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Finally, Aurelian was able to cut off the city’s supply of provisions so that she and her people were compelled by starvation to surrender. She was not defeated in battle. Aurelian carried her captive to Rome. On the day of his entry into the city he arranged a triumphal processionfirst elephants, then lions, tigers, birds, monkeysand after the monkeys, Zenobia.

Two guns were brought in by Worth’s column and planted in position to batter down the San Cosmé gate, the barrier to the great square in the city’s centre, and which fronted the cathedral and palace. Quitman and Shields had to fight their way through as hot a fire, and as they charged inward found themselves before the citadel, mounting fifteen guns.

Instead, He was cast into the notorious Síyáh-Chál, theBlack Pit”, a deep, vermin-infested dungeon which had been created in one of the city’s abandoned reservoirs. No charges were laid but He and some thirty companions were, without appeal, kept immured in the darkness and filth of this pit, surrounded by hardened criminals, many of them under sentence of death.

Therefore, wherever Bahá’ís reside, they must, through the given city’s Spiritual Assembly, and bearing the signature of named individuals who are members of the elected body, inform the British authorities in Jerusalem, either by cable or letter sent through His Majesty’s ambassadors or consuls, that the Bahá’í community, in conformity with the explicit writings and the Will and Testament of His Eminence ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Sir Abbás Effendi, texts well known and available in His own handrecognize His Eminence Shoghi Effendi as the one to whom all Bahá’ís must turn, and as the Guardian of the Cause of God, and that they have no connection whatever, either material or spiritual, with Mírzá Muḥammad-Alí, whom they consider to be excommunicated from the Bahá’í Faith, according to the explicit writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon’s transparent light: The breath of the moist earth is light Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

And beyond this again the lofty ridge of the Quirinal mount stood out in fair relief with all its gorgeous load of palaces and columns; and the great temple of the city’s founder, the god Romulus Quirinus; and the stupendous range of walls and turrets, along its northern verge, flashing out splendidly to the new-risen sun.

Should the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction whose subversive principles they abhor, their forefathers of all preceding ages would protest against their base degeneracy; the children of the generations to come would curse their memory; all reflecting men of the present time would accuse them of black ingratitude,—ingratitude to the mighty dead among their Pontiffs, to whom they are indebted for their very name, their city’s fame, its honored State, its very existence in modern times; ingratitude, above all, to that ruler who offered them, who bestowed upon them, liberty, and who would have gladly rescued them in his day from tyranny,—the tyranny of faction,—even as his predecessors, in bygone times, snatched them from the cruel grasp of barbarism.

The blended sounds swept up, in a confused sonorous murmur, like the sea; the shrill cry of the water-carriers, and the wild chant of the choral songs, and the keen clangour of the distant trumpets ringing above the din, until the ears of the youth, as well as his eyes, were filled with present proofs of his native city’s grandeur; and his whole soul was lapped in the proud conscious joy, arising from the thought that he too was entitled to that boastful name, higher than any monarch’s style, of Roman citizen.

And so also if we followed the road which passes through Stein Thor, away across the leafy fringing of trees and shrubs which ornament the city’s outline; and still on through the shady avenues of youthful stems, when we come upon a great house with deep overhanging eaves, square-topped chimneys, and altogether with a Swiss air about it.