The fate of those who remained proved that the fugitives' forebodings had been well grounded. Urmi was abandoned once more to the wretched misrule of the Persians; and the man who obtained chief authority was that same Mejid es Sultaneh of whom we have already spoken on page 215. In those days he had been generally regarded as one of the most enlightened and free-thinking of the Persian nobility. His reforming tendencies had earned him disgrace and exile; and it had been to the generosity of sympathetic English merchants that he had owed the preservation of his forfeited estates. But apparently the only lesson that he had been capable of learning from adversity was the wisdom of truckling to iniquity, and he now reappeared as a pan-Islamic fanatic of the most virulent and reactionary type. The Persian magnates were as much averse to Turkish domination as to Russian, and might have been expected to evince some gratitude to their Christian neighbours for the prominent share they had taken in repelling the recent assault. But apparently they argued in their own minds that the very presence of the Christians had in some sort invited the invasion; that anyway they had helped the hated Russians, and that a general persecution of them would be the best way of conciliating the Turks. So some hundreds of these poor wretches were massacred during the winter--driven out in batches of 50 or 60 to one or other of the neighbouring villages, and there mercilessly put to death. Among them were a batch of 70 from the Christian villages of Gawar, who had been impressed to act as porters by the Turks in the recent invasion and had given their captors the slip when the invading army took to flight. These were marched back towards Gawar and handed over to the Kurds--possibly the very men who had impressed them--by whom they were all knifed or clubbed to death. In these massacres perished Mar Dinkha,[154] the Bishop of Mergawar; and we, who have laughed at his oddities must not omit to pay our tribute to the heroism of the old man's martyrdom. Utterly crippled by his injuries, he spent his last hours in prison crawling to and fro to comfort his fellow-sufferers--his last moments in bestowing absolution upon them as each in turn preceded him to death. It should be noted by our phil-Islamites that, in nearly every instance, all these victims were offered their lives on the sole condition of apostasy. With Islam (when free to express itself) it is still "the Koran or the sword." Mercifully the return of spring brought a respite from this reign of terror. Enver's invasion of Transcaucasia had been utterly crushed at Sara Hamish. The Russian outposts spread south again, and Urmi was reoccupied once more.