The Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel: Gregory's Visit

In *A Heavenly Vista* Louis George Gregory devotes a short chapter to his visit, in April 1911, to the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel. The Shrine had been completed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá only two years previously — a low, plain stone building set into the slope of the mountain, with no dome, no colonnade, none of the marble splendour that would in time be added by the future Guardian.

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Gregory ascended the slope, the booklet records, in a small party of believers — Persian and Western pilgrims together. The day was clear; the bay of Haifa lay below; the wind off the Mediterranean carried the smell of pine. The path was rough.

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He arrived, with the others, at the small door. He removed his shoes. He entered the chamber.

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The chamber, the booklet records, was very plain. The walls were of unornamented stone. The floor was covered with a rough matting; a small lamp hung from the ceiling. At one end stood the carved threshold-stone behind which the remains of the Báb had been laid. The whole was of perhaps ten feet in width and fifteen in length.

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> I stood in the small chamber of the Shrine, a long way from > Charleston, and the silence was the loudest thing I have ever > heard.

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The party stood. Some of the Persian believers chanted, in low voices, prayers in Arabic. Gregory could not understand the words; he was, however, able to follow the shape of the prayers from the cadence. He stood with his head bowed.

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He was conscious, the booklet preserves, of the geography he had crossed to be there. He had been raised in Charleston, the son of a man who had been emancipated from slavery only a generation before. He had been educated in the South against considerable obstacle. He had been admitted to the practice of law in Washington in a country whose laws and customs were arrayed against the dignity of his people. He stood, that morning, an African American Bahá’í, in the chamber of the Persian Herald of a worldwide Cause.

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The crossing, Gregory writes, did not in that hour feel strange to him. It felt, on the contrary, exactly right. The Cause that had sent for him from his Washington office, that had brought him across the Atlantic, that had received him in Alexandria and conducted him to Mount Carmel, was the Cause that recognised, in any chamber of any race, the same single human soul. The Shrine of the Báb, Gregory writes, made the recognition explicit.

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The Persian dust that lay behind the threshold-stone and the African dust that lay in his own veins were, in the Cause's understanding, the dust of one creation.

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He left the chamber, the booklet ends, with his shoes in his hand and his face quietly wet, and walked back down the slope of Mount Carmel toward the bay.

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