CHAPTER VIII.
A TOPSY-TURVY WORLD.
Halil Patrona was already the master of Stambul.
The rebel leaders had assembled together in the central mosque, and from thence distributed their commands.
At the sixth hour (according to Christian calculation ten o'clock in the evening) the ship arrived bearing the Sultan, the princes, the magnates, and the sacred banner, and cast anchor beside the coast kiosk at the Gate of Cannons.
Inside the Seraglio none knew anything of the position of affairs. All through the city a great commotion prevailed with the blowing of horns, in the cemetery bivouac fires had been everywhere lighted.
"Why cannot I send a couple of grenades among them from the sea?" sighed the Kapudan Pasha, "that would quiet them immediately, I warrant."
As the Kizlar-Aga, Elhaj Beshir, came face to face with the newly arrived ministers in the ante-chamber where the Mantle of the Prophet was jealously guarded, he rubbed his hands together with an enigmatical smile which ill became his coarse, brutal countenance and cloven lips, and when the Padishah asked him what the rebels wanted, he replied that he really did not know.
That smile of his, that rubbing of the hands, which had been robbed of their thumbs by the savage cruelty of a former master for some piece of villainy or other—these things were premonitions of evil to all the officials present.