THE TOWERS OF SILENCE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 657, 26 September 1884, Page 7

THE TOWERS OF SILENCE.

Science Monthly. I must say a word on the subject of the famous cemetery of the Parsees, or, more properly, their Towers of Silence at Bombay. These must not be passed over unnoticed, the more especially as they have a kind of parallel relation to cremation, in respect at least to the underlaying motive prompting this most singular form of Eastern burial—if burial, indeed, it may be justly called. The Dakhmas, or Tower of Silence, are amply masses of masonry, built of hard blocks of granite, and covered with white chunam. The largest of the five towers is about forty feet in diameter, and. not much over half that height. The whole are embosomed in luxuriant foliage, rising out of an enormous and well-kept garden. There is a sixth tower, square in shape, that stands quite apart from the five; but this is reserved only for the remains of convicted criminals. The whole of the towers have been erected within two centuries. These strange, silent, solemn structures are set in a sea of graceful cypresses, palms, and gorgeous blossoming plants, and at the first glance upwards the stranger is startled to to see an extraordinary kind of moulding on the summit composed entirely of vultures with their heads pointing upwards, and usually in such perfect order and lazy expectancy, that they have been taken for grotesque ornament carved from the cornice stone. The following is an accurate description of the interior “ Imagine a massive cylinder fourteen feet high and fully forty feet in diameter, built throughout of solid stone, within the centre a well six feet across, leading down to an excavation under the masonry, containing four drains, terminated each by holes filled with charcoal. Round the upper surface of the solid circular cylinder, and hiding the interior from view, is a stone parapet, ten or twelve feet high. This, viewed from the outside, seems to form once piece with the solid stonework. The upper surface of the solid stone column is divided into seventytwo compartments, radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the central well, and arranged in three concentric rings separated each from each by narrow ridge 3 of stone grooved to act as channels to convey all moisture from the receptacles into the well. . . . It should be noted that the number serenty-two is emblematic of the seventy-two chapters of Zoroaster’s Yasua, a part of the Zendavesta. Each circle of stone coffins is divided from the rest by a oathway, thus making three circular pathways round the central well; and these three pathways are crossed by another pathway conducting from the one door which admits the corpse-bearers from the exterior. In the outermost circle of open stone coffins are placed the bodies ot males, in the middle those of females, and in the inner and smallest circle those of children.” Such is in brief the account given by Mr Monier Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit. The bodies are deposited in the open stone coffins, and on being left there, the vultures, watching on the parapet above, swoop down and, it is said, in five minutes fly up again, leaving only a skeleton behind. The bearers return in about a fortnight, and with gloved hands place the dry skeleton in the central well, where the dust of the Parsees remains undisturbed for evermore. The garden surrounding these awful towers is accessible only to Parsees, and is most jealously guarded. The Parsees themselves say that Zoroaster taught them to regard the elements as symbols of deity. Earth, fire, and water should never, he said, be defiled by contact with putrifying flesh, and the decaying portions of the human body were to be dissipated as quickly as possible. God, say*' the Parsees, sends the vultures, and they do their work better than millions of insects. The very rain water washing the skeletons is conducted into purifying charcoal. They form, the Parsees affirm, a united body in life, and in death they are united too. It must be observed that no one is permitted to see the descent of the vultures, for after the towers were consecrated no person, except those bearing the dead, has been allowed to enter ; and even the Parsee high priests may not come within thirty feet of the immediate precincts. The particulars here cited were furnished from a model, as no European would be allowed to go beyond the garden embosoming these places of appalling sepulture. It is evident here the Parsees sought for the same end mainly as the cremationist, with the difference that they do not separately preserve the ashes of the dead from whom relics, such a 3 locks of hair, are doubtless taken before they are committed to what appears to Western ideas a dreadful tomb.