venting him.

And lo! it seemed to those who stood round as if the severed head
slowly opened its eyes and looked upon the new-comer with cold, stony,
stiff, dim eyeballs. This only lasted for a moment, and then the
Omarite took his hand off the head and the eyes closed again. Perhaps
it was but an illusion, after all!

Then the dervish spoke. His deep, grave voice sank into the hearts of
all who heard him: "Go to Mahmoud, and tell him that I have bought
from him the head of Ali Pasha and the heads of his three sons,
Sulaiman, Vely, and Mukhtar, and a whole empire is the price I pay him
therefor."

"What empire art thou able to give?" inquired the captain of the
ciauses who were guarding the head.

"That which is the fairest of all, that which is nearest to his heart,
that which he had the least hope of--his own empire."

These bold words were reported to the Sultan, and the Grand Signior
summoned the Omarite dervish to the palace, and shut himself up alone
with him till late at night. When the muezzin intoned the fifth
namazat, towards midnight, Mahmoud dismissed the dervish. What they
said to each other remained a secret known only to themselves. The
fakir, on emerging from the Sultan's dressing-room, plucked a piece of
coal from a censer, and wrote on the white alabaster wall this
sentence, "Rather be a head without a hand than a hand without a
head," and nobody but the Sultan understood that saying.

Mahmoud commanded that nine purses of gold should be given to the
dervish; he gave him also the heads of Ali and of Ali's three sons.

The dervish left the Seraglio with the four heads and the nine
purses. With the nine purses he bought an empty field in front of the
Selembrian gate and planted it with cypress-trees, and at the foot of
every cypress he set up a white turbaned tombstone--there were
hundreds and hundreds side-by-side without inscriptions. He said, too,
that it would not be long before the owners of these tombs arrived. In
the middle of this cemetery, moreover, he dug a wide grave, and in it
he buried the heads of Ali's three sons, with their father's head in
the middle. He erected four turbaned tombstones over them, two at the
head and two at the foot of the grave, and on the largest of these
tombstones was written: "Here lies the valiant Ali Tepelenti, Pasha of
Janina, leaving behind him many other warriors who deserve death just
as much as he."

The people murmured because of what was written