home to England and
try to get well again. He started out on horseback with two Armenian
servants and a Turkish guide. He was making along the old track that
has been the road from Asia to Europe for thousands of years. His plan
was to travel across Persia, through Armenia and over the Black Sea to
Constantinople, and so back to England.

For forty-five days he moved on, often going as much as ninety miles,
and generally as much as sixty in a day. He slept in filthy inns where
fleas and lice abounded and mosquitoes tormented him. Horses, cows,
buffaloes and sheep would pass through his sleeping-room, and the
stench of the stables nearly poisoned him. Yet he was so ill that
often he could hardly keep his seat on his horse.

He travelled through deep ravines and over high mountain passes and
across vast plains. His head ached till he felt it would split; he
could not eat; fever came on. He shook with ague. Yet his remorseless
Turkish guide, Hassan, dragged him along, because he wanted to get the
journey over and go back home.

At last one day Martyn got rest on damp ground in a hovel, his eyes
and forehead feeling as though a great fire burnt in them. "I was
almost frantic," he wrote. Martyn was, in fact, dying; yet Hassan
compelled him to ride a hundred and seventy miles of mountain track to
Tokat. Here, on October 6th, 1812, he wrote in his journal:

"No horses to be had, I had an unexpected repose. I sat in the orchard
and thought with sweet comfort and peace of my God--in solitude my
Company, my Friend, my Comforter."

It was the last word he was ever to write.

Alone, without a human friend by him, he fell asleep. But the book
that he had written with his life-blood, the Persian New Testament,
was printed, and has told thousands of Persians in far places, where
no Christian man has penetrated, that story of the love of God that is
shown in Jesus Christ.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 62: See Chapter XXIII.]

CHAPTER XXV

THE MOSES OF THE ASSYRIANS

_William Ambrose Shedd_

(1865-1918)

I

A dark-haired American with black, penetrating eyes that looked you
steadily in the face, and sparkled with light when he laughed, sat on
a chair in a hall in 1918 in the ancient city of Urumia in the land of
Assyria where Persia and Turkey meet.

His face was as brown with the sunshine of this eastern land as were
the wrinkled faces of the turbaned Assyrian village men who stood
before him. For he was born out