"God preserve us! I must hasten to the Prince. Will not you come too?"
"I'll remain here," replied Teleki coolly. "We are in the hands of God wherever we may be, and when He calls me to Him I will account to Him for all that I have done."
The Princess ran along the winding corridor, and, finding her husband, took him down with her into the garden.
It was terrible to see from the outside how the vast building moved and twisted beneath the sinuous motion of the earth; every moment one might fear it would fall to pieces.
The Prince asked where Teleki was; the Princess said she had left him in her apartments.
"We must go for him this instant!" cried the Prince, but amongst all the trembling faces around him he could find none to listen to his words, for a man who fears nothing else is a coward in the presence of an earthquake.
Meanwhile the Minister was sitting quietly at a writing-table and writing a letter to Kara Mustafa, who had taken the place of the dead Kiuprile. He was a great warrior and the Sultan's right hand, who not long before had been invited by the Cossacks to help them against the Poles, which he did very thoroughly, first of all ravaging numerous Polish towns, and then, turning against his confederate Cossacks, he cut down a few hundred thousands of them and led thirty thousand more into captivity.
To him Teleki wrote for assistance for the Hungarians.
Every bit of furniture was shaking and tottering around him, the windows rattled noisily as if shaken by an ague, the very chair on which he sat rocked to and fro beneath him, and the writing-table bobbed up and down beneath his hand so that the pen ran away from the paper; but for all that he finished his letter, and when he came to the end of it he wrote at the bottom in firm characters:
"Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinæ!"