Some three months after this text was finished, Bahá’u’lláh expressed His wish to leave the world. He was now living, still an exile and prisoner as He had been, here and there throughout the Middle East, for the previous forty years, in the Mansion of Bahjí outside ‘Akká. From this time on it became clear from the tone of His remarks, although He made no open reference to it, that the end of His life on earth was approaching. Years before, He had described in His Tablet of the Vision—revealed on the anniversary of His Forerunner and Prophet-Herald, the martyred Báb—how the white-clad “Luminous Maid” had appeared before Him and urged Him to hasten to His “other dominions,” dominions “whereon the eyes of the people of names have never fallen.” Now a few more months passed, until after a brief illness He died at dawn, on May 29, 1892, in the seventy-fifth year of His age.

Then the famous telegram was sent to Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd, whose prisoner He had been. It began with the words: “The Sun of Bahá has set.” Then mourners from `Akká and the neighboring villages crowded the fields around the Mansion, and notables of the Shí‘íh and Sunní, Christian, Jewish and Druse communities, poets, divines and officials, from cities as