Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 152
152 this revelation relying on this circumstance. But soon after the revelation had been published Qadian was visited by plague, and remained subject to its attacks for four or five years. Again, if plague had been confined to other parts of the village and had not visited the quarter in which the Promised Messiah as lived, the matter would still have been left open to conjecture, for it could have been said that special sanitary measures and precautions had been adopted in that quarter and that its immunity from plague was due to its superior sanitary conditions and not to any Divine intervention. But the plague visited that quarter of the town also where the Promised Messiah as lived and took its toll of all the adjoining houses, but the house of the Promised Messiah as re- mained unaffected so much so that not even a rat died of plague in it. In other words, the house stood in the midst of a sea of fire which consumed neighbouring houses but left it entire, as if the flames when they approached its walls were extinguished by the action of some Unseen but Mighty Hand. This happened, not once or twice, but continued throughout five terrible years when the weekly number of deaths due to plague in India amounted to not less than thirty or forty thousand. The pestilence hovered round the house of the Promised Messiah as but dared not touch any of those who dwelt within its walls, although during the epidemic many families took refuge in his house to take advantage of the immunity promised by the revelation, and the house became so full that living in it would have been danger- ous even in normal times.