The Long Road Through the Snow

A retelling for children, based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, who wrote down the words of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf.

Many years later, when she was an old woman, Bahíyyih Khánum sat with a friend named Lady Blomfield and told her a story she had carried since she was a girl. It was a story about snow, and a very long road, and the winter her whole family had to leave their home.

She did not tell it because she wanted people to feel sorry for them. She told it because she wanted the friends who came after her to know — to know what her family had crossed, and how far they had come.

So here is what she remembered.

It was the middle of winter when the order came. The family was told to leave Persia and travel all the way to another land called Iraq, to a city named Baghdád. And they could not pack slowly or wait for spring or get ready in any careful way. The order was sharp and sudden: leave at once.

There was no time to gather warm coats. There was no time to find good boots, or pile up food for the road, or do any of the sensible things you would want to do before a long winter journey. Their home in Tihrán had already been taken from them. What little they had left did not include the heavy clothes a family needs to cross mountains in the snow.

And the road ahead was not a short one. It ran westward, up and over the high mountain passes, through the great white snowfields where the wind never seems to stop. There were no carriages — the passes were far too steep and narrow for wheels. So they went the only way they could: on horses, and on the backs of mules, step by careful step through the cold.

The journey would last three whole months.

The snow was deep, the children cried with the cold, and the road went on for three months.

Bahíyyih Khánum's mother was named Ásíyih Khánum, and she did everything a mother could think of to keep the little ones warm. She had no proper winter clothes to give them — so she wrapped them in whatever she could find. She tucked them into shawls. She borrowed blankets from neighbours at the very last moment, before they left. She even pulled the soft lining out of her own coat to wrap around the children. And the very youngest, a little boy named Mírzá Mihdí, she carried in her own arms the whole way.

Bahíyyih Khánum's brother was there too — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who was only eight years old that winter. He stayed close beside His father, Bahá'u'lláh, keeping near Him all along the road. But the cold and the hard travelling made Him sick. When His own legs grew too tired and too weak to walk any further, He was lifted up to ride on the pack-saddle of a mule, riding on through the deep snow.

The weather only got worse. In some places the road was so buried and so icy that it was almost impossible to pass at all. But there was nowhere to stop, and so on they went.

Years later, the one thing Bahíyyih Khánum remembered most was this. She remembered falling asleep on the back of her mother's horse, rocked by its slow steps. And then she would wake up — and find that nothing had changed. It was still dark. It was still snowing. And they were still moving forward, on and on, through the same long night.

At last, after three months on that frozen road, the family reached Baghdád. It was early in the springtime now.

But the family that arrived was not quite the same as the family that had set out. The children were thinner than before. Their parents looked older. All the comfortable things from their old life in Persia were gone, and they would not come back. Yet the most important things had made it through every mile of snow: they still had each other, and they still had their faith — and on that terrible road, that faith had been enough to carry them.

That is why Bahíyyih Khánum told the story at all. Some of the bravest journeys do not look like adventures. Sometimes being brave just means holding on — staying close to the people you love, putting one tired step after another, and not giving up, even when the road is long and the night is cold and you cannot yet see the end.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Journey from Tihrán to Baghdád, Winter 1853".

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.