violated the sacred tombs of the Assassins, throwing into the torrents the ashes of the Imans. It is then that the Tartar, bearer of the heads of the vanquished which had been despatched to Constantinople, returned in all haste with an order to put a stop to the butchery. Fifty-two villages burned. Three hundred Assassins massacred.... Lady Hester had been well avenged of Colonel Boutin! An illustrious traveller, Maurice Barrès, was, a century later, in the course of that marvellous _Enquête aux pays du Levant_, wherein are resuscitated all the "obscure life," all the "religious heart of Asia," to penetrate in his turn into the depths of the Ansaries Mountains. He looked for traces of Lady Hester, and he passed over the ruins of the Kalaat el Kaf without knowing their tragic secret. People murmured, afterwards, that the true authors of the crime had escaped; they were too powerful to be reached. No matter, the innocent had paid for the guilty. It was a form of Turkish justice of which Soliman rarely gave the example during his reign. Moreover, Lady Hester thanked him with that matchless grace which she knew how to display when she was pleased. France did not forget the part which the noble Englishwoman had taken in the affair of Colonel Boutin. After a speech from the Comte Delaborde, the Chamber of Deputies addressed to her its thanks, and assured her of the gratitude of the country. The _Courrier français_ devoted to her, in an article on Colonel Boutin, some moving lines: