The satrap of Janina had arrived at the fulfilment of his wishes.  In the retirement of his fairy-like palace by the lake he could enjoy voluptuous pleasures to the full.  But already seventy-eight years had passed over his head, and old age had laid the burden of infirmity upon him.  His dreams were dreams of blood, and vainly he sought refuge in chambers glittering with gold, adorned with arabesques, decorated with costly armour and covered with the richest of Oriental carpets; remorse stood ever beside him.  Through the magnificence which surrounded him there constantly passed the pale spectre of Emineh, leading onwards a vast procession of mournful phantoms, and the guilty pacha buried his face in his hands and shrieked aloud for help.  Sometimes, ashamed of his weakness, he endeavoured to defy both the reproaches of his conscience and the opinion of the multitude, and sought to encounter criticism with bravado.  If, by chance, he overheard some blind singer chanting in the streets the satirical verses which, faithful to the poetical and mocking genius of their ancestors, the Greeks frequently composed about him, he would order the singer to be brought, would bid him repeat his verses, and, applauding him, would relate some fresh anecdote of cruelty, saying, “Go, add that to thy tale; let thy hearers know what I can do; let them understand that I stop at nothing in order to overcome my foes!  If I reproach myself with anything, it is only with the deeds I have sometimes failed to carry out.”

Sometimes it was the terrors of the life after death which assailed him.  The thought of eternity brought terrible visions in its train, and Ali shuddered at the prospect of Al-Sirat, that awful bridge, narrow as a spider’s thread and hanging over the furnaces of Hell which a Mussulman must cross in order to arrive at the gate of Paradise.  He ceased to joke about Eblis, the Prince of Evil, and sank by degrees into profound superstition.  He was surrounded by magicians and soothsayers; he consulted omens, and demanded talismans and charms from the dervishes, which he had either sewn into his garments, or suspended in the most secret parts of his palace, in order to avert evil influences.  A Koran was hung about his neck as a defence against the evil eye, and frequently he removed it and knelt before it, as did Louis XI before the leaden figures of saints which adorned his hat.  He ordered a complete chemical laboratory from Venice, and engaged alchemists to distill the water of immortality, by the help of which he hoped to ascend to the planets and discover the Philosophers’ Stone.  Not perceiving any practical result of their labours, he ordered the laboratory to be burnt and the alchemists to be hung.

Ali hated his fellow-men.  He would have liked to leave no survivors, and often regretted his inability to destroy all those who would have cause to rejoice at his death.  Consequently he sought to accomplish as much harm as he could during the time which remained to him, and, for no possible reason but that of hatred, he caused the arrest of both Ibrahim pacha, who had already suffered so much at his hands, and his son, and confined them both in a dungeon purposely constructed under the grand staircase of the castle by the lake, in order that he might have the pleasure of passing over their heads each time he left his apartments or returned to them.