I was asked, in Bombay, to follow a little Parsi baby to the dokhma. I intended doing so—not out of curiosity—but out of sympathy and liking for its mother. I even started; but before we were half-way there I turned back. I thought of that little white stone where the white-robed procession must stop, beyond which the mother might not go. The vultures sometimes scream when the halt is made at the “Farewell Stone.” I could not go. I could not see that little baby’s body carried to the hungry birds, in the presence of the pale, pretty, little Parsi woman, upon whose breast I had seen it the week before.
God help any mother when she parts with her dead child! But I think the glad shrieks of those swooping beast-birds must be even harder to bear than the first fall of the earth on the coffin lid.
Asia is the graveyard of countless millions. Asia is the home of many, many distinct races, all of which have different burial customs. All are more or less interesting.
The Parsis, who rank above most of the Oriental peoples in civilisation, dispose of their dead in the most repulsive manner of any race in Asia. But they break no sanitary law when they throw their dead to the merciless vultures.
The Hindoo disposal of the dead is, more than that of any other Eastern people, save the Burmese, in entire consonance with the health of Asia’s living millions.
The Burmese also practise cremation, and are, therefore, as much as the Hindoos, the guardians of public health. It is the Burmese who most hate death, and who mourn longest for their dead.
The Chinese are, in their funeral rites, the most fantastic, the noisiest, and the most callous. Their custom of keeping the dead unburied for long years, and their mode of interment, which is usually above ground, are a positive menace, not alone to their own health and the health of the stranger within their gates, but also to the health of all Asia.
The Japanese, who are Past Masters of the difficult art of living gracefully, pleasantly, satisfactorily, and with dignity, meet death with more self-control than any of their fellow Asiatics. There is nothing in their funeral customs to offend the most fastidious European or the most prejudiced American. Their cemeteries, if we are to have cemeteries at all, might well be models for the civilised world—models of peaceful, quiet beauty, ideal resting-places surrounded by the everlasting hills, which lift their high, hopeful heads as if in promise of immortality—places full of flowers that live so brightly and die so sweetly that they whisper with their gentle, perfumed lips the only one consolation for death—if death be eternal.
The Cingalese, the Sikhs, the Mohammedans, deserve mention in this little series; but then so do a score of others. May they all rest in peace, the simple native folk, and know no trouble, feel no pain, in that strange land from which is sent us no Book of Travels, and not even a newspaper letter—“The undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns!”