BABYLON AND PERSIA

THE VENDIDAD. THE LESSER AVEST.'i. 13ITo which Ahura-Mazda answers :" It is even so asthou hast said, O righteous Zarathushtra ! " but ex¬plains that, when the rain-water, thus polluted, re¬turns unseen to whence it came (by evaporation), itis first cleansed in a special heavenly reservoir, calledthe sea POlTIKA, from which it runs back into the seaVouru-Kasha as pure as ever, and as fit to water theroots of the sacred trees that grow there (the Gaok¬erena and the tree of All-Seeds, see p. 65), and torain down again upon the earth, to bring food tomen and cattle.12. The same inevitable inconsistency shows itselfin the feeling about the Dakhmas.Although theexistence of these constructions is a matter of abso¬lute necessity, we saw above that the sites on whichthey are erected are numbered among those places"where the earth feels sorest grief."Nay, they aredenounced, on unimpeachable hygienic grounds, asthe trysting places of all the fiends " where thetroojDS of daevas rush together, to kill their fiftiesand their hundreds, their thousands and their tensof thousands. . . . Thus the fiends revel on thereas long as the stench is rooted in the Dakhmas.Thus from the Dakhmas arise the infection of diseases,fevers, humors. . . . There death has most power onman from the hour when the sun is down."And, al¬though the building of Dakhmas has at all times beenconsidered a meritorious act of piety, we are told thatthe man who gladdens the earth with greatest joy, is,first, " he who digs out of it mo.st corpses of dogs andmen," and, second, " he'who pulls down most of thoseDakhmas on which corpses of men are deposited."