"I will join you in helping to recover your throne," said Sabat to the fugitive Prince. "I am going," said Sabat to Colonel MacInnes, "to see if I can carry the message of Christianity to this fierce people."
So Sabat and the Prince, with others, went aboard a sailing ship and crossed the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra. They landed, and for long the struggle with the rebels swayed from side to side. The Prince was so pleased with Sabat that he made him his Prime Minister. But the struggle dragged on and on; there seemed to be no hope of triumph. At last Sabat decided to go back to Penang. One day he left the Prince and started off, but soldiers of the rebel-chief Syfoolalim captured him.
Great was the joy of the rebels—their powerful enemy was in their hands! They bound him, threw him into a boat, hoisted him aboard a sailing ship and clapped him in the stifling darkness of the hold. As he lay there he pierced his arm to make it bleed, and, with the blood that came out, wrote on a piece of paper that was smuggled out and sent to Penang to Colonel MacInnes.
The agonies that Sabat suffered in the gloom and filth of that ship's hold no one will ever know. We can learn from the words that he wrote in the blood from his own body that they loaded worse horrors upon him because he was a Christian. All the scene is black, but out of the darkness comes a voice that makes us feel that Sabat was faithful at the end. In his last letter to Colonel MacInnes he told how he was now ready (like his friend Abdallah) to die for the sake of that Master whom he had in his rage denied.
Then one day his cruel gaolers came to the hold where he lay, and, binding his limbs, thrust him into a sack, which they then closed. In the choking darkness of the sack he was carried on deck and dragged to the side of the ship. He heard the lapping of the waves. He felt himself lifted and then hurled out into the air, and down—down with a crash into the waters of the sea, which closed over him for ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] The inn of the Near East—a square courtyard with all the doors and windows inside, with primitive stables and bunks for the camelmen, and sometimes rooms for the well-to-do travellers.
[59] Pronounce Vi-zah'-ga-pat-ahm.
[60] The Arabic New Testament revised by Solomon Negri and sent to India by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in the middle of the eighteenth century.