As Toll Rises in S. Asian Quake, Child's Cry Leads Father to Rescue

So did neighboring India, although that country did not escape unscathed, with reports of more than 500 dead near the cease-fire line that separates Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir. With many houses destroyed, families huddled under trees and plastic sheets, lighting wood fires against the mountain chill as they awaited help that by Sunday afternoon had yet to arrive in many areas.

The earthquake struck at 8:50 a.m. Saturday. Its epicenter was in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir 60 miles north of Islamabad, which escaped with relatively little damage, although dozens of people, and perhaps more, are thought to have died in the collapse of a 10-story apartment building.

During a drive Sunday from the capital toward the epicenter, the first signs of serious damage were visible about 116 miles north in Abbottabad, an old British hill station where a number of small apartment blocks and businesses -- including an ersatz "Best Western" lodging -- had been damaged or destroyed.

Things got worse in the Mansehra district, closer to the epicenter, where in places the road was buckled and nearly blocked by rockslides. Mud-brick homes exposed their contents through gaping holes. Some families had moved outdoors, setting up rope cots in empty fields, in apparent fear of aftershocks -- of which there have been many.

The earthquake wreaked havoc in Garhi Habibullah, situated in a fertile river valley dotted with cornfields and apricot orchards and surrounded by steep fir-covered hills. Many homes and stores had collapsed, spilling their contents into the streets. The body of a 10-year-old girl lay beneath a sheet on a rope cot awaiting burial.

Hussain, the retired forester, recalled the horror of Saturday morning.

A compact, sinewy man with a bushy beard and flat woolen cap, Hussain had risen before dawn with his wife and children to pray and eat a light meal before beginning a day-long fast in observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Carrying their book bags and wearing their school uniforms -- long blue tunic over white pants with white head scarf -- Maria, the 14-year-old, and her 15-year-old sister left home that morning at 7:30 in a buoyant mood, he said.

The sisters walked up the hill to the girls high school, where eight teachers taught about 750 students in classes as large as 100, residents said.

Hussain was in the courtyard of his home, reading verses from the Koran, when the ground lurched and the walls shook. The family reception room immediately fell in on itself. At about the same time, he said, "I heard a loud 'bang' " from up the hill in the direction of the school, about 100 yards away.

His wife and elderly mother were the first to grasp what had happened. "They shouted at me that the school had collapsed," he said.

Repeating a familiar Muslim invocation -- "There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet" -- the couple ran up the hill with Hussain's brother to a scene of utter horror. One of the school's five buildings, the one that housed Maria, had been flattened. Children beneath the rubble cried out for their parents, who frantically pulled at the wreckage with their bare hands. (Hussain's older daughter had been playing badminton outside and was not injured.)

After hearing his daughter's voice, "I felt I could move all this debris," said Hussain, whose bloodied and bandaged hands bore witness to his struggle. He and his brother pounded on the rubble for 15 minutes and finally opened a two-foot-wide hole. There on the other side, he said, was his daughter's tear-streaked face.

He grabbed her by the chin and pulled her, uninjured, to safety.

"I was very sure I would die," recalled Maria, a wavy-haired girl who says she wants to be a doctor. The teenager said she was sitting in Urdu class with 62 other children on the ground floor of the building when the earthquake struck. The teacher, Miss Yasib, had just begun the day's lesson, on "friendship and responsibility."

At the first jolt, many children ran for the exit, and some escaped outside, Maria recalled. But then the ceiling caved in, trapping her and several dozen other children in a dark space about two feet high. After she heard her father's voice, Maria said, she crawled about 30 feet through the gloom toward a pinprick of light, which grew steadily wider.

About 50 girls were pulled from the shattered building alive, according to Hussain and Mohammed Shafik, the school watchman.

Others met tragedy. By Saturday night, townspeople working with saws, shovels and sledgehammers had removed the bodies of 138 girls, including some from Maria's Urdu class, according to Hussain and other residents. Among the dead was Miss Yasib.