... description: 1954, William Sears Part 3 author: William McElwee Miller title: My Persian Pilgrimage notes: ... # My Persian Pilgrimage ## William McElwee Miller ### 1954, William Sears Part 3 ------ ## My Persian Pilgrimage ### William McElwee Miller ### 1954 ### An Autobiography ### The Return to Meshed (1925) In my account of the first three years of my Persian pilgrimage, I told in considerable detail the story of my experiences. I did this so that the purpose of the pilgrimage, and my way of working to achieve that purpose, might be-come clear. But since the pilgrimage was a long one, it will not be possible to recount so fully the events that occurred in the decades the followed. Also, from 1925 I was the member of a family, and my wife and children were fellow pilgrims with me. I would like to include their stories with mine. But if I did so, my book would become too large. I will therefore refrain from including much interesting material which I hope my children will one day record. I will have to risk the criticism of being egocentric by confining my story chiefly to what God did to me and through me in Persia. Now for the story of our journey back to Meshed. On January 3, 1925, two years after leaving Meshed, I sailed from New York with my wife and three children on the big ship Aquitania for England. In London the hotel rooms were very cold, and there was a terrible black fog that penetrated the hotel dining room, so that one could not see people on the other side of the room. I was glad to meet the head of the Scripture Gift Mission, who was a friend of the Haines family. During all the years that followed, this fine agency sup.. ..rusalem, which may have been the one from which our Lord rose triumphant on the third day. As we drove northward in a car, we stopped to see the well where, it is thought, Jesus talked with the woman of Samaria and gave her the water of life. Then, after passing through Nazareth and climbing to the top of the hill from which the angry people wanted to cast Jesus, we came to the Sea of Galilee. There we spent a beautiful and restful Sabbath. It was the best day of our trip. There we could almost see Jesus Christ walking by the shore and calling the fisher-men to rise up and follow him. We proceeded to Haifa, climbed up on Mt. Carmel, and looked out to the west at the beautiful blue Mediterranean Sea, as Elijah had done many centuries ago when he prayed for rain. I did not stop to see the Bahá’ís, as I had done two years before. After a night in Haifa, we drove through the orange groves and gardens of Tyre and Sidon and arrived in Beirut in Lebanon. In Beirut we made arrangements with a man who was to take two new Studebaker cars to Baghdád to sell to travel in his cars. So At we went in his fine car, climbing up from Beirut over the high Lebanon mountains, then across a wide valley and again climbing over the Anti-Lebanon range, and down into Damascus where we spent the night. We were able to see some of the sights of this ancient and once beautiful city. Early next morning we were off for Baghdád. At that time no proper road had been laid out across the hundreds of miles of desert country that separated Damascus from the Euphrates River and Baghdád in ‘Iráq. But there was a rough trail, and the owner of the cars decided to follow it. All that day we rode and bounced along through a region in which there was no sign of life anywhere. It was Al bare desert, and the ground was hard. Toward evening, very black clouds gathered in the sky, and the driver feared that if the rain fell on us, the desert would become a sea of mud, and we might get stuck in it for days. And so he drove on through the night. We stopped only to repair a punctured tire..