KHALID HUSSEIN makes no sound; his eyes stare into the distance. Only his emaciated body and the perpetual digging motion of his hands hint at the horror that he has endured.

A few words by a Pakistani doctor on the chart by his hospital bed provide the mimimum information: “Admitted yesterday. Found 27 days after being buried in his house. Tibia fractured. Psychosis.” The report is dated November 11.

Mr Hussein is almost certainly the last person to be recovered alive from the rubble after the October 8 earthquake in northern Pakistan that killed at least 73,000. His survival may be little short of miraculous, but it comes at a terrible price.

The 20-year-old farm worker has not said a word since being pulled into the daylight. He stares drooling into space, clawing at the blankets on his bed at the Al Abbass Medical Institute in Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan- controlled Kashmir, as if trying to tunnel out of a nightmare.

Should he recover his senses, reality will reveal that his mother, brother and four sisters died in the landslide that crushed his home in the village of Pahl, in the remote Jhelum valley.

He was tending his family’s livestock in a building adjoining their house. His mother was working in the fields. His father was visiting a distant farm. The 12-second earthquake caused a series of massive landslides. Rocks flew from the mountain tops, crushing his mother. The family house disappeared under tonnes of earth and stone. Every house in the village was destroyed and 250 of Pahl’s 600 residents were killed.

“I rushed back to my home but there was nothing I could do,” Muzzafar Hussein, 40, Khalid’s father, said. “It took 12 days to remove the debris from my home and reach the body of the last of my dead children. I couldn’t find Kahlid anywhere. So I buried the others and assumed that I would never find my missing son.”

The father, working with his three surviving sons, set about clearing the rubble. Then, on November 5, his 18-year-old son, Zahid, cried out.

“He could see Khalid’s hand,” Mr Hussein Sr said. “I warned him immediately that Kahlid would be dead, but as we pushed the debris away we could see that Khalid was unconscious and breathing. He was pinned in a foetal position beneath a wooden beam and rocks, with just enough space to move his arms slightly.”

They dragged the young man, his right leg broken in several places, to a tent and poured milk and water down his throat. He began to stir.

It was not until November 10 that a vehicle could be found to take him to Muzzafarabad for treatment.

In the dirty, overcrowded surgical ward where he now lies, a doctor said that his psychological trauma had yet to be addressed. “A psychiatrist has seen him,” Dr Naheed said. “But to be honest right now he’s being treated for the breaks in his leg. It is not impossible for a man to survive this long without food and water, but it is nearly miraculous.”

His only companion is his father, who stands by the bed stroking the young man’s head, torn between his own immeasurable grief and the relief of having recovered a lost son, albeit one he watches endlessly digging at the press of invisible walls.

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