Twain was fascinated by the Parsee funeral ritual. They hold that “the principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a Parsee funeral is Purity. By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried.” Instead they used vultures to pick the body clean, after which the bones were left exposed to the tropical sun and rain—and the sacred elements—for a month, when the powdery remains were placed in a well with a drain and eventually found themselves in the Arabian Sea."

Today, alas, the famously efficient Bombay vultures have vanished, poisoned by the twentieth century with its industrial pollution and agricultural chemicals. In their stead the Parsees have installed solar mirrors above and to the side of the funeral Towers and these are maneuvered to reflect intensified solar rays on to the bodies. The vultures are much missed: decomposition by vultures took as little as thirty minutes, whereas the same process by solar can take a week or so. The Parsees are now rearing fifteen vultures and plan to train them back in the ways of their ancestors, human and avian.

(The Indian Equator)