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 swarms of fireflies. The entire Tukholian valley now resembled a fiery hell.

With savage screams and yells of delight, the Mongols danced about and ran about the conflagration, flinging into the fire everything that came to hand. With mournful groans the hoary witness of the folk-mote, the giant linden, toppled over to the ground, cut down by Mongolian hatchets. The air in the Tukholian basin became heated as in a real kettle and suddenly from the surrounding hills a fierce wind blew downward whirling the sparks around, tearing at the burning stacks of straw and the roofs, strewing them about like fiery shots. The Tukholian stream for the first time in its life mirrored such a brilliance and for the first time became heated in its chill rocky bed.

The conflagration lasted for perhaps two hours. The Tukholians, boundless grief expressed upon their faces, watched dumbly from the steep high banks of the valley.

Then the Mongols began to extinguish the fires by throwing whatever was not completely burned into the stream and busied themselves digging a fosse around the site chosen for their encampment.

In a moment in the center of their camp rose the tents for the officers. The rest of the army was to sleep under the open sky on the heated ground.

Again it was dark in the Tukholian basin. The Mongols would gladly have built themselves campfires, but that was impossible, too late they remembered that they had laid waste to the whole valley with the conflagration and everything in it that could be burned had been burned or washed away by the stream. The army was forced to sleep and to stand guard in the dark. Even the trenches were not dug as deep as they were required to be, for it had already grown too dark to finish them.

Wrathful and dissatisfied, restless as a black storm cloud,