Dakhmas or
Parsee towers of silence. These towers, built like a windowless
colosseum, are massive cylinders of hard black granite, open to the
heavens.

The parapet supports a coping of motionless living vultures, waiting in
patience to be fed. Here the death rate is high and there are many to
die, so they do not suffer from hunger.

The vultures grow restless; they see a funeral cortege of black men in
spotless white robes; they bear a black corpse in a white shroud. The
body is hastily deposited within the area on its bed of stone and
mattress of charcoal. The vultures swoop down to the feast. In a short
while, satiated, they rise on heavy wing and lazily resettle upon the
parapet.

* * * * *

All day long, my soul struggling for freedom or forgetfulness, is caged
within the body of one of these vultures. I do not see the sun except
through vulture eyes. I do not feed except upon the dead. My companions
are vultures. I am never beyond the smell of the dead. I have no
friendships, no hopes.

There are times at night when my vulture body sleeps. Then the soul
seems to break forth; but it does not go out in freedom as of old. I may
go into the hovels of Bombay in the form of an old black beggar.

Then it is my overwhelming desire to do some act of kindness, but my
clothes are in rags; my face is a horrid mask, and I smell of the dead
and am driven away.

I found a man dying by the wayside, too weak to move, too blind to see.
When he asked for water, I thought now is my chance. I shuffled to the
fountain and when I would dip up a cupful, it became as solid glass.

At a time of famine I found a child crying for bread without the city
walls. At great strain upon my feeble limbs, I climbed a wall and stole
from the kitchen of the enclosed villa a roasted fowl and carried it to
the child. The child took it, but when he raised it to eat, it was the
hand of a putrid corpse.

When I lift the head of the sick, they shudder and gasp and grow cold.

So I return to my vulture body, to my perch on the parapet, to breakfast
on the dead and to my vulture consort.

(End of translation.)

* * * * *

I spent the next winter at law school, returning to the old farmhouse
the middle of May.

The first time I went down to the springhouse, I saw a vividly-colored
golden robin or hangnest restlessly flitting about the old elm trees and
occasionally bursting into lo