INDIA: Terrible Totals

• Share

Uncounted thousands of the quick and the dead still lay last week in the ruins of Quetta in British Baluchistan, smeared by earthquake last fortnight (TIME, June 10). Against the menace of fire, flood, jackals, looters and cholera, a British division surrounded the town and dug frantically in the ruins. But when a rumor spread that the British planned to dynamite and abandon Quetta, natives set up a mighty howl, pointed out that in other earthquakes men had been dug out alive as long as a week afterward.

Added last week to Quetta's 26,000 dead were estimates of at least 30,000 more buried in the ruins of a hundred villages and towns from Kalat to Mastung. Survivors at Quetta watched with weary awe last week as another earthquake split a mountain in the distance and made a depression where the peak had been.