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The riffle grenades had charge of phosphor, which exploded with the impact, and
constituted an efficacious incendiary tactic device. Released with a fusil similar to the Mauser,
was impossible to hit precise targets at 300 metres. The targets, the windows of the Monastery,
invited them to throw the projectiles only 25 metres onwards.

Seated on a squared base of seventy metres edgewise, the Gompa showed three files of
windows in the upper level of the entrance door, main façade that we saw ahead. Sheltered, as I
said, some 500 hundred lamas of the Kurkuma Bonnet, many of which loomed and harangued
the duskhas, wheter supplicating, or commanding, to resist the enemy, to reorganize the
defense, not flee, etc. Perhaps the most paradoxical of such dramatic intimations was the one
that assured, in the Name of the Holy Lord, that the intruders were not Demons but simple
mortals.

Existed also a great rear door, which guided to the White Isle, and two small doors on
both sides of the edifice, all them remained locked from inside. The roofs, covered with brown
tiles, were inclinated in gently hyperbolic sloping, and there was a central courtyard
surrounded by galleries and fine columns.

In those moments, the lamas warned the fire that consumed the village and exhorted
the people to fight it emplying the water of the ponds and inner channels, which could be
flooded in just minutes opening some floodgates that contained the pressure of the lake. It
must be admitted that some duskhas conserved the calm in those tragic moments and ran to
comply the orders, that the lamas not dared to realize by themselves; and were others who
tried vainly turn off the voracity of the fire. But one thing is to stop an occasional fire,
produced by accident in such or such place, and other very different to face a hundred focuses
deliberately fired.

The fire became uncontainable in some neighborhoods and their dwellers fleed
frightened, some of them to the exterior, and others towards the Lamas’ Monastery.
Insensitive for the riddled corpses who sowed the zone, mobs coming from different
direcctions converged every moment to request the Divine succor of their Gods, while the
lamas were threatening them to fight immediately, against the fire and against the invisble but
letal enemies.

However, even though the lament and the howls of the desperates were deafening,
about the background noise that produced the crackle of the things breakin, the sound of the
fireweapons was not heard anymore. Encouraged by such silence, the lamas screamed now
prayers and mantrams from almost every window.

One and sixteen minutes. The squadron of von Grossen appeared impromptu from the
shadows of the Pagoda and marched in closed order in pairs for some metres. One instant later

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