removed from human
habitations that only twice a year, at seed sowing and harvest time, it
was visited by the peasants of that region. Alone and undisturbed, He
passed a considerable part of His retirement on the top of that mountain
in a rude structure, made of stone, which served those peasants as a
shelter against the extremities of the weather. At times His
dwelling-place was a cave to which He refers in His Tablets addressed to
the famous _Sh_ay_kh_ 'Abdu'r-Rahman and to Maryam, a kinswoman of His. "I
roamed the wilderness of resignation" He thus depicts, in the
Lawh-i-Maryam, the rigors of His austere solitude, "traveling in such wise
that in My exile every eye wept sore over Me, and all created things shed
tears of blood because of My anguish. The birds of the air were My
companions and the beasts of the field My associates." "From My eyes," He,
referring in the Kitab-i-Iqan to those days, testifies, "there rained
tears of anguish, and in My bleeding heart surged an ocean of agonizing
pain. Many a night I had no food for sustenance, and many a day My body
found no rest.... Alone I communed with My spirit, oblivious of the world
and all that is therein."

In the odes He revealed, whilst wrapped in His devotions during those days
of utter seclusion, and in the prayers and soliloquies which, in verse and
prose, both in Arabic and Persian, poured from His sorrow-laden soul, many
of which He was wont to chant aloud to Himself, at dawn and during the
watches of the night, He lauded the names and attributes of His Creator,
extolled the glories and mysteries of His own Revelation, sang the praises
of that Maiden that personified the Spirit of God within Him, dwelt on His
loneliness and His past and future tribulations, expatiated upon the
blindness of His generation, the perfidy of His friends and the perversity
of His enemies, affirmed His determination to arise and, if needs be,
offer up His life for the vindication of His Cause, stressed those
essential pre-requisites which every seeker after Truth must possess, and
recalled, in anticipation of the lot that was to be His, the tragedy of
the Imam Husayn in Karbila, the plight of Muhammad in Mecca, the
sufferings of Jesus at the hands of the Jews, the trials of Moses
inflicted by Pharaoh and his people and the ordeal of Joseph as He
languished in a pit by reason of the treachery of His brothers. These
initial and impassioned outpourings of a Soul struggling to unburden