After 48 hours of unremitting horror, trawling through the debris of what used to be Bam, and coping with the stench of death that now hangs over it, Rolf Zipf-Marks felt a sudden tingle of hope.
As his rescue dog, a lanky Alsatian, scampered over yet another mound of rubble in the earthquake-obliterated Iranian city, it briefly froze, tail wagging, its nose sniffing eagerly at the ground.
”He’s never been so interested before,” said Zipf-Marks, a dog handler with a German aid agency, Maltezer.
”This is the first sign of a living person in this dirt we’ve seen since we got here,” he said, staring at the dog as he grabbed his radio to request back-up.
Beside him, grey-bearded Akram Abbas Zade was pleading and raking at the ground. This had been the house of his niece.
”They’re still alive, my niece and her husband, there’s a strong cellar in the house — listen! You can hear them,” he insisted.
Zade’s urgency was understandable. He lost 80 relatives, including most of his immediate family, to the earthquake that razed Bam on Friday.
Yet Zipf-Marks’s refusal to reassure him was understandable, too.
More than 20 rescue dog teams who have been working relentlessly since Saturday have failed to dig up any survivors from Bam’s suffocatingly powdery rubble — the remnants of its vulnerable mud-brick houses.
Zade would soon have to face this cruel truth.
Back-up came quickly, but far too late to make a difference.
The rescuers concluded that there were corpses beneath the ruins of the house, but no survivors.
”Every dog has a different way of signalling what it has found, but we’re sure there’s nothing alive here,” said Zipf-Marks, who suddenly looked shattered.
”The dogs are finding a strong scent, but no noise, no movement, nothing to indicate life.”
That has been the depressing story of the rescue effort so far, and the reality of the situation was reflected in an admission on Sunday night by the United Nations coordination agency.
It is considering calling off the search after two days — a very short search time — to concentrate on bringing in emergency aid, with still little food, shelter or medical treatment in the town.
Moving on with the German dog team, Holgar Strunz described the difficulty of keeping the animals interested in a search that their handlers mostly consider hopeless.
”There’s nothing alive in these death mounds, from the first hour here we knew that,” said Strunz, who, like all the handlers, is a volunteer, abruptly summoned to eastern Iran.
”It’s hard keeping the dog up, so its senses are working well, when you know that. It’s hard not to get depressed — sadness everywhere, and the smell, too.
”You have to keep remembering the people left alive here. They’re full of hope, even if it’s just of finding their relative’s corpse. They have to live on, so they live on.”
The death rate among those trapped in the rubble is so high because of the mud bricks that once made Bam one of the Middle East’s most prized historical sites.
Like the high walls of the town’s medieval mud castle, thousands of small dwellings have crumbled to grey powder, leaving few air pockets for trapped survivors.
Bam’s poor suburbs now resemble huge grey sandbanks that are scattered with clothes, wooden beams and stray paper.
Whipped up by a desert wind on Sunday, thick clouds of dust billowed across the rubble, forcing the searchers to cover their faces in cotton scarves.
Many of them were volunteers from outside Bam, at least 20 000 of whom answered a government appeal for willing hands.
”I could not stand to see only foreigners helping, so I came to do whatever anyone needs,” said Naseer Imami, a businessman from Tehran who arrived in Bam with a bulldozer.
With few resources to offer Bam’s destitute people, and little organisation behind its relief effort, according to Western aid workers, the government on Sunday asked for no more volunteers.
Humanitarian workers do not often sound so downbeat. But they are faced with a near impossible job and surrounded by survivors coping with unimaginable loss.
As an Algerian rescue dog team drove down the main road, an elderly man screamed: ”What are you doing here? My family is dead. What are you doing here?”
Another survivor, Mohamed Asadabadi, walked down a side street carrying the shrouded corpse of his brother.
”Soon I will have found all my relatives’ bodies,” he said. ”Then I will leave.”
On a bed in a makeshift clinic, Mohammed Sayedi (70) lay bandaged and sobbing. He described lying trapped for three hours alongside the bodies of his four sons and four daughters.
He is likely to die of the internal injuries he suffered there, the nurse treating him said later.
The dog handling teams in Bam, mostly European, including two from Britain, were on Sunday given another reason to call off the search for survivors.
At 1pm a series of small tremors shook the town, raising fears of another massive quake.
John Holland, the leader of one of the British dog teams, Rapid UK, knows more about earthquakes than most of the handlers in Bam.
A fire officer based in Hartley, Gloucestershire, he has combed the rubble left by 22 quakes, including disasters in Mexico, Turkey and Taiwan. Holland said he had never seen a more hopeless aftermath than in Bam.
”There was a site in the Philippines that we worked on for nine days, the average is probably six or seven days,” he said, visibly exhausted, after not having had any sleep since the disaster struck.
”I think it’s highly likely we’ll pull out tomorrow after only two days,” Holland said. ”I can’t speak for the other teams, but I doubt they think differently.”
”We’re still getting a lot of requests to search places. People might say they can hear knocking or whatever. But the truth is, this is as hopeless as it gets.
”It’s total devastation and there are no survivors that we know of. People here have been left in a hopeless situation. Because of the way the mud walls crumbled, they don’t even have anything to rebuild with.”
An interior ministry spokesperson said that the death toll had reached 22 000, but was likely to rise.
The ministry said on Sunday that 20 500 bodies had already been recovered and buried.
A local official predicted the final death toll would top 30 000, noting that some outlying villages had been totally destroyed.
Amid all the suffering, there were also signs on Sunday that the rescue effort is being hampered by lack of organisation and security, with reports from Bam of looting and stealing of humanitarian aid. — Guardian Unlimited Â