The Book of Missionary Heroes, Basil Mathews [web based ebook reader txt] 📗

mark the road but the rocks being a little more worn in one place than in another." Suddenly in the darkness the pony stopped; dimly through the gloom Martyn could see that they were on the edge of a tremendous precipice. A single step more would have plunged him over, to be smashed on the rocks hundreds of feet below. Martyn did not move or try to guide the beast: he knew that the pony himself was the safest guide. In a minute or two the animal moved, and step by step clambered carefully up the rock-strewn mountain-side.

At last they came out on the mountain top, but only to find that they were on the edge of a flat high plain—a tableland. The air was pure and fresher; the mules and the travellers revived. Martyn's pony began to trot briskly along. So, as dawn came up, they came in sight of a great courtyard built by the king of that country to refresh pilgrims.

Through night after night they tramped, across plateau and mountain range, till they climbed the third range, and then plunged by a winding rocky path into a wide valley where, at a great town called Kazrun, in a garden of cypress trees was a summer-house.

Martyn lay down on the floor but could not sleep, though he was horribly weary. "There seemed," he said, "to be fire within my head, my skin like a cinder." His heart beat like a hammer.

They went on climbing another range of mountains, first tormented by mosquitoes, then frozen with cold; Martyn was so overwhelmed with sleep that he could not sit on his pony and had to hurry ahead to keep awake and then sit down with his back against a rock where he fell asleep in a second, and had to be shaken to wake up when Zechariah, the Armenian mule driver, came up to where he was.

They had at last climbed the four mountain rungs of the ladder to Persia, and came out on June 11th, 1811, on the great plain where the city of Shiraz stands. Here he found the host Jaffir Ali Khan, to whom he carried his letters of introduction. Martyn in his Persian dress, seated on the ground, was feasted with curries and rice, sweets cooled with snow and perfumed with rose water, and coffee.

Ali Khan had a lovely garden of orange trees, and in the garden Martyn sat. Ill as he was, he worked day in and day out to translate the life of Jesus Christ in the New Testament from the Greek language into pure and simple Persian. The kind host put up a tent for Martyn in the garden, close to some beautiful vines, from which hung lovely bunches of purple grapes. By the side of his tent ran a clear stream of running water. All the evening nightingales sang sweetly and mournfully.

As he sat there at his work, men came hundreds of miles to talk with this holy man, as they felt him to be. Moslems—they yet travelled even from Baghdad and Bosra and Isfahan to hear this "infidel" speak of Jesus Christ, and to argue as to which was the true religion. Prince Abbas Mirza invited him to come to speak with him; and as Martyn entered the Prince's courtyard a hundred fountains began to send up jets of water in his honour.

At last they came to him in such numbers that Martyn was obliged to say to many of them that he could not see them. He hated sending them away. What was it forced him to do so?

The Race against Time

It was because he was running a race against time. He knew that he could not live very long, because the disease that had smitten his lungs was gaining ground every day. And the thing that he had come to Persia for—the object that had made him face the long voyage, the frightful heat and the freezing cold of the journey, the life thousands of miles from his home in Cornwall—was that he might finish such a translation of the New Testament into Persian that men should love to read years and years after he had died.

So each day Martyn finished another page or two of the book, written in lovely Persian letters. He began the work within a week of reaching Shiraz, and in seven months (February, 1812) it was finished. Three more months were spent in writing out very beautiful copies of the whole of the New Testament in this new translation, to be presented to the Shah of Persia and to the heir to the throne, Prince Abbas Mirza.

Then he started away on a journey right across Persia to find the Shah and Prince so that he might give his precious books to them. On the way he fell ill with great fever; he was so weak and giddy that he could not stand. One night his head ached so that it almost drove him mad; he shook all over with fever; then a great sweat broke out. He was almost unconscious with weakness, but at midnight when the call came to start he mounted his horse and, as he says, "set out, rather dead than alive." So he pressed on in great weakness till he reached Tabriz, and there met the British Ambassador.

Martyn was rejoiced, and felt that all his pains were repaid when Sir Gore Ouseley said that he himself would present the Sacred Book to the Shah and the Prince. When the day came to give the book to Prince Abbas, poor Henry Martyn was so weak that he could not rise from his bed. Before the other copy could be presented to the Shah, Martyn had died. This is how it came about.

The Last Trail

His great work was done. The New Testament was finished. He sent a copy to the printers in India. He could now go home to England and try to get well again. He started out on horseback with two Armenian servants and a Turkish guide. He was making along the old track that has been the road from Asia to Europe for thousands of years. His plan was to travel across Persia, through Armenia and over the Black Sea to Constantinople, and so back to England.

For forty-five days he moved on, often going as much as ninety miles, and generally as much as sixty in a day. He slept in filthy inns where fleas and lice abounded and mosquitoes tormented him. Horses, cows, buffaloes and sheep would pass through his sleeping-room, and the stench of the stables nearly poisoned him. Yet he was so ill that often he could hardly keep his seat on his horse.

He travelled through deep ravines and over high mountain passes and across vast plains. His head ached till he felt it would split; he could not eat; fever came on. He shook with ague. Yet his remorseless Turkish guide, Hassan, dragged him along, because he wanted to get the journey over and go back home.

At last one day Martyn got rest on damp ground in a hovel, his eyes and forehead feeling as though a great fire burnt in them. "I was almost frantic," he wrote. Martyn was, in fact, dying; yet Hassan compelled him to ride a hundred and seventy miles of mountain track to Tokat. Here, on October 6th, 1812, he wrote in his journal:

"No horses to be had, I had an unexpected repose. I sat in the orchard and thought with sweet comfort and peace of my God—in solitude my Company, my Friend, my Comforter."

It was the last word he was ever to write.

Alone, without a human friend by him, he fell asleep. But the book that he had written with his life-blood, the Persian New Testament, was printed, and has told thousands of Persians in far places, where no Christian man has penetrated, that story of the love of God that is shown in Jesus Christ.