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On the evening of the very day of the Bab's execution, which fell on the ninth of July 1850 (28th of Sha'ban 1266 A.H.), during the thirty- first year of His age and the seventh of His ministry, the mangled bodies were transferred from the courtyard of the barracks to the edge of the moat outside the gate of the city. Four companies, each consisting of ten sentinels, were ordered to keep watch in turn over them. On the following morning the Russian Consul in Tabriz visited the spot, and ordered the artist who had accompanied him to make a drawing of the remains as they lay beside the moat. In the middle of the following night a follower of the Bab, Haji Sulayman Khan, succeeded, through the instrumentality of a certain Haji Allah- Yar, in removing the bodies to the silk factory owned by one of the believers of Milan, and laid them, the next day, in a specially made wooden casket, which he later transferred to a place of safety. Meanwhile the mullas were boastfully proclaiming from the pulpits that, whereas the holy body of the Immaculate Imam would be preserved from beasts of prey and from all creeping things, this man's body had been devoured by wild animals. No sooner had the news of the transfer of the remains of the Bab and of His fellow- sufferer been communicated to Baha'u'llah than He ordered that same Sulayman Khan to bring them to Tihran, where they were taken to the Imam- Zadih- Hasan, from whence they were removed to different places, until the time when, in pursuance of Abdu'l- Baha's instructions, they were transferred to the Holy Land, and were permanently and ceremoniously laid to rest by Him in a specially erected mausoleum on the slopes of Mt. Carmel. (54:1) Thus ended a life which posterity will recognize as standing at the confluence of two universal prophetic cycles, the Adamic Cycle stretching back as far as the first dawnings of the world's recorded religious history and the Baha'i Cycle destined to propel itself across the unborn reaches of time for a period of no less than five thousand centuries. The apotheosis in which such a life attained its consummation marks, as already observed, the culmination of the most heroic phase of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i Dispensation. It can, moreover, be regarded in no other light except as the most dramatic, the most tragic event transpiring within the entire range of the first Baha'i century. Indeed it can be rightly acclaimed as unparalleled in the annals of the lives of all the Founders of the world's existing religious systems.
(54:2)
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