e like thee, to slay, year after
year, so many of the oppressed, and to inflict upon them manifold
afflictions, when they have increased a hundredfold, and ye find
yourselves in complete bewilderment, knowing not how to relieve your minds
of this oppressive thought. ...His Cause transcends any and every plan ye
devise. Know this much: Were all the governments on earth to unite and
take My life and the lives of all who bear this Name, this Divine Fire
would never be quenched. His Cause will rather encompass all the kings of
the earth, nay all that hath been created from water and clay.... Whatever
may yet befall Us, great shall be our gain, and manifest the loss
wherewith they shall be afflicted."

Pursuant to the peremptory orders issued for the immediate departure of
the already twice banished exiles, Baha'u'llah, His family, and His
companions, some riding in wagons, others mounted on pack animals, with
their belongings piled in carts drawn by oxen, set out, accompanied by
Turkish officers, on a cold December morning, amidst the weeping of the
friends they were leaving behind, on their twelve-day journey, across a
bleak and windswept country, to a city characterized by Baha'u'llah as
"the place which none entereth except such as have rebelled against the
authority of the sovereign." "They expelled Us," is His own testimony in
the Suriy-i-Muluk, "from thy city (Constantinople) with an abasement with
which no abasement on earth can compare." "Neither My family, nor those
who accompanied Me," He further states, "had the necessary raiment to
protect them from the cold in that freezing weather." And again: "The eyes
of Our enemies wept over Us, and beyond them those of every discerning
person." "A banishment," laments Nabil, "endured with such meekness that
the pen sheddeth tears when recounting it, and the page is ashamed to bear
its description." "A cold of such intensity," that same chronicler
records, "prevailed that year, that nonagenarians could not recall its
like. In some regions, in both Turkey and Persia, animals succumbed to its
severity and perished in the snows. The upper reaches of the Euphrates, in
Ma'dan-Nuqrih, were covered with ice for several days--an unprecedented
phenomenon--while in Diyar-Bakr the river froze over for no less than forty
days." "To obtain water from the springs," one of the exiles of Adrianople
recounts, "a great fire had to be lighted in their immediate neighborhood,
and kept burning f