As the discourse of the Mullah
came to an end a crash resounded throughout the building: six stalwart
swordsmen had flung the great gates of the mosque together, and barred all
exit. Excepting the conspirators, twenty-two in number, the remainder of
the edifice was filled with the galley's crews of the corsair, men who, had
he given the order, would have cheerfully set alight to the sacred building
itself and roasted the Mullahs themselves in the flames.
To the corsairs, after they were seated in the mosque, the word had been
passed that the Berber tribesmen had meditated this treachery against them,
which, had it succeeded, would have meant the death or enslavement of them
all. It was therefore a trap of a singularly deadly description into which
the countrymen of Selim Eutemi walked on this Friday morning.
The doors being closed, the conspirators were one by one dragged before
Uruj, who, bitterly reproaching them, gave order for their instant death.
They were haled out through rows of jeering pirates, and beheaded in the
street immediately in front of the principal entrance of the mosque. When
the slaughter of the twenty--two was accomplished Uruj strode from the
mosque over the weltering corpses of the traitors amid the plaudits of his
own men, ever ready to acclaim deeds of blood and cruelty. After this there
were no more plots against the corsair in Algiers. News of all these
desperate doings in Algiers had by this time filtered across into Spain,
and El Maestro Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval recounts how, when the
tidings came to Fray Francisco Ximenes, the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo,
that that prelate, much scandalised that the might of Imperial Spain should
be flouted by a mere pirate, sent Don Diego de Vera with some fifteen
thousand men to recapture the town, and relieve the beleaguered garrison in
the tower.
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