Night falls slowly; the sun sets behind the mountains. Abdul Wajid knows he doesn't have much more time. He's been waiting the whole day at the bus station that sits at the entry to Muzarrafabad. He continues to hope. Wajid asks every passing driver for a ride. Where to? It's all the same to Wajid. "The main thing is to get out of this city of death," he said. "I can't stay here anymore."

As another mini-bus rolls up to the destroyed bus station and gets caught in traffic, Wajid grabs his chance and hops the boarding-steps. The driver and passengers protest, but Wajid ignores them. He forces himself into the cabin and closes the door behind him. He waves through small rear window to signal his success. He's managed to get out of Muzarrafabad. In a few hours he'll be in secure Islamabad.

Scenes like this one are constantly playing out in this provincial capital city of Kashmir. Muzarrafabad was near the epicenter of the earthquake: now almost 80 percent of the city is destroyed. The enormous market is gone. An occasional rooftop juts out of the debris. The smell of corpses hangs over the entire city. Survivors try to escape the smell by holding handkerchiefs over their faces. The estimated total of dead currently rests at 15,000: that would be more than ten percent of the population.

The count will soon rise. The villages surrounding Muzarrafabad have still not been searched. The valley is encircled by mountains that shine in the sun, as though polished: fields and forests once there have slid away from the force of the quake. Presumably several thousand dead will be found in the surrounding villages. Wajid comes from one of these villages.

Injured lying next to the dead

Wajid still can't believe he survived the earthquake, which measured 7.6 on the Richter scale. He was drinking tea with his parents when the earth began to shake. In itself, that's nothing unusual for people in Kashmir; light earthquakes are a part of daily life. Wajid says it began lightly. "I immediately ran out of the house, and took my parents with me," he recounts.

He didn't manage to save his wife, nor his two kids. "We were thrown to the floor and we held our hands over our heads," he says. The only thing he remembers is the tremendous enveloping noise. "I thought the sky was falling on our heads."

Muzaffarabad saw no help for a long while. The Pakistani army worked through the rubble on the surrounding mountain roads until they reached the city on Monday morning.

Since then, help has slowly been trickling in. Convoys of trucks have been arriving. They bring water, food, and tents. But, thousands of survivors can no longer wait. Like Abdul Wajid, they've decided to leave. They stand in large groups in front of the bus station. Some try to throw themselves onto cars when they drive past. Whenever a large truck drives by, they cling onto the truck bed. Sometimes the driver reacts violently; other times, he allows them to stay.

It's hard to tell what people in this city did to get through the last several days. They had neither food nor water. Even the people who were pulled out of the rubble found themselves in hellish circumstances. The hospital had collapsed, and residents had no tents, so the soccer stadium became a sort of open-air military hospital -- without beds or medicine. Dozens of injured continue to lie there on blankets. Several meters away are decaying corpses.

At noon, a heavy storm arrives. Within a few minutes, the valley is dark. The torrential rain lasts for an hour. Hail beats down on the car roof. Soon, the streets are flooded by water. People stand drenched in the open, or press under the emergency tents. They are familiar with monsoons.

From now on, the storms will return every day at this time. Then comes winter. That's another reason so many people are leaving now.

Switchbacks through despair

After the rain, even a routine drive in a car is daunting. People constantly pound the windshield and pull on the doors, begging for a place. Dramatic scenes play out outside. Empty trucks are boarded by the desperate. As soon as an aid convoy enters the city, dozens clamber aboard the truck-beds. They take away as much as they can carry.

Although the army starts to accompany these convoys, people continue their desperate raids. "Better to get slammed a few times that to die of dehydration," said one of the rioters. His hard-won booty: two bottles of water and a small bag of rice.

Amid these scenes of chaos, the rescuers set out to begin their work. During the morning, a troop of German ISAF troops arrives from neighboring Afghanistan. Within 30 minutes, they install a makeshift deployment center. They've also brought with them a group from THW, Germany's federal disaster relief agency, who immediately go to work with their hi-tech tools.

Following tips from residents, they search several homes for survivors, but the only thing they find in most of them are bodies of the dead. "Seventy-two hours is the critical timeframe for rescuing people from the rubble, and we've just passed that," THW's Ralf Klein-Hitpass says, describing the mission. "But we still have to hope for a small miracle."

But 21-year-old Azid doesn't believe another miracle like that will be possible in Muzaffarabad. Together with his family, he's loading what little they have left into the bed of a van.

There are mattresses and even a television Azid was able to pull out of the rubble that was once his home. As he finishes loading, a group of people who also want to leave gather around the vehicle. "You still have money, you can go," an old man yells, with tears in his eyes. "You're just going to leave us here to die." But Azid doesn't listen, he's already behind the wheel and he applies pressure to the gas pedal.

Abdul Wajid arrives in Islamabad at 8 p.m. The drive has been stressful, and the vehicle was so full that people had to squeeze in, he later says by telephone. When Wajid made a rest stop, nobody wanted to get out. Until he can find a new place to live, Wajid is staying with a professor he befriended in the capital city and he's just enjoyed his first warm meal since Saturday.

"I was sad about leaving my hometown," he says, pausing briefly, "but it was the right decision." As soon as he can find a car, he says he's going to return to Muzaffarabad to pick up his parents. But he knows it will be a long time before he can return to live in the devastated city.