of dealing with the Parsee dead is startlingly original, and
said to be in strict keeping with the teaching of Zoroaster. According
to Parsee tenets fire is too highly venerated to be polluted by burning
the dead, while water is equally respected, and Mother Earth as well.
Hence the Parsees offer their dead to the elements and the birds of the
air, and the bones of rich and poor, high and low, even of the
malefactor and suicide, are consigned to eternity in crumbled state in a
common pit.

The Towers of Silence occupy the finest site on Malabar Hill,
overlooking beautiful Bombay, and high above the Arabian Sea--it is
Nature's beauty spot, embowered in graceful shrubbery and palms, with
fragrant flowers everywhere. The governor of Bombay Presidency resides
at Malabar Point, further along, and the homes of men high in
officialdom or commerce occupy every available site in the neighborhood.
The Towers, five in number, are of whitewashed stone and cement, 275
feet in circumference, and perhaps twenty-five feet high. An iron door
admits the corpse of the Parsee, and once within the strange building it
is proffered to the birds of the air--gloating vultures, coarse and
repugnant in every aspect.

Four carriers of the dead are seen approaching the beautiful garden with
a bier on their shoulders. Two bearded men, the only living persons
permitted to enter a Tower, come next. Then follow from fifty to a
hundred mourners and friends in pure white robes, walking two and two,
each couple holding a handkerchief between them in token of a united
grief. The apex of the hill reached, the mourners turn into the house of
prayer, wherein the eternal fire is burning, or take position beneath
spreading palms for solitary meditation. The bearers deliver the corpse
to the bearded functionaries at the entrance to the Tower, and these
carry it within. The floor of the Tower is of iron grating with three
circles whereon the corpses are placed. The inner circle is for
children, the next for women, and the outer for men.

The bearded men are lost to view for a minute or two only, and their
concluding office within is to remove the shroud, leaving the body
wholly bare. The iron door clangs as they emerge, there is a mighty whir
of wings, and in a twinkling the corpse is in possession of hundreds of
greedy, competing vultures. In twenty minutes not a vestige of flesh
remains on the bones, and the loathsome birds resume their watch from
the edge