Word: quetta
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...quake swept up the Plain of No Riches, along the farther side of the Suliman mountain wall. When it stopped, Quetta, Kalat, Mastung, Shikapur and dozens of villages were a plain of rubble. Alert Sir Alexander yelled to his household to stand in the doorways. The house tumbled but the doorways stood. Then Sir Alexander went to work...
...Indian Britons, Quetta is a coveted assignment. The great heat of the Indus never reaches its plateau. Even in summer it is cool enough for polo. And in winter its thick clay houses can be kept warm. Surrounded by mountains, Quetta's plain is green with grapes and melons. Under British patronage the town has grown to 60,000, reared some fine Western buildings, drawn trade from southwestern Asia. And the Pathans keep life in Quetta from ever getting really dull. Last week, however, it was not the Pathans but the most disastrous earthquake in twelve years that picked...
Unofficial estimates gave the number of dead as more than 40,000. Of these some 200 were white men, women and children. The R. A. F. barracks collapsed, killing 57 Britons. The crashing hangars wrecked 21 planes out of 27. The police barracks fell on Quetta's entire police force of 160, wiping it out. In that whole city of 60,000 souls, only three buildings stood: Government House, a Catholic school and a brewery...
Computing only Quetta's calamity, more than 20,000 were buried deep in the ruins, many alive. But Death had not finished looking for them. First came the sniffing jackals and pariah dogs. Then fire broke out, burning some. Finally water poured out of the cracked earth, drowning others. From the fast-rotting bodies of the dead, cholera germs fanned out across Quetta. Then the earth began to rock once more, settling the ruins deeper, and a landslide rolled down the nearby Mountain of Death. In this fantastic register of disaster, a Pathan raid failed to materialize at once...
...match Quetta's disaster last week, statisticians were obliged to recall Japan's 1923 earthquake in which 99,331 were killed...