n, the native province
of Baha'u'llah, and brought about in its wake, the confiscation, the
plunder and the destruction of all His possessions. In the village of
Takur, in the district of Nur, His sumptuously furnished home, inherited
from His father, was, by order of Mirza Abu-Talib _Kh_an, nephew of the
Grand Vizir, completely despoiled, and whatever could not be carried away
was ordered to be destroyed, while its rooms, more stately than those of
the palaces of Tihran, were disfigured beyond repair. Even the houses of
the people were leveled with the ground, after which the entire village
was set on fire.

The commotion that had seized Tihran and had given rise to the campaign of
outrage and spoliation in Mazindaran spread even as far as Yazd, Nayriz
and _Sh_iraz, rocking the remotest hamlets, and rekindling the flames of
persecution. Once again greedy governors and perfidious subordinates vied
with each other in despoiling the innocent, in massacring the guiltless,
and in dishonoring the noblest of their race. A carnage ensued which
repeated the atrocities already perpetrated in Nayriz and Zanjan. "My
pen," writes the chronicler of the bloody episodes associated with the
birth and rise of our Faith, "shrinks in horror in attempting to describe
what befell those valiant men and women.... What I have attempted to
recount of the horrors of the siege of Zanjan ... pales before the glaring
ferocity of the atrocities perpetrated a few years later in Nayriz and
_Sh_iraz." The heads of no less than two hundred victims of these
outbursts of ferocious fanaticism were impaled on bayonets, and carried
triumphantly from _Sh_iraz to Abadih. Forty women and children were
charred to a cinder by being placed in a cave, in which a vast quantity of
firewood had been heaped up, soaked with naphtha and set alight. Three
hundred women were forced to ride two by two on bare-backed horses all the
way to _Sh_iraz. Stripped almost naked they were led between rows of heads
hewn from the lifeless bodies of their husbands, sons, fathers and
brothers. Untold insults were heaped upon them, and the hardships they
suffered were such that many among them perished.

Thus drew to a close a chapter which records for all time the bloodiest,
the most tragic, the most heroic period of the first Baha'i century. The
torrents of blood that poured out during those crowded and calamitous
years may be regarded as constituting the fertile seeds of that World
Or