Malfuzat - Volume IX — Page 310
310 MALFŪZĀT - ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF URDU VOLUME 9 14 JULY 1907 The True Remedy for Safeguarding against the Plague Hadrat Ummul-Mu'minin [the Mother of the Believers] with her sons, relatives and servants-eighteen people in total-had gone to Lahore for a change of atmosphere on 4 July 1907 and arrived back in Batala at 1pm on Sunday 14 July 1907. The Promised Messiahas had, there- fore, gone to Batala on the morning of 14 July 1907 with some of his companions. As it is the summer season, therefore, they left here early morning around sam. The Promised Messiahas was in a wagon. Many utterly devoted companions went running alongside the wagon all the way to Batala. The Promised Messiahas arrived in Batala around 10am. Thanks to Roy Jismal, the respectable and capable tax collector of Batala, that when he came to know from Sheikh Şahib that the Promised Messiahas was coming and would stay there a few hours, he arranged for a fine place for rest near the station adjacent to his home. He himself came to meet the Promised Messiahas as well. During the course of the conversation he said that he lived there at this very place outside of the town. The Promised Messiahas said: It is indeed better to live at this place as there is often fear of disease in the town and the plague was widespread in Batala during the previous season and though there is ease now, yet it is not a place of peace. The real issue is that people do not pay heed towards reforming their actions, and unless actions are reformed, this punishment will not go away. At the very outset when the inoculation was proposed for safeguard- ing against the plague and it was dispensed everywhere with great enthusiasm, at that time I also had written a book with the name Kishti-e-Nūḥ ['Noah's Ark']. I had disclosed in it that