All the way to the camp at Fülek he was the object of flattery and congratulation; the Hungarians gathered in troops beneath his banner, colonels and captains belauded him. As for the worthy Prince, he did not show himself at all, but sat in his tent and read his books, and when he felt tired he took his watch to pieces and put it together again.
At Fülek the Transylvanian army joined the camp of Kara Mustafa.
Teleki dressed up the Prince in his best robes, and trotted with him and his suite to the tent of the Grand Vizier with growing pride when he heard the guards blow their trumpets at their approach, and the Grand Vizier as a special favour admitted them straightway to his presence, allowed them to kiss his hand, made the magnates sit down, and praised them for their zeal and fidelity, giving each of them a new caftan; and when they were thus nicely tricked out, he dismissed them with an escort of an aga, a dragoman, and twelve cavasses to see the whole Turkish camp to their hearts' content.
Teleki regarded this permission as a very good omen. Turkish generals are wont to be very sensitive on this point, and it is a great favour on their part when they allow foreigners to view their camps.
The dragoman took the Hungarian gentlemen everywhere. He told them which aga was encamped on this hill and which on that, how many soldiers made up a squadron of horse, and how many guns, and how many lances were in every company. He pointed out to them the long pavilion made of deal boards in which the gunpowder lay in big heaps, and gigantic cannon balls were piled up into pyramids, and round mortars covered with pitchy cloths, and gigantic culverines, and siege-guns, and iron howitzers lay on wooden rollers. The accumulated war material would have sufficed for the conquest of the world.
The gentlemen sightseers returned to their tents with the utmost satisfaction, and, overjoyed at what he had seen, the Prince gave a great banquet, to which all the Hungarian gentlemen in his army were also invited. The tables were placed beneath a quickly-improvised baldachin; and at the end of an excellent dinner the noble feasters began to make merry, everyone at length saw his long-deferred hopes on the point of fulfilment, and none more so than Michael Teleki.
One toast followed another, and the healths of the Prince and of Teleki were interwoven with the healths of everyone else present, so that worthy Apafi began to think that it would really be a very good thing if he were King of Hungary, while Teleki held his head as high as if he were already sitting in the seat of the Palatine.
Just when the revellers were at their merriest, a loud burst of martial music resounded from the plain outside, and a great din was audible as if the Turkish armies were saluting a Prince who had just arrived.
The merry gentry at once leaped from their seats and hurried to the entrance of the tent to see the ally who was received with such rejoicing, and a cry of amazement and consternation burst from their lips at the spectacle which met their eyes.
Emeric Tököly had arrived at the head of a host of ten thousand Magyars from Upper Hungary. His army consisted of splendid picked warriors on horseback, hussars in gold-braided dolmans, wolf-skin pelisses, and shakos with falcon feathers. Tököly himself rode at the head of his host with princely pomp; his escort consisted of the first magnates of Hungary, jewel-bedizened cavaliers in fur mantles trimmed with swansdown, among whom Tököly himself was only conspicuous by his manly beauty and princely distinction.