After we leave Benares the railway turns south-eastwards to the wide delta country where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra meet, and where Calcutta, the capital of India,[12] stands on one of the arms of the river. The town itself is flat and monotonous, but it is large and wealthy and contains more than a million inhabitants. The climate is very damp and hot, the temperature even in winter being about 95 deg. in the shade. Accordingly in the summer the Viceroy and his government move up to Simla in the cool of the hills. From Calcutta we travel by train right across to the western coast of the Indian Peninsula, to a more beautiful and more pleasant city--indeed one of the most beautiful cities of the world. Bombay is the gate to India, for here the traveller ends his voyage from Europe through the Suez Canal and begins his railway journey to his destination. It is a great and wealthy commercial town, having about 800,000 inhabitants, and innumerable vessels lie loading or unloading in the splendid harbour. Here we find the last remnant of a people formerly great and powerful. About six or seven hundred years before the birth of Christ lived a man named Zoroaster. He founded a religion which spread over all Persia and the neighbouring lands, and under its auspices Xerxes led his immense armies against Greece. When the martial missionaries of Islam overwhelmed Persia in 650 A.D. many thousands of the followers of Zoroaster fled to India, and a remnant of this people still live in Bombay and are called Parsees. They are clever and prosperous merchants, many of them being multi-millionaires, and they own Bombay and control its trade. Their faith involves a boundless reverence for fire, earth, and water. As the earth would be polluted if corpses were buried in it, and as fire would be dishonoured by burning bodies, they deposit their dead within low round towers, called the Towers of Silence. There are five of these towers in Bombay. They all stand together on a high hill, rising from a peninsula which runs out into the sea. The body is laid naked within the walls of the tower. In the trees around large vultures perch, and in a few minutes nothing but the skeleton is left of the corpse. Under the cypresses and the fine foliage trees in the park round the Towers of Silence the family of the deceased may abandon themselves to their grief. THE USEFUL PLANTS OF INDIA In India we find a flora nearly allied to that which flourishes in tropical Africa, a soil which freely affords nourishment to both wild and cultivated plants, an irrigation either supplied directly by the monsoon rains or artificially conducted from the rivers. It is true that we travel for long distances, especially in north-western India, through true desert tracts, but other districts produce vegetation so dense and luxuriant that the air is filled with reeking, choking vapour as in a huge hothouse.