So Abdallah was bound and carried before the Moslem judges. His friend Sabat stood by watching, just as Saul had stood watching them stone Stephen nearly eighteen centuries earlier. "You shall be given your life and be set free," they said, "if you will spit upon the Cross and renounce Christ and say, 'There is no God but Allah.'" "I refuse," said Abdallah. A sword was brought forward and unsheathed. Abdallah's arm was stretched out: the sword was lifted--it flashed--and Abdallah's hand, cut clean off, fell on the ground, while the blood spurted from his arm. "Your life will still be given you if you renounce Christ and proclaim Allah and Mohammed as His prophet." This is how Sabat himself described what happened next. "Abdallah made no answer, but looked up steadfastly toward heaven, like Stephen, the first martyr, his eyes streaming with tears. He looked at me," said Sabat, "but it was with the countenance of forgiveness." Abdallah's other arm was stretched out, again the sword flashed and fell. His other hand dropped to the ground. He stood there bleeding and handless. He bowed his head and his neck was bared to the sword. Again the blade flashed. He was beheaded, and Sabat--Sabat who had ridden a thousand miles with his friend and had faced with him the blistering sun of the desert and the snow-blizzard of the mountain--saw Abdallah's head lie there on the ground and the dead body carried away. Abdallah had died because he was faithful to Jesus Christ and because Sabat had obeyed the law of Mohammed. _The Old Sabat and the New_ The news spread through Bokhara like a forest fire. They could hardly believe that a man would die for the Christian faith like that. As Sabat told his friends afterward, "All Bokhara seemed to say, 'What new thing is this?'" But Sabat was in agony of mind. Nothing that he could do would take away from his eyes the vision of his friend's face as Abdallah had looked at him when his hands were being cut off. He plunged out on to the camel tracks of Asia to try to forget. He wandered far and he wandered long, but he could not forget or find rest for his tortured mind. At last he sailed away on the seas and landed on the coast of India at Madras. The British East India Company then ruled in India, and they gave Sabat a post in the civil courts as mufti, _i.e._ as an expounder of the law of Mohammed. He spent most of his time in a coast town north of Madras, called Vizagapatam.[59] A friend handed to him there a little book in his native language--Arabic. It was another translation of those stories that Abdallah had read in Kabul--it was the New Testament.[60]