"It is impossible to hold on any longer," said Dr. Shedd to his wife. "I will go and tell all in the compound. You get things ready."
Mrs. Shedd got up and began to collect what was needed: she packed up food (bread, tea, sugar, nuts, raisins and so on), a frying pan, a kettle, a saucepan, water jars, saddles, extra horse-shoes, ropes, lanterns, a spade and bedding. By 7.30 the baggage wagon and two Red Cross carts were ready. Dr. Shedd and Mrs. Shedd got up into the wagon; the driver cried to his horses and they started.
As they went out of the city on the south the Turks and Kurds came raging in on the north. Within two hours the Turks and Kurds were crashing into houses and burning them to the ground; but most of the people had gone—for Dr. Shedd was practically the last to leave Urumia.
Ahead of them were the Armenians and Syrians in flight. They came to a little bridge—a mass of sticks with mud thrown over them. Here, and at every bridge, pandemonium reigned. This is how Mrs. Shedd describes the scene:
"The jam at every bridge was indescribable confusion. Every kind of vehicle that you could imagine—ox carts, buffalo wagons, Red Cross carts, troikas, foorgans like prairie schooners, hay-wagons, Russian phaëtons and many others invented and fitted up for the occasion. The animals—donkeys, horses, buffaloes, oxen, cows with their calves, mules and herds of thousands of sheep and goats."
All through the day they moved on, at the end of the procession—Dr. Shedd, planning out how he could best get his people safely away from the Turks who—he knew—would soon come pursuing them down the plain to the mountains. Night fell and they were in a long line of wagons close to a narrow bridge built by the Russians across the Baranduz river. They had come some eighteen miles from Urumia.
So they lay down in the wagons to try to sleep. But they could not and at two o'clock in the night they moved on, crossed the river and drove on for hour after hour toward the mountains that rose in a wall before them.
The poor horses were not strong so the wagon had to be lightened. Assyrian boys took loads on their heads and trudged up the rocky mountain road while the wagon jolted and groaned as it bumped its way along. The trail of the mountain pass was littered with samovars (tea urns), copper kettles, carpets, bedding; and here and there the body of someone who had died on the way. At the very top of the pass lay a baby thrown aside there and just drawing its last breath.
So for two days they jolted on hardly getting an hour's sleep. At last at midday on the third day they left Hadarabad at the south end of Lake Urumia. Two hours later the sound of booming guns was heard. A horseman galloped up.
"The Turks are in Hadarabad," he said. "They are attacking the rear of the procession."