others were not released. By night, he made his escape from the prison and went to the house of Riḍá
Khán—that rare and precious man, that star-sacrifice among the lovers of God—the son of Muḥammad
Khán, Master of the Horse to Muḥammad
Sháh. He stayed there for a time, after which he and Riḍá
Khán secretly rode away to the
Fort of Shaykh Tabarsí in Mázindarán.
1 Muḥammad
Khán sent riders after them to track them down, but try as they might, no one could find them. Those two horsemen got to the Fort of Tabarsí, where both of them won a martyr’s death. As for the other friends who were in the prison at
Ṭihrán, some of these were returned to Qazvín and they too suffered martyrdom.
One day the administrator of finance,
Mírzá Sháfí, called in the murderer and addressed him, saying: “Jináb, do you belong to a dervish order, or do you follow the Law? If you are a follower of the Law, why did you deal that learned mujtahid a cruel, a fatal blow in the mouth? If you are a dervish and follow the Path, one of the rules of the Path is to harm no man. How, then, could you slaughter that zealous divine?” “Sir,” he replied, “besides the Law, and besides the Path, we also have the Truth. It was in serving the Truth that I paid him for his deed.”
2These things would take place before the reality of this Cause was revealed and all was made plain. For in those days no one knew that the
Manifestation of
the Báb would culminate in the Manifestation of the
Blessed Beauty and that the law of retaliation would be done away with, and the foundation-principle of the Law of God would be this, that “It is better for you to be killed than to