Roving East and Roving West | Page 5

kept carefully for the purpose, and then, in due course, the
blood of the horses is tapped in order to make the anti-toxin. Wonderful
are the ways of science! The Laboratory is also the headquarters of the
Government's constant campaign against malaria and guinea worm,
typhoid and cholera, and, in a smaller degree, hydrophobia. But nothing,
I should guess, would ever get sanitary sense into India, except in
almost negligible patches.

THE TOWERS OF SILENCE
The Parsees have made Bombay their own, more surely even than the
Scotch possess Calcutta. Numerically very weak, they are long-headed
and far- sighted beyond any Indian and are better qualified to traffick
and to control. All the cotton mills are theirs, and theirs the finest
houses in the most beautiful sites. When that conflict begins between
the Hindus and the Mohammedans which will render India a waste and
a shambles, it is the Parsees who will occupy the high places--until a
more powerful conqueror arrives.
Bombay has no more curious sight than the Towers of Silence, the
Parsee cemetery; and one of the first questions that one is asked is if
one has visited them. But when the time came for me to ascend those
sinister steps on Malabar Hill I need hardly say that my companion was

a many years' resident of Bombay who, although he had long intended
to go there, had hitherto neglected his opportunities. Throughout my
travels I was, it is pleasant to think, in this way the cause of more
sightseeing in others than they might ever have suffered. To give but
one other instance typical of many--I saw Faneuil Hall in Boston in the
company of a Bostonian some thirty years of age, whose office was
within a few yards of this historic and very interesting building, and
whose business is more intimately associated with culture than any
other, but who had never before crossed the threshold.
The Towers of Silence, which are situated in a very beautiful park, with
little temples among the trees and flowers, consist of five circular
buildings, a model of one of which is displayed to visitors. Inside the
tower is an iron grating on which the naked corpses are laid, and no
sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume
the flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the
coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is
their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees
choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they
must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; and both earth and water
they hold also too sacred to use for burial. Hence this strange and--at
the first blush--repellant compromise. The sight of the cemetery that
awaits us in England is rarely cheering, but if to that cemetery were
attached a regiment of cruel and hideous birds of prey we should
shudder indeed. Whether the Parsees shudder I cannot say, but they
give no sign of it. They build their palaces in full view of these terrible
Towers, pass, on their way to dinner parties, luxuriously in
Rolls-Royces beside the trees where the vultures roost, and generally
behave themselves as if this were the best possible of worlds and the
only one. And I think they are wise.
Oriental apathy, or, at any rate, unruffled receptiveness, may carry its
owner very far, and yet if these vultures cause no misgivings, no chills
at the heart, I shall be surprised. As for those olive-skinned Parsee girls,
with the long oval faces and the lustrous eyes--how must it strike them?
It was not till I went to the caves of Elephanta that I saw vultures in

their marvellous flight. It is here that they breed, and the sky was full of
them at an incredible distance up, resting on their great wings against
the wind, circling and deploying. At this height they are magnificent.
But seen at close quarters they are horrible, revolting. On a day's
hunting which I shall describe later I was in at the death of a gond, or
swamp-deer, at about noon, and we returned for the carcase about three
hours later, only to find it surrounded by some hundreds of these birds
tearing at it in a kind of frenzy of gluttony. They were not in the least
disconcerted by our approach, and not until the bearers had taken sticks
to them would they leave. The heavy half-gorged flapping of a vulture's
wings as it settles itself to a new aspect of its repast is the most
disgusting sight I have seen.
To revert to the Towers of Silence, one is brought very near to death
everywhere in the East. We have our