Cause;
the interception of these messages by the governor and the substitution by
him of forged letters loaded with abuse which he dispatched in their stead
to Tihran; the enthusiastic support extended by the female occupants of
the Fort, the shouts of exultation which they raised, the eagerness with
which some of them, disguised in the garb of men, rushed to reinforce its
defences and to supplant their fallen brethren, while others ministered to
the sick, and carried on their shoulders skins of water for the wounded,
and still others, like the Carthaginian women of old, cut off their long
hair and bound the thick coils around the guns to reinforce them; the foul
treachery of the besiegers, who, on the very day they had drawn up and
written out an appeal for peace and, enclosing with it a sealed copy of
the Qur'an as a testimony of their pledge, had sent it to Hujjat, did not
shrink from throwing into a dungeon the members of the delegation,
including the children, which had been sent by him to treat with them,
from tearing out the beard of the venerated leader of that delegation, and
from savagely mutilating one of his fellow-disciples. We call to mind,
moreover, the magnanimity of Hujjat who, though afflicted with the sudden
loss of both his wife and child, continued with unruffled calm in
exhorting his companions to exercise forbearance and to resign themselves
to the will of God, until he himself succumbed to a wound he had received
from the enemy; the barbarous revenge which an adversary incomparably
superior in numbers and equipment wreaked upon its victims, giving them
over to a massacre and pillage, unexampled in scope and ferocity, in which
a rapacious army, a greedy populace and an unappeasable clergy freely
indulged; the exposure of the captives, of either sex, hungry and
ill-clad, during no less than fifteen days and nights, to the biting cold
of an exceptionally severe winter, while crowds of women danced merrily
around them, spat in their faces and insulted them with the foulest
invectives; the savage cruelty that condemned others to be blown from
guns, to be plunged into ice-cold water and lashed severely, to have their
skulls soaked in boiling oil, to be smeared with treacle and left to
perish in the snow; and finally, the insatiable hatred that impelled the
crafty governor to induce through his insinuations the seven year old son
of Hujjat to disclose the burial-place of his father, that drove him to
viol