Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/408

386 pantomime of her washing the groom's feet with milk, and his purse was given the bride, that she might spend it on a feast for the poor. The ceremony was full of meaning and deep significance to the beautiful, dark-eyed Parsi women and to the serious, priestly looking men, but it would take many pages to convey the full meaning of the customs brought from Persia so many centuries ago.

There were stock sights to be seen in Bombay, and we took the red Murray book and did them; but it was not exciting after the up-country sights and people. First, to the twin Towers of Silence, with the friezes of living vultures on their cornices, where the Parsis, who do not believe in defiling the earth, expose the bodies of their dead to the elements and the birds of the air. Nothing could be more gruesome and repellent than the rows of huge, motionless birds awaiting their prey. There were chill, sepulchral halls where ceremonies are held by the mourners, and from the parapet of the high garden one has a fine view down over the Back Bay and the city, and across the harbor to the mainland shores.

In all the many accounts I have read of these Towers of Silence, the narrators always looked down the winding road and saw a procession of white-clad mourners approaching with a body, and gruesomely told how the vultures saw it too, and flapped their wings. We looked and looked in vain, the first travelers to miss that regulation spectacle. When we boasted our exemption to a resident of Bombay, he said wearily: "But of course you will go home and say you saw a funeral winding up.