WITNESS - At quake epicentre, they fed me noodles

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 Yingxiu 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 epicentre 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 metres 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.