Bibliography: #BIB02110

web link	bahai-library.com/bibliography/BIB02110
reference type	Book
title	Orient Express
author	Dos Passos, John
year	1927
date	1927
publisher	Harper & Brothers
place published	New York ; London
issue	10.
abstract	Colorful chronicle of author's travels through the Middle East in 1921.
notes	Bahá'í Faith: pp. 76, 90-92. The author refers to his traveling companion, Sayyid: "...he thought in many ways as the Baha'is thought, and they were good people, honest and tolerant and anxious for progress and education; he only wished there were more of them in Persia." Dos Passos met three American Baha'i women in Tihran in the month of Muharram (Sept. 4 -Oct. 3), 1921, just a few months before 'Abdu'l-Baha's passing: "The three American women were Baha'i Missionaries, one from New York, one from Chicago and the youngest one perhaps from some small town in the Dakotas. They all had the same eyes, spread, unblinking, with dilated pupils. We sat in a long dark room furnished in European Persian style, looking at each other constrainedly. The eldest women spoke of the persecutions of the followers of Baha'ullah in Persia.... She was old with tired grey hair puffed over her forehead and grey unfirm lips and a face full of small tired wrinkles. The Presbyterian missionaries who lived in the big mission at the other end of town would not speak to them because they were not Christians. They do not know that the service of our lord El Baha'ullah includes the service of Christ who was also a great prophet and the emanation of God. Another of the women was a doctor. Her face was firm and thin and she was neatly dressed. She spoke of the sufferings of the women, of their flabby ignorance, their wilted lives in the candied gloom of the anderun, the sickness among them and the difficulty with which they had children. The youngest one had come recently to Teheran. Her talk was full of miracles. She had come up from the coast in winter. They had told her it was death to attempt such a thing. Death has no power on the servant of everlasting light. She had crossed alone a great snowy pass that even the Kourds didn't dare pass in winter; when she came to a ford the swollen river would shrink within its banks; bandits had killed all the other travellers on the road but her; at every step she had felt the hand of God bearing her up, keeping her mule from stumbling, turning away the designs of wicked men. It was dark when I left them..." The three women were most likely: (1) Dr. Sarah A. Clock, the eldest of the three, who arrived in the winter of 1911 and died Jan. 24, 1922 in Tihran; (2) Dr. Susan I. Moody from Chicago who arrived in Tihran Nov. 26, 1909 and died in Iran Oct. 23, 1934 (she founded the Tarbiyat School for Girls in Tihran); and (3) Elizabeth H. Stewart, a nurse from Philadelphia who arrived with Lillian Kappes in Dec. 1911 (Kappes died Dec. 1, 1920 in Tihran, about nine months before Dos Passos arrived), returned to Philadelphia in Jan. 1925 and died in 1926. Stewart, however, did not arrive "recently" as the author suggests, and she was not from the Dakotas. Genevieve L. Coy arrived in 1922 to replace Kappes, so it could not have been she.
language	English
keywords	TRAVELS & JOURNEYS; IRAN; ORIENT; PIONEERING
number of pages	[8], 181
edition	1st ed.

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