In a narrow passage in the village of Moulay Brahim, in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, a house had spilled across the lane in a drift of sandy ruins. It was largely unrecognisable from what it once was, save for the unlikely survival of a solitary room left beached atop the rubble, the blue paint of its walls still visible.
Abderahim Imni, with his hand bandaged from where he was injured by falling masonry during Friday’s devastating earthquake, was directing the cleanup in the street where his home once stood.
An electrician aged 43, he had been sleeping in the surviving part of his house along with three other family members when the rest of the building collapsed around them as a series of devastating shocks struck the village at just after 11pm. It was, he conceded, a lucky escape.
“I felt the house shaking. We were covered in debris for a moment but it was only for a short time and then we managed to escape,” he said. “Even then it wasn’t easy. There was no electricity and the air was full of dust. You couldn’t see. My heart was pounding like I was having a heart attack.”
In the choking gloom, Abderahim and his family members had clambered down a drop on to the talus of teetering rubble and fled to a nearby garden where they spent the night.
The family and their neighbours in this village of 3,000 were still coming to terms with the death and destruction that was visited on them so suddenly.
In the heart of this poor rural village, which sprawls down a steep mountain slope, there was almost no building left unscathed. Some houses, like Abderahim’s, had disintegrated. Others had been left standing but with upper storeys now bowing dangerously over the narrow stepped lanes, threatening to tumble under their own weight.
But the worst impact has been on human lives. Moulay Brahim’s residents say 25 people died here that they know of, among more than 2,100 known so far to have died across the quake zone.
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, villagers dug the living and the dead out of the ruins with the most rudimentary of tools, giving first aid to the survivors until ambulances could reach the village. Landslides blocking the roads had to be cleared first.
“I was asleep when the earthquake struck,” said Fatna Bechar. “I could not escape because the roof fell on me. I was trapped. I was saved by my neighbours who cleared the rubble with their bare hands. Now, I am living with them in their house because mine was completely destroyed.”
On a main road at the upper end of the village, coffins bearing a mother and her daughter, two of four family members killed when their house collapsed, were being put into an ambulance on Sunday morning to be taken to a nearby hospital.
As the bodies were being loaded, a group of weeping relatives surrounded the vehicle crying out the names of the dead.
Standing nearby, Oumizane Lahoucine, 56, described the moment the earth shook and he ran to shelter in the street. “It lasted for six seconds,” he recalled, in a suit jacket and trousers smudged with dust. “It felt like we were being bombed.”
Behind his blue painted door, the stairs to the upper floor were choked with fallen masonry. The walls of every room were cracked. One side of his house had been pushed into the road outside.
While a food distribution and an international rescue team did reach the village on Sunday, Morocco’s military, whose helicopters could be seen from the village flying over the mountains, had yet to arrive, tasked for now with assisting more remote and even more badly damaged villages still inaccessible by road.
So the villagers of Moulay Brahim were largely helping themselves, digging their streets out from under the ruins, as figures emerged from doors carrying bundles of bedding and clothing to where they were sleeping in the open, shivering through the cool mountain nights.
While the scenes on the road to Moulay Brahim appeared to offer a picture of random destruction, some towns left almost unscathed while other villages were hit hard, there was a grim logic that explained why some buildings fell and others remain standing.
The 6.8-magnitude quake, which shook cities from Marrakech down to the coast, damaged most older houses made of clay brick and cinder blocks in poorer, rural communities, with newer concrete buildings surviving better.
For those who survived the initial quake, the pressing question now is when meaningful help will reach them and what it will involve. For while encampments of tents have begun appearing in some neighbouring locations and alongside the main road closer to the coastal plain, shelters had yet to reach Moulay Brahim on Sunday.
Among those who had been sleeping in the open was Moulay Ali Azouad, sitting with his family by the side of one of the village’s main roads. They had brought out mattresses and blankets from their damaged homes in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, but they said they were scared to go back to fetch more and warmer clothes.
“The earthquake happened at about five past 11,” said Moulay Ali. “The ground began to shake. It was a small tremor at first and then 10 more shocks came really fast. We all ran straight from the house and have stayed outside ever since.”
He pointed to a stony layby on the far side of the road. “The women sleep there, and the men sleep here on the pavement,” he said. “The only help we have had so far is from Moroccan relatives living abroad who have sent money for food. But we need clothes and bedding and shelter because it is cold here at night.”
Only now are villagers beginning to ask about the future and who will rebuild their ruined village.
“We’re waiting for the government to bring us the help we need and tell us what will happen,” said Abderahim Imni as he supervised a boulder being shifted from his lane.
Until then, the villagers of Moulay Brahim will continue waiting.