man follower". Then the bell rang and we went into class.

How many days passed after this I don't know, but one night around midnight our house began shaking. The earthquakes had started. The tremors continued in this way for about two weeks. The people said: "Hoja Efendi was a good man. They harassed him, treated him badly, and slandered him so there were earthquakes." [^218]

[^218]:Şahiner, Said Nursi, 335-6.

Nadir Baysal, some of whose reminiscences were given above, described the air of terror that descended on the town after Bediuzzaman was arrested. He says also that Bediuzzaman was not held in the prison but in his house:

It was Ramadan in 1943. I was going towards Ustad's house when in the Shoemakers' Market I saw them taking him, still with a turban on his head, in a phaeton to the Law Courts. Çaycı Emin, Mehmet Feyzi and altogether twenty-two people were kept for about two weeks in the prison. Ustad did not stay inside but was sent back to his house under police supervision. Two weeks later they transferred them all to Denizli Court. Such an air of terror overwhelmed the town at that time that it was as though anyone who had met with Ustad had committed a crime. Some people did not dare to go out of their houses…

While Ustad was leaving Kastamonu, the leaves of the calendar showed 1943. A short while later the earthquakes started. A great stone rolled down from the citadel and seven people were killed in the house on which it fell. In the region of Tosya between six and seven hundred people died. [^219]

[^219]:Nadir Baysal, in Son Şahitler, iv, 285-6.

#### Kastamonu-Ankara-Isparta

Kastamonu-Ankara-Isparta

On the Night of Power, which in Turkey is generally considered to be 25-26 Ramadan, and was thus probably 27 September, Bediuzzaman was taken from the police station opposite his house in Kastamonu and put on the bus for Ankara, some 271 kilometres to the south. He is reported to have told the police there:

"Tell that Midhat [the governor of Kastamonu] to send my defence speeches in both the new and old letters on after me!" [^220]

[^220]:Şahiner, Said Nursi, 338.

This, reported by Selahaddin Çelebi, referred to Bediuzzaman's defence from Eskisehir Court which he had given to the officials and police while they had been searching his house for the Fifth Ray and other treatises. [^221]

[^221]:See, Nursi, Kastamonu Lahikası, 203-4.