MAHARAJA—JAIPORE.
MOHAMMEDAN LADY, BOMBAY.
The Parsees have a peculiar form of burial, which has come down from prehistoric times. On Malabar Hill in the suburbs of Bombay, overlooking the sea, in the midst of a beautiful garden, are their Towers of Silence. These are large circular buildings twenty-five or thirty feet high and without a roof. Within the wall is a circular platform sloping downward to a well in the center. When a Parsee dies he is prepared for burial and borne to this garden. After the last rites have been performed and the relatives and friends have taken their farewell, the body is carried within the tower by men appointed for the purpose and placed naked upon this platform. As soon as the corpse bearers depart, the waiting vultures (of which several hundred make their home in the garden) swoop down upon it and do not rise until the bones are bare. The skeletons, sun-bleached, are washed by the rains into the pit in the center, where rich and poor, conspicuous and obscure, mingle their dust together. Every sanitary precaution is taken and a fixed rate of five rupees is charged to all alike, the money being advanced from a burial fund where the family can not afford to bear the expense.
The Parsees of Bombay, though they wear a dress peculiar to themselves, are of all the Indians most like the Europeans and Americans. We were in one Parsee home, and the furniture, the pictures and the library were such as would be found in the average home in our country. Statistics show that the percentage of education among the Parsees is very much higher than among any other class of inhabitants, and the women share the educational advantages with the men.
ELEPHANT PARADE.