If Kamco had so strong a liking for Ali, it was because she found in him, not only her blood, but also her character.  During the lifetime of her husband, whom she feared, she seemed only an ordinary woman; but as soon as his eyes were closed, she gave free scope to the violent passions which agitated her bosom.  Ambitious, bold, vindictive, she assiduously cultivated the germs of ambition, hardihood, and vengeance which already strongly showed themselves in the young Ali.  “My son,” she was never tired of telling him, “he who cannot defend his patrimony richly deserves to lose it.  Remember that the property of others is only theirs so long as they are strong enough to keep it, and that when you find yourself strong enough to take it from them, it is yours.  Success justifies everything, and everything is permissible to him who has the power to do it.”

Ali, when he reached the zenith of his greatness, used to declare that his success was entirely his mother’s work.  “I owe everything to my mother,” he said one day to the French Consul; “for my father, when he died, left me nothing but a den of wild beasts and a few fields.  My imagination, inflamed by the counsels of her who has given me life twice over, since she has made me both a man and a vizier, revealed to me the secret of my destiny.  Thenceforward I saw nothing in Tepelen but the natal air from which I was to spring on the prey which I devoured mentally.  I dreamt of nothing else but power, treasures, palaces, in short what time has realised and still promises; for the point I have now reached is not the limit of my hopes.”

Kamco did not confine herself to words; she employed every means to increase the fortune of her beloved son and to make him a power.  Her first care was to poison the children of Veli’s favourite slave, who had died before him.  Then, at ease about the interior of her family, she directed her attention to the exterior.  Renouncing all the habit of her sex, she abandoned the veil and the distaff, and took up arms, under pretext of maintaining the rights of her children.  She collected round her her husband’s old partisans, whom she attached to her service, some by presents, others by various favours, and she gradually enlisted all the lawless and adventurous men in Toscaria.  With their aid, she made herself all powerful in Tepelen, and inflicted the most rigorous persecutions on such as remained hostile to her.

But the inhabitants of the two adjacent villages of Kormovo and Kardiki, fearing lest this terrible woman, aided by her son, now grown into a man, should strike a blow against their independence, made a secret alliance against her, with the object of putting her out of the way the first convenient opportunity.  Learning one day that Ali had started on a distant expedition with his best soldiers; they surprised Tepelen under cover of night, and carried off Kamco and her daughter Chainitza captives to Kardiki.  It was proposed