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 Philosopher’s 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 Pasha, 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.

It was not enough for Ali merely to put to death those who displeased him, the form of punishment must be constantly varied in order to produce a fresh mode of suffering, therefore new tortures had to be constantly invented.  Now it was a servant, guilty of absence without leave, who was bound to a stake in the presence of his sister, and destroyed by a cannon placed six paces off, but only loaded with powder, in order to prolong the agony; now, a Christian accused of having tried to blow up Janina by introducing mice with tinder fastened to their tails into the powder magazine, who was shut up in the cage of Ali’s favourite tiger and devoured by it.

The pasha despised the human race as much as he hated it.  A European having reproached him with the cruelty shown to his subjects, Ali replied:—­

“You do not understand the race with which I have to deal.  Were I to hang a criminal on yonder tree, the sight would not deter even his own brother from stealing in the crowd at its foot.  If I had an old man burnt alive, his son would steal the ashes and sell them.  The rabble can be governed by fear only, and I am the one man who does it successfully.”