Lush paddy fields filled with death & despair

Villagers carry an earthquake victim during a mass funeral in Bantul, Yogyakarta yesterday. At least 2,914 people were killed and thousands injured when a strong earthquake rocked Indonesia's densely-populated island of Java. PHOTO: AFP

"Elder sister, elder sister," she mumbled as she wept in the shade of a tree near her ruined home. The woman, who gave her name as Purkasih, said her sister Duljiah was trapped in the kitchen.

About a dozen young men, some with swollen faces and gaping cuts in their legs, tried desperately to clear the rubble. Finally they found Duljiah, dead under the wreckage.

This fertile district along the Indonesian coast was once dotted with houses along the sprawling paddy fields and lush groves of green. Now, nearly everywhere, there are piles of rubble and destruction.

"There is only one house remaining standing here," said Ngadiyo, 63, crouching in front of the ruins of his house in the hamlet of Suren Wetan in the central part of Bantul district, one of the areas worst-hit by the quake.

"Even that is not safe any more," he said.

His elder brother, Jodi Riwono, 46, sat on part of a collapsed wall, covered in bruises.

"I have never gone through an earthquake this strong during my entire life," Riwono said.

He awakened with his lower body trapped by rubble but his upper body was intact, protected by a space created by a falling beam that had got stuck on a cupboard.

"I don't have many years to live," he said, explaining why he had refused calls by passing neighbours to flee north amid rumours that tidal waves were forming off the coast. "But if I have to die, then I will die here."

Slowly, he said, he disengaged his legs from the wreckage but lost consciousness, Finally he was rescued by a grandson.

"I thank God that I am allowed more time to live," Riwono said.

The earthquake that struck off the southern coast of Java island killed at least 1,700 people, injured thousands more and caused mass destruction.

Thousands of families fled their homes in panic after the 6.2 magnitude quake struck early in the morning, many running for higher ground amid false rumours of a tsunami like the one that devastated the country in December 2004.

But Bakit, an 18-year-old high school student with the side of his face badly swollen and bruised, said running anywhere was impossible.

"Even us healthy men could not see if we could run -- because of the dust raised by the falling houses," he said. "I was thrown by the quake and could only crawl out as everything was falling around me."