Our Parsee friend told me that the Arabs and Persians always
speak of the singing-fish as "tiny women of the sea;" but he had
never heard our version of their long hair, and their twining it about
hapless sailors to drag them down to their coral caverns beneath the
ocean's wave. He showed me how to preserve the fish by drying in the
sun after repeated anointings with an aromatic oil, which he gave me
for the purpose; and I have still in my cabinet these two specimens as
a reminder of the incident.
The manner in which the Parsees dispose of their dead seems to us too
shocking to be tolerated by a people so gentle and refined. But they
have grown familiar with a custom that, generation after generation,
has been observed by their race till it has ceased to be repugnant.
They call it "consigning the dead to the element of air." For
this purpose they have roofless enclosures, the walls of which are
twenty-five or thirty feet high, and within are three biers--one each
for men, women and children. Upon these the bodies of the dead are
laid, and fastened down with chains or iron bands. Presently birds
of prey, so numerous within the tropics and always waiting to devour,
pounce upon the corpse and quickly tear the flesh from the bones,
while the skeleton remains intact. This is afterward deposited in
a pit dug within the same enclosure, and which remains open till
completely filled up with bones; after which another is dug, and
when the enclosure can conveniently contain no more pits a new one is
selected and prepared.
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