His banishment to that prison-city, has written, "that upon
Our arrival at this Spot, We chose to designate it as the 'Most Great
Prison.' Though previously subjected in another land (Tihran) to chains
and fetters, We yet refused to call it by that name. Say: Ponder thereon,
O ye endued with understanding!"

The ordeal He endured, as a direct consequence of the attempt on the life
of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, was one which had been inflicted upon Him solely
by the external enemies of the Faith. The travail in Adrianople, the
effects of which all but sundered the community of the Bab's followers,
was, on the other hand, purely internal in character. This fresh crisis
which, during almost a decade, agitated Him and His companions, was,
however, marked throughout not only by the assaults of His adversaries
from without, but by the machinations of enemies from within, as well as
by the grievous misdeeds of those who, though bearing His name,
perpetrated what made His heart and His pen alike to lament.

Akka, the ancient Ptolemais, the St. Jean d'Acre of the Crusaders, that
had successfully defied the siege of Napoleon, had sunk, under the Turks,
to the level of a penal colony to which murderers, highway robbers and
political agitators were consigned from all parts of the Turkish empire.
It was girt about by a double system of ramparts; was inhabited by a
people whom Baha'u'llah stigmatized as "the generation of vipers"; was
devoid of any source of water within its gates; was flea-infested, damp
and honey-combed with gloomy, filthy and tortuous lanes. "According to
what they say," the Supreme Pen has recorded in the Lawh-i-Sultan, "it is
the most desolate of the cities of the world, the most unsightly of them
in appearance, the most detestable in climate, and the foulest in water.
It is as though it were the metropolis of the owl." So putrid was its air
that, according to a proverb, a bird when flying over it would drop dead.

Explicit orders had been issued by the Sultan and his ministers to subject
the exiles, who were accused of having grievously erred and led others far
astray, to the strictest confinement. Hopes were confidently expressed
that the sentence of life-long imprisonment pronounced against them would
lead to their eventual extermination. The farman of Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz,
dated the fifth of Rabi'u'_th_-_Th_ani 1285 A.H. (July 26, 1868), not only
condemned them to perpetual banishment, but stipulated their strict