From the minarets outside the muezzins proclaimed the prayer of dawn: "La illah il Allah! Muhammad razul Allah!"--"There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet!" * * * * * Ali Pasha did not pursue the fugitives. That day he was praying all the morning. He locked himself up in his inmost apartments, that nobody might see what he was doing. He now did what he had not done for seventy years--he wept. For a whole hour his inflexible soul was broken. So that woman whom he had loved better than life itself, she forsooth had given the first signal of approaching misfortune, the first sign of the coming struggle! Let it come! Let her veil be the first banner to lead an army against Janina! Tepelenti would not attempt to stay her in her flight. For one long hour he thought of her, and this hour was an hour of weeping; and then he bethought him of the approaching tempest which the prophetic voice had warned him of, and his heart turned to stone at the thought. Ali Pasha was not the man to cringe before danger; no, he was wont to meet it face to face, and ask of it why it had tarried so long. He used even to send occasionally for the _nimetullahita_ dervish who had been living a long time in the fortress, and question him concerning the future. It must not be supposed, indeed, that Tepelenti ever took advice from anybody; but he would listen to the words of lunatics and soothsayers, and liked to learn from magicians and astrologers, and their sayings were not without influence upon his actions. The dervish was a decrepit old man. Nobody knew how old he really was; it was said that only by magic did he keep himself alive at all. Every evening they laid him down on plates of copper and rubbed invigorating balsam into his withered skeleton, and so he lived on from day to day. Two dumb eunuchs now brought him in to Tepelenti, and, bending his legs beneath him, propped him up in front of the pasha. "Sikham," said Ali to the dervish, "I feel the approach of evil days. My sword rusted in its sheath in a single night. My buckler, which I covered with gold, has cracked from end to end. A severed head, which hid itself away from me so that I could not find it, came forth to me at night and spoke to me of my death; and in my dreams I see my sons make free with the Prophet. I ask thee not what all these things signify. That I know. Just as surely as in winter-time the hosts of rooks and crows resort to the roofs of the mosques, so surely shall my sworn enemies fall upon me. I am old compared with them, and it is a thing unheard of among the Osmanlis that a man should reach the age of nine and seventy and still be rich and mighty. Let them come! But one thing I would know--who will be the first to attack me? Tell me his name."