IRAN: The road to Bam is littered with the detritus of desperation. At a rest stop along what centuries ago was a main artery of the Silk Road, used hypodermic needles betray the highway's current infamy as a route for smuggling raw opium from Afghanistan, 200 miles to the east, across terrain that alternates desert pan with mountain ridge.
The wrecks on the roadside suggest a sharper trauma. In the frantic scramble to find medical attention for more than 10,000 people all hurt at once, the highway north from Bam became a drag strip, cars and trucks passing frantically –- and not always making it back into lane – in a 140-mile sprint to the nearest hospital in Kerman, once known as "the heart of the world," now a provincial capital.
The hospitals in Bam were flattened, as was the rest of the city, an ancient place sketched by the Silk Road trade route over a half-dozen centuries and, on the day after Christmas, erased in a matter of seconds by an even older, roughly parallel line:; a fault in the earth.
Iranian officials are not certain how many people were killed in the earthquake, when one plate beneath the surface abruptly moved northwest and the other due southeast. But more than 30,000 bodies have been buried so far in what had been a boomtown of perhaps 100,000 people.
"It’s not worth living here," said Reza Miri, his artificial leg squeaking as he walked over the rubble of his street, where steel gates remained on their hinges, but the houses behind them had disappeared.
In this city, turned into piles of rubble, only the size of the heaps denotes relative wealth. Luxury homes collapsed as thoroughly as the one-room estate Maryam Abbasnejad’s father had built by hand, and where he died with his wife, on their side of a blanket hung to divide the tiny living space in half. Maryam, 10, alone survived, with a broken arm and purple bruises down one cheek.
In Miri’s neighbourhood – working-class, by the size of the piles – survivors fended for themselves while a dozen young Iranian Red Crescent volunteers killed time watching traffic three blocks away.
"I’m a war veteran, and I haven’t seen one of these damned people come and help us," Miri said, cursing the helicopters circling overhead, air cover for another Iranian official touring the city.
A neighbour tugged free three red carpets, rolled them up and piled them onto a metallic gold Camaro; they fit nicely on the fastbackonto their open-top truck. Around the corner, a baby goat stood bleating in the cab of a loaded pick-up.
Five days after the quake, the city was emptying out. But not entirely.
"Our neighbours went to villages to stay there for shelter, but we have no car to go in," said Birjan Mohammadi, a woman in her fifties.
She squatted on a mound of bricks and watched dusk gather toward another night that she and her grandchildren – a beaming little girl of five5 or six6 and her little brother, standing side by side – would spend sleeping atop the rubble that had crushed their parents. On the ground were empty plastic bottles of Ashi Mashi cola and empty tuna tins.
"We sleep outside in the open air," the woman said. "It’s freezing cold." The relief effort was far from uniform, officials have acknowledged.
Iran’s first responder in disasters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was on the scene within hours, and by all accounts took matters firmly in hand, airlifting 4,000 wounded residents to hospitals across the country in the first 24 hours after the quake.
But distribution of the torrent of aid that arrived in the ensuing days was uneven at best.
"Look out!" a bystander yelped, as another bit of largesse was tossed off the back of a passing truck last week.
Aimed at a row of tents that a displaced family had erected at the curb of a main street, the packet whacked a journalist in the head and flapped onto the asphalt. Batool Shahrokhi picked it up – a lacy tablecloth, tightly bound in plastic – and kept talking.
A moment later, she dropped it and grabbed her weeping husband as the ground rumbled. Another after-shock.
"We have nowhere to go," she said, shrugging.