Tide of Trees & Tigers

Seismographs the world over one day last fortnight registered an earthquake so violent that the record of its convulsions ran off the paper. Because of the incomplete recordings, seismologists were unable at first to determine the quake's location, later reckoned that it must have hit hardest in southeastern Tibet and in northern Assam (a province of India). Communications with this wild mountain region, always poor, had stopped abruptly; the extent of the damage done by the quake could only be guessed at. By last week, frightening evidence of the quake's dreadful work in Assam had begun to reach the outer world.

Shipping on the lower Brahmaputra River (whose source is in the Himalayas) was dislocated by a tide of tens of thousands of uprooted trees and the bodies of tigers, elephants and other wild life borne down the river from the earthquake area. The waters of the Brahmaputra, blackened with sulphur that the quake had churned up from the earth's innards, cast up millions of dead and dying fish. Up in the mountains the river had been dammed by landslides. Indian air force pilots in Liberator bombers were sent to blast the river free, but before they could go to work, the water burst free and innundated vast stretches of land. Ledo airfield, built as a U.S. Air Force base during World War II, was destroyed.

Frightened travelers who managed to make their way out of the earthquake region told of entire villages that had been swallowed. Thousands of people and cattle were marooned on islands in flooded areas. Brahmin priests performed propitiation ceremonies to the goddess of earth and the god of destruction. The quake had not yet spent itself. Hills were still disappearing and new hills were rising out of the laboring earth. Peasants in the area sat in numb and sleepless terror, watching tumblers half-filled with water for signs of further tremors. At the slightest trembling of the water, they would rush frantically to open ground. At week's end New Delhi heard that the death toll was close to 5,000.

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