northerly of the three houses
lying to the west of, and adjacent to, the Mansion. His interment took
place shortly after sunset, on the very day of His ascension.

The inconsolable Nabil, who had had the privilege of a private audience
with Baha'u'llah during the days of His illness; whom 'Abdu'l-Baha had
chosen to select those passages which constitute the text of the Tablet of
Visitation now recited in the Most Holy Tomb; and who, in his
uncontrollable grief, drowned himself in the sea shortly after the passing
of his Beloved, thus describes the agony of those days: "Methinks, the
spiritual commotion set up in the world of dust had caused all the worlds
of God to tremble.... My inner and outer tongue are powerless to portray
the condition we were in.... In the midst of the prevailing confusion a
multitude of the inhabitants of Akka and of the neighboring villages, that
had thronged the fields surrounding the Mansion, could be seen weeping,
beating upon their heads, and crying aloud their grief."

For a full week a vast number of mourners, rich and poor alike, tarried to
grieve with the bereaved family, partaking day and night of the food that
was lavishly dispensed by its members. Notables, among whom were numbered
_Sh_i'ahs, Sunnis, Christians, Jews and Druzes, as well as poets, 'ulamas
and government officials, all joined in lamenting the loss, and in
magnifying the virtues and greatness of Baha'u'llah, many of them paying
to Him their written tributes, in verse and in prose, in both Arabic and
Turkish. From cities as far afield as Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut and Cairo
similar tributes were received. These glowing testimonials were, without
exception, submitted to 'Abdu'l-Baha, Who now represented the Cause of the
departed Leader, and Whose praises were often mingled in these eulogies
with the homage paid to His Father.

And yet these effusive manifestations of sorrow and expressions of praise
and of admiration, which the ascension of Baha'u'llah had spontaneously
evoked among the unbelievers in the Holy Land and the adjoining countries,
were but a drop when compared with the ocean of grief and the innumerable
evidences of unbounded devotion which, at the hour of the setting of the
Sun of Truth, poured forth from the hearts of the countless thousands who
had espoused His Cause, and were determined to carry aloft its banner in
Persia, India, Russia, 'Iraq, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt and Syria.

With the ascension of Bah