THE earthquake arrived as Bam slept. Dust engulfed the city at 5.28am as the ancient trading centre on the Silk Road was reduced to ruins. By 5.29am most of the dead and the injured lay buried in their mud-brick homes.

Entire neighbourhoods collapsed; in the old quarter of Bam hardly a building remained upright. In one street, only a wall and the trees were standing.

State television played image upon image of disaster. People were shown carrying away the injured, while neighbours cried uncontrollably next to the blanket-covered bodies of their loved ones. One man held his head in his hands and wailed.

At the city's only cemetery, a crowd of about 1000 people wailed and beat their chests over some 500 corpses that lay on the ground. The dead were being buried in mass graves dug by a bulldozer, which mowed makeshift pits in the sand.

Mohammed Karimi, in his 30s, was at the cemetery with the bodies of his wife and four-year-old daughter.

''Last night before she went to sleep she made me a drawing and kissed me four times,'' he said of his daughter, Nazenine, whom he held in his arms.

''When I asked, 'Why four kisses,' she said, 'Maybe I won't see you again, papa','' said Karimi, tears streaming down his face.

Maryam, 17, mourned her relatives. ''I have lost all my family. My parents, my grandmother, and two sisters are under the rubble,'' she said.

One old woman, disconsolate with grief, smeared her face with dirt, only able to utter: ''My child, my child.''

Once a city of 80,000, Bam's population, most of whom are now homeless, huddled in the open spaces, where the streets used to be.

Waves of panic swept through the survivors as a series of aftershocks destroyed buildings that had withstood the main quake. One early aftershock registered a magnitude of 5.3, according to the geophysics institute of Tehran University.

The emergency services were unable to cope. Two hospitals collapsed in the earthquake, killing scores of nurses and doctors. The government said it had sent 19 aircraft to take survivors to hospitals and it was using helicopters to lift out some of the injured. One commercial airliner was pictured crammed full of desperate, dirty civilians.

Elsewhere, the dead were piled on to the back seats of cars or lifted into trucks. Some of the injured were taken to neighbouring towns.

Roads into Bam were choked with ambulances and cars packed with people desperate to discover whether their relatives were alive. Residents handed out biscuits to the motorists and distributed petrol to ambulances.

Eyewitnesses said few aid workers were at the scene and the hospitals that had withstood the quake were filled to overflowing.

Residents told reporters that they felt let down by the authorities. Ruhollah Bahrami, a shopkeeper, lamented the lack of outside help.

He said: ''If this were the West, we would have had plenty of help by now.''

It was a sentiment which unified a broken population. Despite radio reports saying help had been dispatched, by nightfall no outside help had been seen in the city.

Yesterday, it was left to shocked Iranians to help their countrymen. In Tehran, volunteers jammed a blood donation centre; one doctor told Iranian television that 650 people were on the waiting list.

Ministries set up bank accounts for donated funds, and the governors of Fars province asked for blankets and non-perishable food items, and asked all males under 25 to head towards Bam, in the neighbouring province of Kerman, to help in the relief work.

At dusk, frightened survivors braced themselves for sub-zero temperatures, and said they hoped relief supplies would come soon.

''No-one has come to help us, all we are after is a tent. I feel I could die tonight it's so cold,'' said Tahmasb Yousefabadi, 25, a taxi driver who lost 17 family members.

Survivors lit fires to keep warm and made torches from palm branches as they dug with bare hands for survivors.

Throughout the city, now without water, gas or electricity, people sat shivering in their nightclothes - all their possessions were buried in their homes.

previous quakes that shook iran

Some of the major earthquakes in Iran in the past three decades.

April 10, 1972 - An earthquake with a radius of more than 250 miles struck southern Iran around Ghir Karzin, killing more than 5374.

March 22, 1977 - 167 killed at Bandar Abbas, in the southeastern coastal region.

April 6, 1977 - 352 deaths in Isfahan province.

December 21, 1977 - A quake at Zarand, in Kerman province, killed 521.

September 16, 1978 - 15,000 died when the town of Tabas and surrounding villages were levelled.

January 16, 1979 - An earthquake at Khorasan province killed 199 people.

November 14, 1979 - 385 died in a quake which hit a string of villages between Qaen and Khaf in Khorasan province.

June 11, 1981 - 1027 were killed and more than 800 injured in the town of Golbaf.

June 21, 1990 - The worst earthquake in Iran's history killed 35,000 and injured 100,000 in the Caspian regions of Gilan and Zanjan.

February 28, 1997 - About 1000 killed in north-western Iran.

May 10, 1997 - 1560 people died in rural areas of eastern Iran near the Afghan border.

June 22, 2002 - Dozens of villages were razed and 229

people were killed in Qazvin province.