Ghostly silence as quake rescuers leave

THERE was an unearthly quiet this weekend in Langtang, where the remains of up to 300 people are believed to be buried under 6m of rock and ice that sheared off a mountain during the earthquake that hit Nepal two weeks ago.

Gone were most of the international search teams that had been working their way through the debris — the drones, the US Special Forces, the Israeli military. Instead, there was silence and the marks of an immense blast of air: on the ridge opposite the landslide, rows and rows of sturdy trees had been stripped of their foliage and laid flat against the ground, pointing uphill.

On the valley floor were traced ghostly outlines of stone walls, all that remains of dozens of guesthouses scraped off the ground by the thundering wall of ice and rock and earth.

That mass, which one witness described as “a swath of white”, is now black.

Though 91 bodies were retrieved from Langtang early on, according to the police, officials say that in recent days search teams have been finding only fragments: bits of clothing and pieces of bodies.

By Friday, the death toll nationally from the April 25 earthquake had risen to 7 904, with 15 935 in- jured. Relief teams were still struggling to reach people in isolated villages to provide shelter and medical care before the monsoon rains arrive, typically in late May. International news crews have, for the most part, headed home.

Some aid workers said they were worried that donors’ attention had already strayed from Nepal.

An initial request to donor nations by the UN for $423-million (about R5billion) for the first three months of aid has yielded only $22.4-million so far, according to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. — © The New York Times News Service