Pursuant to the peremptory orders issued for the immediate
departure of the already twice banished exiles, Bahá'u'lláh, His family, and
His companions, some riding in wagons, others mounted on pack animals, with
their belongings piled in carts drawn by oxen, set out, accompanied by Turkish
officers, on a cold December morning, amidst the weeping of the friends they
were leaving behind, on their twelve-day journey, across a bleak and windswept
country, to a city characterized by Bahá'u'lláh as "the place which none
entereth except such as have rebelled against the authority of the
sovereign." "They expelled Us," is His own testimony in the
Suriy-i-Mulúk, "from thy city (Constantinople) with an abasement with
which no abasement on earth can compare." "Neither My family, nor
those who accompanied Me," He further states, "had the necessary
raiment to protect them from the cold in that freezing weather." And
again: "The eyes of Our enemies wept over Us, and beyond them those of
every discerning person." "A banishment," laments Nabil,
"endured with such meekness that the pen sheddeth tears when recounting
it, and the page is ashamed to bear its description." "A cold of such
intensity," that same chronicler records, "prevailed that year, that
nonagenarians could not recall its like. In some regions, in both Turkey and
Persia, animals succumbed to its severity and perished in the snows. The upper
reaches of the Euphrates, in Ma'dan-Nuqrih, were covered with ice for several
days -- an unprecedented phenomenon -- while in Diyar-Bakr the river froze over
for no less than forty days." "To obtain water from the
springs," one of the exiles of Adrianople recounts, "a great fire had
to be lighted in their immediate neighborhood, and kept burning for a couple of
hours before they thawed out."
Traveling through rain and storm, at times even making night
marches, the weary travelers, after brief halts at Kuchik-Chakmachih,
Buyuk-Chakmachih, Salvari, Birkas, and Baba-Iski, arrived at their destination,
on the first of Rajab 1280 A.H. (December 12, 1863)
- Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’)
