SALADIN: PRINCE OF (JHIVALRY after the example of Malek Shah, and the plans of the conspirators were revealed long before they could be put into effect. Their leader, the chief eunuch of the Palace, was caught at his summer house and promptly beheaded. All the negroes in the official life of Cairo, some fifty thousand, rose in open revolt, and there was fierce fighting in the open square between the Palace of the Caliph and that of the new Vizier, before the rebels were defeated. The echoes of this affair were to last some years and were heard in various parts of the country. After repeated severe punishments the blacks, too, decided they had found their master and ceased to agitate. Long before the rumblings of official recalcitrance had ceased, Saladin was deep in his ultimate purpose. The vision which had inspired him to overcome the defection of the emirs was expanding day by day. The control of Egypt soon became a minor matter. Already he saw himself moving on to a larger destiny. Somebody would have to carry on the splendid work of Zenghi and Nur ed-din, somebody whose personal ambition would be merged in the greater ambition to reclaim the patrimony of the Moslems and to plant the banner of the Prophet in all the holy places of Islam. And where was this heir to the mighty unless, indeed, it should turn out that he was the selected of God? Something of this far-seeing vision may have become apparent to Nur ed-din, still very much in the flesh, and hacking away continuously at the Franks, for his manner of addressing the new Vizier, as well as