‘Is there anybody out there?’

Today, all that is visible is her long hair, an arm, and a foot. Up in the mountains, just below the peak, her corpse now stands witness to the death in her village: not a single house stands upright, Safeena has taken the official death count to 300 in this village alone.

After a three-hour climb up four successive hills along a craggy, landslide-prone road, The Indian Express team is the first to reach this village.

The survivors, shocked and hungry, are mourning alone, having spent the last two cold nights under an open sky. The only people for company, the personnel of the Border Security Force who have come down from Sopore with blankets and rations.

In fact, rattling off the numbers of one’s dead has become a bizarre kind of greeting in the village. Whenever, two villagers come across each other, they show their fingers, indicating the number of dead from their respective families. The dead lie in the courtyards as nobody can muster even four people, who will carry each body to the graveyard.

Safeena’s father is frail but he has been searching for his daughter ever since the quake struck and she went missing. Seeing a rescue team going up the hill, he marches in front, showing the way up. But when he finds her, he does not break down.

There’s no change in his face. He hastily follows the team down when they say they can’t extricate the body.

The father isn’t the only one. Several others in the village just sit there, their faces blank, their eyes drained of all expression. Local teacher Muhammad Tariq Hussain Minhas has the reason: ‘‘There is not a single house which has not collapsed, not a single family which hasn’t been touched by death.’’ Nine of his family have been killed, including two sisters.

Manhas was cutting corn outside his house when the quake struck. ‘‘The mountains first shuddered, then spouted dust which soon enveloped our village, everything became invisible.’’

And it was only when that dust settled that the living saw the dead. They saw that 24 had been killed when they had assembled in the house of the ailing Imam of the local grand mosque, Muzamil Hussain Jagwal to ask about his health.

A dozen of them were from the Imam’s family, including the Imam himself.

His son is alive. ‘‘I was at my father’s bedside when the floor shook and the walls pressed in,’’ says Abdul Kabir. Kabir’s daughter is still buried inside. ‘‘She was playing hide and seek with me at the time (of the earthquake). She used to hide and then, in minutes, would show her face at the door,’’ the father recalls, bending down to look underneath the stones. ‘‘I am praying I can get her body now.’’