Nalanda

It was a giant bonfire of books.
An event so sad as no funeral can ever be .
The legends say, the massive library took months to burn .
Millions of words of wisdom turned to ashes.
Thousands of tons of knowledge evaporated from
the collective psyche .
Scores of dialects , scripts and languages , rendered extinct.
Monks , teachers, students and saints were all hounded, caught and exterminated, like roaches.
The marauders sat in their saddles ,exulting at the scale of destruction , wrought by them.

A university turned to dust.
A powerhouse of saintly brotherhood , fed vultures for weeks .
And the crows gathered in astounding numbers , hyenas laughed and jackals cried at the demise of Nalanda.