, or
had been lashed to death, or had spikes hammered into their hands and
feet, or had incisions made in their noses through which strings were
passed, and by which they were led through the streets before the gaze of
an irate and derisive multitude.

This turmoil, so ravaging, so distressing, had hardly subsided when
another conflagration, even more devastating than the two previous
upheavals, was kindled in Zanjan and its immediate surroundings.
Unprecedented in both its duration and in the number of those who were
swept away by its fury, this violent tempest that broke out in the west of
Persia, and in which Mulla Muhammad-'Aliy-i-Zanjani, surnamed Hujjat, one
of the ablest and most formidable champions of the Faith, together with no
less than eighteen hundred of his fellow-disciples, drained the cup of
martyrdom, defined more sharply than ever the unbridgeable gulf that
separated the torchbearers of the newborn Faith from the civil and
ecclesiastical exponents of a gravely shaken Order. The chief figures
mainly responsible for, and immediately concerned with, this ghastly
tragedy were the envious and hypocritical Amir Arslan _Kh_an, the
Majdu'd-Dawlih, a maternal uncle of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, and his
associates, the Sadru'd-Dawliy-i-Isfahani and Muhammad _Kh_an, the
Amir-Tuman, who were assisted, on the one hand, by substantial military
reinforcements dispatched by order of the Amir-Nizam, and aided, on the
other, by the enthusiastic moral support of the entire ecclesiastical body
in Zanjan. The spot that became the theatre of heroic exertions, the scene
of intense sufferings, and the target for furious and repeated assaults,
was the Fort of 'Ali-Mardan _Kh_an, which at one time sheltered no less
than three thousand Babis, including men, women and children, the tale of
whose agonies is unsurpassed in the annals of a whole century.

A brief reference to certain outstanding features of this mournful
episode, endowing the Faith, in its infancy, with measureless
potentialities, will suffice to reveal its distinctive character. The
pathetic scenes following upon the division of the inhabitants of Zanjan
into two distinct camps, by the order of its governor--a decision
dramatically proclaimed by a crier, and which dissolved ties of worldly
interest and affection in favor of a mightier loyalty; the reiterated
exhortations addressed by Hujjat to the besieged to refrain from
aggression and acts of violence; his affirmation