each about twenty feet
high, made of brick, covered with plaster.

While you are admiring the flowers and trees a funeral enters the gates.
The body is carried by four professional bearers and is followed by two
priests and the relatives and friends. All the mourners are clothed in
white. They walk two by two, no matter how distant may be the house of
death, each couple holding a handkerchief as a symbol of their union in
sorrow. When the procession reaches the top of the hill the mourners
diverge and take seats in the house of prayer, where the sacred fire is
burning, or they seat themselves in the beautiful garden for meditation
and prayer. The priests deliver the body to the two corpse bearers, who
throw open the great iron door and enter with the body. The floor of the
tower is of iron grating, arranged in three circles--the outer for men,
the next for women and the inner for children. As the bearers lay the
body down, they strip off the shroud. Then the iron door closes with a
clang. This is the signal for a score of vultures to swoop down upon the
body. No human eye can see this spectacle, but the imagination of the
visitor pictures it in all its horror. Within a few minutes the gorged
vultures begin flapping their way to the top of the tower, where they
roost on the outer rim.

The bones of the corpse are allowed to remain for several days exposed
to the fierce sun. Then they are thrown into a great central well, where
the climate soon converts them into dust. This is washed by the rains
into underground wells. Charcoal in these wells serves to filter the
rain water before it enters the ground. Thus do the Parsees preserve
even the earth from contamination by the ashes of the dead. No expense
is spared by the Parsees in the construction of these towers of
silence, which are always placed on the tops of hills. According to the
testimony of some of the ablest medical men of England and America, who
have examined these burial grounds, the Parsee method of disposing of
the dead is the most sanitary that has ever been devised. It avoids even
the fumes that are given off in cremation of the dead. It is also cheap
and absolutely democratic, as the bones of the rich and poor mingle at
last in the well of the tower of silence.

There is nothing offensive to European taste in the towers of silence
except the vultures. These disgusting birds, like the Indian crow, are
protected because they are admirable scavengers. The P