The Return from the Mountains

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald), drawn from the recollections the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum, gave of her childhood. The narrative is retold in our own words; the short lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for the original account.

She was only a little girl — perhaps eight years old — when her father went away.

Bahíyyih Khánum, who would one day be honored as the Greatest Holy Leaf, remembered those days all her life. In 1854, in Baghdád, Bahá'u'lláh withdrew quietly from the household and disappeared into the mountains of Kurdistán, telling no one where He had gone. He did it to still the discord that had grown up among the believers around Him; but to the small family He left behind, it simply meant that the heart of their home was suddenly, inexplicably, gone.

What followed were two years of hardship the child never forgot. Her mother, Ásíyih Khánum — born to wealth, raised in comfort — now drew the family's water herself, hauling it up from a deep well on rough ropes, hour after hour, her hands worn by the work. They were poor now, and often hungry. A baby brother fell ill, and a harsh houseguest forbade them from calling a doctor or seeking help; and the little one died. Through all of it the mother held the household together, and the children watched her bear the unbearable without bitterness.

And they waited. Two years of not knowing — whether He lived, whether He would ever come back, whether the silence would simply go on forever.

Then, at last, a thread. Travellers began to speak of a mysterious holy man living far off in the mountain district of Sulaymáníyyih — a dervish who would give no name, whose wisdom and love had quietly enchanted that whole region. The family heard of "The Nameless One," and their hearts leapt with a hope almost too painful to hold: could it be Him?

It was. Word was sent; and Bahá'u'lláh, in the rough garb of a dervish, came home.

Bahíyyih Khánum kept the picture of that homecoming for the rest of her days. Her mother stood to receive Him — not collapsing, not crying out, but, as the daughter remembered, calm and gentle, with the deep composure of a soul whose long trust had been answered. And her brother, the young 'Abbás — the future 'Abdu'l-Bahá — took His father's hand and held it fast, the child wrote, as though never again could he let him go.

Two years of poverty, of drawing water, of grief and uncertainty, gathered themselves into that single moment in the doorway and were transformed into joy. The family was whole again. And the little girl who had endured those years learned, young, the lesson that would carry her through a lifetime of exile and sacrifice still to come: that love can wait through the longest silence, and that what is given back to a patient heart is sweeter than anything the years of waiting took away.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted phrases are verbatim from The Chosen Highway (Lady Blomfield, George Ronald). See the source for the complete account.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway