When it comes to sight-seeing proper, the traveller will visit the island of Elephanta, six miles from the city. Here stands a great temple cut in the solid rock, its roof supported by huge pillars left standing when the chamber was hollowed out. The temple is adorned with colossal figures and carvings of Hindoo gods and of animals. Its excavation must have been a tremendous piece of work, and it is considered that it was carried out some eleven hundred years ago.
Among the crowds of Bombay no people are more distinctive than the Parsees. The Parsees may always be known by the strange head-gear and long coats of the men and by the splendid dresses of the women, who move about as freely as European women, and are not shut up like Hindoo women of the richer classes.
The Parsee man wears on his head a long, high, shiny hat in the form of a cylinder; it has no brim, and is one of the oddest head-coverings that may be seen. In origin he is a Persian, for the Parsees are descended from a race that fled into India from Persia when that land was attacked by the Arabs twelve centuries ago. The Parsee women are dressed very splendidly, because their race is very rich. The Parsee is the banker and money-lender of India. No other native is so clever in trade or amasses wealth so swiftly as a Parsee.
In his religion the most sacred thing is fire, and to him the sun, as the emblem of fire, is the greatest religious symbol. Upon the shore of the bay many Parsees may be seen at evening at their devotions before the setting sun. Each seats himself upon the sand, bows to the sun, taking off his hat and replacing it, and then, with a small brass jar at his side, begins to read prayers from a sacred book, chanting them aloud.
The Parsee reverence for fire is seen in the treatment of his dead. The Hindoo makes a funeral pyre and burns his dead. Not so the Parsee. He considers that fire is too sacred to use for such a purpose; nor, on the other hand, is he willing to defile the earth by digging a grave. So the Parsee dead are exposed to be torn to pieces and devoured by vultures. Beside the sea there stand five broad low towers, the famous Towers of Silence. In these the bodies of the dead are exposed. One of these is reserved for the use of a wealthy family, one for suicides and those who die by accidental deaths, and three for general use. The towers and the trees around are loaded with huge vultures, which, in a couple of hours, reduce a body to a heap of bones.
CHAPTER II
IN THE LAND OF THE RAJPUTS
Rajputana is the land of the Rajputs, a splendid warrior race of Northern India. In times long gone by the Rajputs held power over the wide plain watered by the Upper Ganges, but seven hundred years ago their Moslem foes drove them westwards into the land still called Rajputana.
The history of the Rajputs is one of battle. They are born fighters. They have taken a share in all the wars which have torn India through all the centuries. They struggled hard against the British power, but now they are good friends of ours, and their Princes rule under British protection.
The history of this fine race is full of stories of romance and chivalry. Nor is the Rajput of to-day inferior to his brave and haughty fathers: "The poorest Rajput retains all his pride of ancestry, often his sole inheritance; he scorns to hold the plough, or use his lance but on horseback." Of all the brave old stories of Rajput valour and constancy none are more beloved than the tales which hang around the three sacks of Chitore. Thrice was that ancient city seized and plundered by Moslem foes, and never have those terrible days been forgotten. To this day the most binding oath on Rajput lips is when he swears, "By the sin of the sack of Chitore."