Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/486

478 curtains, missed the Boston gentleman with the gray moustache, and was lonesome.

My Parsee neighbor is quite as fat, but by no means as saucy, as ever. Last week his youngest boy died,—little Kirsajee Samsajee Bonnarjee, a contemplative young fire-worshipper, with eyes as profound as the philosophy of Zoroaster. I saw the dismal procession depart from the house, and my heart ached for the little Gheber.

Four awful creatures, that were like ghosts, clad all in white, solemnly dumb and veiled, bore him away on an iron bier. When they arrived at the drawbridge, great sheets of copper were spread before them, and they crossed upon those; for wood is sacred to their adored Element, and the touch of "them on whose shoulders the dead doth ride" would pollute it.

So they carried little Kirsajee to Golgotha, their Place of Skulls, which is a dreary, treeless field, encompassed round about with a blank wall; and they laid him naked in a stone trough on the edge of a great pit, and left him there, betaking them, still solemnly veiled and mute, to their homes again.

All but my Parsee neighbor; he went and sat him down, like Hagar in the wilderness, over against the dead Kirsajee, "a good way off, as it were a bowshot"; and he lifted up his voice, and wept for the lad that was dead. But still he waited there, till the crows and the Brahminee kites should come to perform the last horrid rites; for to Parsee custom the sepulture most becoming to men and most acceptable to God is in the stomachs of the fowls of the air, in the craws of ghoulish vultures and sacrilegious crows.

And presently there came a great Pondicherry eagle, sniffing the feast from afar; and he came alone. Swiftly sailing, poised on silent wings, he circled over Golgotha, circle within circle, circle below circle, over the child sleeping naked, over the father watching veiled.

One moment he flutters, as for a foothold on the pinnacle of his purpose; then—

Sitting solemnly on the breast of the dead boy, the “grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird” peers with sidelong glance into his face, gloating; and then

Immediately my Parsee neighbor uprises in his place, throws aside his veil, and, shouting, runs forward. The Pondicherry eagle soars screaming to the clouds, and the sorrow-stricken Gheber bends over the dear corpse. Is it Heaven or Hell? the right eye or the left? Alas, the left!

He beats his breast, he falls upon his knees, and cries with frantic gestures to the setting Sun; but the sullen god only draws a cloud before his face, and leaves his poor worshipper to despair. Then my Parsee neighbor arises and girds up his loins, muffles his haggard face more closely than before, and with dishevelled beard, and chin sadly sunk upon his breast, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, and meeting no man’s gaze, wends silently homeward.

To-morrow he will take his wife and go to Bombay, to feed with consecrated sandal-wood and oil the Sacred Flame the Magi brought from Persia, when they were driven thence with all their people to Ormuz. But the name of little Kirsajee will cross their lips no more; his memory is a forbidden thing in the household; he is as if he never had been.

When Brahminee kite, and adjutant, and white-breasted crow have done their ghoulish office on little Kirsajee, his bones shall lie bleaching under the pitiless eye of his people's blazing god, till the rains come, and fill the pit, and carry the waste of Gheber skeletons by subterraneous sewers down to the sea. But the Pondicherry eagle took the left eye first; wherefore the most pious deeds of merit, to be performed by my Parsee neighbor,—even a hospital for maimed dogs, or feeding the Sacred Flame with great store of sandal wood and precious gums, or tilling the earth with a diligence equivalent to the efficacy of