THIS royal city still trembles with every slight rumble of the earth, and nervous eyes turn to the clouds that veil the smouldering wrath of Mount Merapi, the greatest volcano in south Java.

It is now spouting a thick ash rain, and its dome of lava is expanding. Seismologists fear it will soon erupt and cause another earthquake, like the shock registering 6.2 on the Richter scale that killed 6,234 people here last weekend.

Yet as workmen pull away debris from the Kraton, the Sultan’s palace, and as the overflowing hospitals struggle to cope with more than 33,200 seriously injured victims, at least in one household there is a sense of rebirth.

Last weekend Saiful Amin, a 32-year-old journalist with the news magazine Tempo, thought his whole world had ended.

Even as he reported news of the devastation wreaked on his city, Saiful feared the dead included his wife Fatkhul Karomah, 24, a civil servant, and their 23-day-old son, Abqory Kurnia Makata, whose name means “the wise and the God-given”.

Abqory, born on May 4, five hours after the first lava streams began flowing from Mount Merapi, knows nothing of his father’s anguish and subsequent joy. But Saiful has the missing hours last Saturday engraved on his soul.

“I had two jobs to do that day, my work for Tempo and organising a celebration for my son’s birth,” he recalled. “So I was writing a story for Tempo on the volcano and worrying about my mother-in-law, trying to arrange plates, tables, and a pair of goats to be slaughtered for the curry and satay.

“On Friday night I worked very late in the office and crashed out there. I woke up before dawn and said my morning prayers at about 5am.

“Just before 6am everything began shaking violently. People shouted, ‘Out! Out!’. I ran out and turned right. The house in front of me collapsed before my eyes. I turned round and ran to the left. That house, too, collapsed in front of me.”

Saiful clambered over the wreckage and made his way to the local mosque. “We heard from the people who’d gathered there that something terrible had happened,” he said.

His memory of exact time is confused. People were cut off from relatives. Mobile phones failed. Landlines were dead.

Dazed and shocked, Saiful made his way on foot to the two main hospitals in the centre of town. Dead and injured people were being brought in, propped on motorcycles, wedged into pedal rickshaws or laid out on Yogyakarta’s traditional horse-drawn carriages.

“I met our local newspaper delivery man who said things were bad in our part of town,” said Saiful. “He lent me his motorbike and I set off for the south. Thousands of people were coming the other way. They’d heard a rumour that a tsunami was coming from the sea and had already reached the Kraton. They panicked.

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