Moon Dance

Britain's famed "thin red line" of Empire goes little farther than Quetta, lying beyond the Suliman mountains which wall off India's rich valley of the Indus. The vulnerable door in that wall is the Bolan Pass. With its back to the door is Quetta; beyond it, on the British railroad to the Afghan border, the forts of New Chaman and Pishin. This is the land of the fanatic, black-bearded Pathans. And at Quetta, to draw their teeth, are stationed a British division, the Indian Staff College, a Royal Air Force training school and Sir Alexander Norman Ley Cater, 55-year-old bald bachelor and Agent to the Governor General.

To Indian Britons, Quetta is a coveted assignment. The great heat of the Indus never reaches its plateau. Even in summer it is cool enough for polo. And in winter its thick clay houses can be kept warm. Surrounded by mountains, Quetta's plain is green with grapes and melons. Under British patronage the town has grown to 60,000, reared some fine Western buildings, drawn trade from southwestern Asia. And the Pathans keep life in Quetta from ever getting really dull. Last week, however, it was not the Pathans but the most disastrous earthquake in twelve years that picked out beautiful Quetta for destruction.

The world has rarely seen a more thorough job. Survivors claimed that just before 3 a. m. a red light filled the sky and the jackals on the plain fell silent. The earth shook, settled back, shook again longer and more violently, and then once more. "For half a minute the earth seemed to go mad," said a British survivor. "Boughs of trees, normally many feet from the ground, swept the earth. Birds fell from their nests. The moon danced crazily in the sky. The roar I can liken only to the sound of 20 express trains."

The quake swept up the Plain of No Riches, along the farther side of the Suliman mountain wall. When it stopped, Quetta, Kalat, Mastung, Shikapur and dozens of villages were a plain of rubble. Alert Sir Alexander yelled to his household to stand in the doorways. The house tumbled but the doorways stood. Then Sir Alexander went to work.

Unofficial estimates gave the number of dead as more than 40,000. Of these some 200 were white men, women and children. The R. A. F. barracks collapsed, killing 57 Britons. The crashing hangars wrecked 21 planes out of 27. The police barracks fell on Quetta's entire police force of 160, wiping it out. In that whole city of 60,000 souls, only three buildings stood: Government House, a Catholic school and a brewery.

Computing only Quetta's calamity, more than 20,000 were buried deep in the ruins, many alive. But Death had not finished looking for them. First came the sniffing jackals and pariah dogs. Then fire broke out, burning some. Finally water poured out of the cracked earth, drowning others. From the fast-rotting bodies of the dead, cholera germs fanned out across Quetta. Then the earth began to rock once more, settling the ruins deeper, and a landslide rolled down the nearby Mountain of Death. In this fantastic register of disaster, a Pathan raid failed to materialize at once only because the earthquake had shaken their hill villages too. Sir Alexander asked and got the power to declare martial law, inasmuch as all the police were dead. Then he sealed Quetta like a tomb, for fear of cholera. Only soldiers prowled through the stinking city.

Prime fear of the British last week was that the superstitious natives would blame the whole thing on the British Raj, for the shaken area was entirely within the northern square of Baluchistan which Britain rules as a territory. And the ancient citadel of the Khan of Kalat, friend of the British, lay in ruins, as though for a judgment.

To match Quetta's disaster last week, statisticians were obliged to recall Japan's 1923 earthquake in which 99,331 were killed.

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