THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

THE NEW LIFE 203Kitty Davy, Rano, Dr. Gohar and Delia de Leon. They spent the first night at Columbia, S.C.,the next at Murphy, Tennessee and en route visited the waterfalls at Rock City. Baba said thatwas to be their last sightseeing. They stayed at Pond Crest in the Ozark hills the next night.The following morning before they left he seemed preoccupied and not in his usual haste tobe off. He told Sarosh in the other car not to let him out of sight as they went along. On theway, he stopped the car, got out and walked ahead for a time. Then they went on, travellingon Route 64. It had rained the night before and the road was slippery. It was not a wide road,and as they came over the crest of a small hill they met an approaching car on the wrong sideof the road. Elizabeth slowed up, expecting the driver of the other car to see them and moveover, but he did not, instead he came on at great speed, seeing their car at the last moment,when it was too late to avoid a collision. Baba was thrown out, his head bleeding, his arm andleg fractured. Mehera and Mehru were also thrown out and hurt, Elizabeth at the wheel of thecar was badly hurt with fractured arms and wrists and broken ribs. Mani, who had beensleeping, seemed unhurt. Baba was the only one who lost blood: he had previously said thathe would shed blood on American soil, and there he was bleeding freely into the ground! Hadthe ditch on to which they were thrown not been unusually soft, there might have been fatalresults. The driver of the other car was a veteran of the Korean war, a double amputee, drivinga car specially made for his disability for the first time that day. Neither he nor his twocompanions were injured.The party's own second car was not in sight. The first car to come along was a man drivinginto Prague, Oklahoma, seven miles distant, taking his wife to the clinic to have a baby; hesummoned two ambulances to come out, into which Baba and the injured ones were put andbrought to the town's hospital. While that was happening Sarosh arrived with the second car.As the day was very hot they had stopped on the way for a drink; how troubled they were atdisobeying Baba's order to keep close behind can be imagined.Baba's fractured arm and leg were set, Elizabeth and the others were attended to; they had tobe kept in the hospital thirteen days. Then they were taken by ambulance fifteen hundredmiles to Elizabeth's home at Myrtle Beach. Baba and the others slowly recovered. He said thathis suffering was all the greater because of the injury to Mehera. On 13 June he dictated thefollowing message:"The personal disaster for some years foretold by me has at last