UP THE winding mountain road they climbed, pushing carts loaded with the dead and wounded, survivors fleeing the city that had tumbled down on them from the hilltops.

“We cannot stay. This has become a city of death,” Mubarak Hussein said as he cradled his injured daughter. “Everything is destroyed. There is no one to help us. It is chaos, hell on earth.”

Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, was the ground zero of the earthquake that killed up to 30,000 people across Pakistan, India and Afghanistan on Saturday — a disaster that prompted a massive outpouring of aid from Britain and across the world yesterday.

Built up the sides of a mountain valley, it was cut off for 24 hours until rescuers broke open the road leading down from the north yesterday. As they removed the last boulders, they were met by thousands desperate to escape the destruction behind them. The survivors were swathed in bloody bandages. Those too badly injured to walk were crammed into cars, pushcarts and wheelbarrows. Behind them, the force of the earthquake had sent the city toppling down the hillsides, crushing concrete houses one on top of the other like fallen dominos. Up to half its buildings were destroyed. There was no power, water or means of communication.

Up and down the slopes, people swarmed through rubble, searching with their hands for the living to rescue and the dead to bury. On top of a collapsed hotel, a man leaned down to pull a bedsheet over the frozen features of Younis, a teenage roomboy crushed as he lay in his bed.

Below him, people laboured with pickaxes to reach bodies trapped between layers of concrete, only their protruding hands showing where they were. “We want to leave too but we have no choice, nobody has come to help us,” Muhammad Zaman said. “We cannot leave without our dead.”

As many as 11,000 people are thought to have died in Muzaffarabad, a city of about 125,000. But as the first help trickled in yesterday, it was the plight of the living that seemed the most desperate.

At a collapsed bank, a Turkish rescue team that arrived by helicopter yesterday afternoon struggled to free a man named Iqbad from the concrete slabs crushing his chest and legs.

Iqbad was pulled out alive, but even as he was carried to a waiting car another desperate man pushed forward.

“Will you help me please?” Faiz Bangesh begged, wringing his hands in front of the team leader. “My brother is trapped over here, he is dying. One of my brothers has died already.”

The rescue worker apologised. There were three more badly injured people to be freed first. “There are only eight of us here, but we need 800,” he said.

Mr Bangesh had travelled from Peshawar to find his brother, Nadir, 19, who had moved to Muzaffarabad five days ago. He had walked the last 20 miles overnight when he found the road blocked. “Where is the Army? Where is the Government?” he shouted. “They have failed us. People are dying and they are doing nothing.”

At the city’s largely destroyed hospital, there was little relief. Those crushed in their beds when the building fell were laid, wrapped in shrouds, in the courtyard. Those who survived lay in beds or rugs on the lawn. There was no one left to treat them: almost all the hospital’s doctors were believed to have perished in the quake. As the time for the evening Iftar — the breaking of the Ramadan fast — drew closer, the squatters became more desperate. None of them had eaten since the earthquake struck.

Back at the hotel where his brother was trapped, Mr Bangesh maintained a desperate vigil. “The Turks came but they said they didn’t know if he was alive so they couldn’t help right now,” he said. “But then we heard him speak.”

Back at the bank news reached the Turkish rescue team from the driver of Iqbad’s car. He had died on the way to the helipad to be evacuated.

In the fading light, Mr Bangesh squatted on the broken roof of his brother’s hotel, calling his name out to ever weaker replies as he waited for a miracle.

Quake magnitude 7.6

Death toll at least 20,000 but expected to rise to more than 30,000

Injured more than 42,000

Countries affected Pakistan, India, Afghanistan

Aid pledged at least $44 million

Foreign Office information line 020 7008 1500

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