The Bahá’í World
Volume 2 : 1926-1928
130THE BAHÁ’Í WORLD 
Bahjí (the home of Bahá’u’lláh) or to the Garden of the Ridván connected with it. The pilgrim house at Bahjí is primitive and unforgetable. Opening on a small court-yard with a vivid patch of grass, one graceful lemon tree full of pale fruit, the stable to one side, the kitchen to the other, the doors wide and deep, is the room where we sit at breakfast; and the birds seem to prefer this big room to high heaven, for they are incessantly darting in and out. Horses are evidently too valuable to be put in stables with outside openings. So Soheil Effendi must ride his Arabian stallion through the dining-room each morning to the grassy plain! ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s white donkey and her foal continue the procession. Then breakfast : Yad’u’lláh, the care-taker of the house presiding at his shining samovar, everyone having hot tea, olives cured in oil, goat’s milk cheese, the flat cakes of bread split and toasted, Syrian honey, and for the Occidentals, oranges picked as needed in this vicinity.
Venus is the evening star. I sit solitary on the steps of the quaint old pilgrim house, entranced with her magical beauty: in this latitude and through this atmosphere she is bright enough to cast a shadow and light seems incessantly to brim up and overflow the beaker of her brilliance. The minarets of ‘Akká pierce a rose and saffron sky; the Mediterranean is still a precious blue. Twilight encroaches; the silence is vaster than any sound; something at the base of one’s soul stirs like an unsuspected Titan, buried for centuries beneath mountains of artificiality and compromise—the eternal quest, the divine adventure, the incessant surge of the soul toward something too magnificent for comprehension, too ecstatic for words. Suddenly, with a crash, the dome of silence is shattered by the uncanny laugh of the jackals. Elisha must have heard them here, and the priests of Baal whose prayers were no more effective than this call of wild beasts. Their sudden silence seems to leave a vacuum. A few vagrant stars appear, and silhouetted against the sky the camel caravans move slowly up the coast to Tyre. Now the shepherds on two distant hills start piping to their flocks, a plaintive, poignant testimony, like all Oriental music, to the ineffable home-sickness of the soul. The moon swims up, pale to virginity; no such robust moon as we know in the early evening. Then, and as from the portal of paradise a mystical beautiful chant arises. It is the voice of a woman, broken with sobs, tragic with longing, rich in praise; and as I listen to her heart-breaking, exalting song, it seems to me that it is rising from the lips of every woman in the world: the essence and epitome of all that ever loved and suffered. It is Laila, the cook, who in her humility has not even entered the Shrine, but is kneeling on the garden path outside. Surely in her reverence, her obedience, her lowliness, her longing, she carries up to God, in that beatific wail, something of the desire of our tortured hearts to reach Him. The wide beds of stock begin to loose their fragrance with the coming up of night, mingling with rose and jasmine. Laila passes me alert and smiling, restored completely by her abandonment to the Spirit. This is a sleight-of-hand which men seldom experience.
What soul is ample enough to house both Love and Wisdom? Love a prodigal expenditure of Life’s mysterious energy: Wisdom a discriminating choice of Life’s subtlest values. Just as some creatures are born to burrow underground and others to sing a kindred soul out to the face of the sun, so some beings are predestined by an alchemical pinch of heavenly leaven to this unconquerable yearning that knows no rest so long as one unloving thing is left on earth. It was for this indeed that Bahá’u’lláh released into this world such a rapture that those who have caught but one drop of His Elixir find the universe shrunk to a point too narrow for their wide yearning.
These are the thoughts that shake one as he wanders over the flower-decked