At quake epicenter, they fed me noodles

(Emma Graham-Harrison has been a correspondent in Beijing for over three years, mostly covering energy and environment stories. She previously reported for Reuters from Madrid and London. In the following story, she describes her day-long hike into the cut-off epicentre of the Wenchuan earthquake and the devastation and generosity she found when she got there.)

By Emma Graham-Harrison

YINGXIU, China (Reuters) - An aftershock jolted me awake with the thuds of collapsing buildings. We were sleeping in a tent far from the tottering remains of Yangzi but still, it was a long time before my heart stopped racing.

A stream of dirty, red-eyed refugees had staggered along the river bank the previous evening as, after more than eight hours of walking and hitch-hiking along a buckled, broken road, we made it to the epicenter of China's deadliest quake in decades.

Someone who was leaving handed me a spare gauze square as a face mask: I gratefully tied it over my mouth and nose.

It was meant as a barrier against disease, asbestos from collapsed buildings and the smell of rotting corpses, in a city where officials say nearly 80 percent of residents may have died.

Helicopters roared in and out, flinging dust over the wounded who waited under dirty quilts with mangled arms and legs, to be carried away from the wreckage of their lives and families.

Behind them all, where Yingxiu once stood, were snarled piles of concrete and metal, rows of the dead lying in the streets just meters from makeshift refugee camps, and what looked like a grotesque experiment in engineering.

Fewer than half the town's buildings were standing and almost none was upright. Some leaned forward or back, others tipped at 45 degrees to the ground, supported by piles of rubble, their doors and windows opening to the sky.

DISINFECTANT

I went looking for the primary school, which residents said collapsed like tens of others in the quake zone.

Finding anything is difficult in a town stripped of its buildings and with streets buried in rubble. When survivors pointed vaguely "over there", it left me no clearer but with no landmarks, I wasn't sure what more to ask.

Eventually I found someone to guide me, who -- without my asking -- pointed out trapped corpses in ruins along the way. I wondered if he had led other journalists there.

Did he find us ghoulish, flocking to the scene to unearth tragedies while others uncovered survivors?

In the school courtyard, bodies were lined up in untidy rows beside the national flagpole. What was left of Yingxiu's government had decided there was nowhere safe to bury the bodies and banned parents from taking them away.

Most were covered, but two small feet were left sticking out from beneath one tarpaulin.