But did he really believe it?
On the same day that Dirham quitted Adrianople, a fakir of the Nimetullahita Order penetrated into the Seraglio and demanded an audience of the Sultan. It was the self-same old soothsayer who had exhibited his enchantments to Ali.
On being admitted to the presence of Mahmoud, he stood audaciously upright before him, bending his head no lower than it was already crooked by the weight of years.
"Allah hath sent me to thee," said the dervish, in a deep, hollow voice, which had lost all its sonorousness. "A great danger is approaching thee. The storm hanging over thy head is at this moment compressed within the skin of an egg, and thou couldst crush it in the palm of thy hand; but if thou dost suffer it to come forth from the egg, thy whole realm will not be sufficient to contain it. This, therefore, is the word of Allah unto thee: This day and this night, and to-morrow and to-morrow night, stop every vessel which sails up the narrow waters of the Golden Horn and search them, and whenever thy guards come upon an egg, let them seize it and bring it to thee; for amongst them are diverse cockatrice eggs which, if once they be hatched, will swallow up both thee and thy realm."
Having said these words, the dervish turned him about, and without so much as saluting the Padishah, without even taking off his slippers before him, he withdrew, not even asking for a reward.
The Sultan was profoundly impressed by this audacity. He immediately sent orders to the wardens of the two watch-towers at the entrance of the Golden Horn to board and search thoroughly every vessel that passed between them, seize every egg they found on board and bring them to him, at the same time detaining all the crews of such vessels.
Fate so willed it that Dirham's was the first vessel that fell into the hands of the searchers.
When the unfortunate servant perceived that the guards seized the eggs, he leaped into the sea, and although he was a good swimmer, he allowed himself to be suffocated in the water lest he should be compelled to betray his masters.
The eggs they carried to the Sultan, and when he had opened them and had read the writing written on their inner skins, he was horrified. Treachery and rebellion! The conspiracy was spreading from one end of the empire to the other. The complicated intrigue, one of whose threads was in Janina and the other in the islands of the Archipelago, had its third in the very capital. This called for terrible reprisals.
The beys were seized the same night in the midst of their joys, and dragged from the paradise of their hopes to be thrown into a dungeon.