An afternoon’s excursion to the Elephanta Caves gives us an idea of the rock temples of the Hindus. These famous caves are on an island in Bombay harbor and are all hollowed by laborious excavation out of trap rock. The largest one is about one hundred and thirty feet deep and equally wide, and rests on huge pillars twenty feet high. Bas-reliefs, staring passively from the rocky walls, represent Siva in various forms, with his wife, Parvati. Facing the entrance of the temple is a colossal trimurti, representing the Hindu trinity, Brahma, the creator, in the center, Vishnu, the preserver, on the left, Siva, the destroyer, on the right. Glimpses of the outer world, with its tropical luxuriance of vegetation, bathed in the ruddy light of the sinking sun, made a most striking contrast to the mysteriousness and gloom of this heathen temple, to which, in the days when worship was celebrated there, the costliest offerings were brought. Horrible as the Hindu custom of cremation is to our ideas, the Parsee fashion of leaving the dead to be devoured by vultures, is a thousand times more repulsive. The Parsees are descendants of the ancient Persians, who sought refuge in India from religious persecution some thousand years ago. They are not only fire-worshipers, but they desire to maintain the purity of all the elements. Their “towers of silence” are circular white stone structures, perfectly plain outside, but the ghastly thing about them is the fringe of vultures sitting around the edge with their heads pointing inward. The bodies of the dead are placed, quite naked, in grooves within the enclosure; hundreds of vultures swoop down from the neighboring trees whenever a body is thus exposed, and in an incredibly short time the satiated birds move away with slow, heavy flight, having left nothing behind but a skeleton! After the skeleton has become perfectly dry in the sun and wind, the carriers of the dead, a separate and peculiar class who are not permitted to mix in social intercourse with other Parsees, gloved and with tongs remove the bones from the grooves and cast them into a central well, where rich and poor must literally meet in death.