The Day the Earth Shook

When the first tremors began in the parched, rock-ribbed mountains of western Sicily last week, most of the 3,000 people of Salaparuta took refuge on the slopes just below their hilltop town. There, among their goats and grapevines, they waited in the chilly night for the danger to pass. At 3 a.m. the earth rolled again, at first gently, then with a sickening sway. Before their eyes, Salaparuta crumbled apart like a child's sand castle. Within 30 seconds, the nine-century-old vineyard town was little more than dust. Left standing over the moonlit rubble was a solitary sentinel, a church tower, whose bell was jolted by the earth's angry vibrations into a final eerie death knell.

Similar scenes of devastation unfold ed elsewhere in a land that has long lived with poverty and the Mafia's cruel rule. Unlike Salaparuta, where all but a few of the villagers had time to flee, scores of people were crushed to death in cascades of masonry in such neighboring towns as Montevago, Gibellina, Santa Margherita di Belice, Salemi and Santa Ninfa. Montevago's lawyer, along with five companions, perished trying to race the tremors in his tiny Fiat. The town's doctor died on his way to save his mother. The earthquake was by far Italy's worst since 75,000 people were killed at the other end of tremor-prone Sicily 60 years ago. The toll: as many as 500 people dead, more than 1,000 injured and 80,000 left homeless over a 600-square-mile carpet of destruction in one of the Mezzogiorno's most backward regions.

Aftershocks & Quagmires. The search for victims continued for long, wearying hours. A seven-year-old girl was pulled out alive after more than two days in the wreckage of her home --though later she died of her injuries. The rescue of a 104-year-old woman ended in the same way: dug out from the debris, she succumbed on the way to a hospital. In Gibellina, the dead were piled on top of mossy sandstone tombs in the town cemetery.

Much of western Sicily was turned into a giant refugee camp. Hundreds of thousands of Siciliani nervously slept outdoors even in such relatively unscathed cities as Palermo, because aftershocks continued to be felt for days. At the quake's epicenter, the homeless made tents of tarpaulin, huddled by bonfires, and waited for the government to distribute food and medicine, much of it contributed by the U.S. and Britain. Then, as if nature had not already done its worst, violent rains and winds lashed the quake area at week's end, turning the refugee encampments into quagmires and halting for a time the delivery of relief supplies.

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