In December an American woman was brought ashore from a steamer and placed in St. John’s Hospital in Beirut in a state of collapse. When sufficiently revived to speak, she said she was Mrs. ____ of Chicago, and had left contrary to her husband’s request to visit the Bab Incarnation, Abbas Effendi of Acre. She was literally starved through seasickness, and before her death, she moaned and mourned her folly in leaving her husband and home to visit the “Master” Abbas. An autopsy revealed perforation of the coats of the stomach. The poor woman had taken this long journey alone and must have suffered untold agonies, ignorant of the language and helpless through seasickness in a winter voyage. Yet to what lengths of exposure will religious delusion drive people ! This Holy Land is the happy hunting-ground of cranks and visionaries of all stripes, Oriental and Occidental.
One of the recent woman pilgrims to the shrine of Abbas Effendi was an English-speaking woman who stated that she had been successively an Agnostic, Christian Scientist, and Theosophist and now was going to try Abbasism. Palestine, whether it ever witnesses the turning of the Jews from Europe and America to their old fatherland or not, is certainly now witnessing the "turning of the cranks."
(Henry Harris Jessup, Fifty-Three Years In Syria, Volume 2, Page 605)
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