day of his death. His accomplice, Mirza Na'im, fell into disgrace, was
twice heavily fined, dismissed from office, and subjected to exquisite
tortures. The regiment which, scorning the miracle that warned Sam _Kh_an
and his men to dissociate themselves from any further attempt to destroy
the life of the Bab, volunteered to take their place and riddled His body
with its bullets, lost, in that same year, no less than two hundred and
fifty of its officers and men, in a terrible earthquake between Ardibil
and Tabriz; two years later the remaining five hundred were mercilessly
shot in Tabriz for mutiny, and the people, gazing on their exposed and
mutilated bodies, recalled their savage act, and indulged in such
expressions of condemnation and wonder as to induce the leading mujtahids
to chastise and silence them. The head of that regiment, Aqa Jan Big, lost
his life, six years after the Bab's martyrdom, during the bombardment of
Muhammarih by the British naval forces.

The judgment of God, so rigorous and unsparing in its visitations on those
who took a leading or an active part in the crimes committed against the
Bab and His followers, was not less severe in its dealings with the mass
of the people--a people more fanatical than the Jews in the days of Jesus--a
people notorious for their gross ignorance, their ferocious bigotry, their
willful perversity and savage cruelty, a people mercenary, avaricious,
egotistical and cowardly. I can do no better than quote what the Bab
Himself has written in the Dala'il-i-Sab'ih (Seven Proofs) during the last
days of His ministry: "Call thou to remembrance the early days of the
Revelation. How great the number of those who died of cholera! That was
indeed one of the prodigies of the Revelation, and yet none recognized it!
During four years the scourge raged among _Sh_i'ah Muslims without any one
grasping its significance!" "As to the great mass of its people (Persia),"
Nabil has recorded in his immortal narrative, "who watched with sullen
indifference the tragedy that was being enacted before their eyes, and who
failed to raise a finger in protest against the hideousness of those
cruelties, they fell, in their turn, victims to a misery which all the
resources of the land and the energy of its statesmen were powerless to
alleviate.... From the very day the hand of the assailant was stretched
forth against the Bab ... visitation upon visitation crushed the spirit
out of that ungrateful people