Villages of the Dead

Wherever water wells up in the vast, arid reaches of northeastern Iran, improbable pockets of green blossom in the hostile landscape. People gather in isolated hamlets and towns to scratch out their precarious, remote existence. One such town was Kakhk, a cluster of blue-plastered, mud-brick buildings where 7,000 Iranians lived. At 2:17 on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Kakhk ceased to exist. In a few swift moments, it became the victim of Iran's worst earthquake since 1962, when 12,000 people perished. "I was taking a stroll in front of my house, when the ground started to tremble and everything became dark," one grief-stricken survivor, Hossein Hedayat, related last week. "The buildings around began falling. I grabbed a tree and hung on. When the dust settled and I could see again, my house was gone. My wife and my daughters were dead." Kakhk was leveled to rubble, and 6,000 of its inhabitants died as it fell. The earthquake rumbled across the Iranian countryside, destroying 14 villages, and severely damaging another 16. The appalling toll: 10,988 dead, another 1,820 seriously injured and 91,000 homeless. For most of the week, a series of aftershocks kept the surviving population in terror. One tremor traveled 1,600 miles across Turkey to the Black Sea coast, snuffing out the lives of another 32 persons and injuring 210.

Reading the Koran. But nowhere was the devastation more complete than at Kakhk, which is located near the epicenter of the original quake. The stench of death hung everywhere as Iranian soldiers, Boy Scouts and teen-age volunteers, their faces covered with protective handkerchiefs, dug frantically into the rubble. More than 40 hours after the earthquake, one grandmother was found safe beneath a fallen archway, reading the Koran to her three-year-old grandson. Few of the searches were so well rewarded.

The Iranian government moved quickly to help the living. Within 48 hours, survivors in the major villages received emergency supplies, and Iranian air force C-130s were soon parachuting tents and blankets to hamlets unreachable by road. Nothing more could be done for the dead. Four days after the earthquake, the government reluctantly ordered in bulldozers to turn what once were the victims' homes into their permanent graves. The leveled villages will be abandoned, and new ones built nearby for the survivors.

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