'Oh Ali. Oh Ali. Oh Ali my brother is dead. My flower is gone. Oh God, our young people are dying.' The woman's mourning pierced the low din of crawling traffic as she watched her brother carried past her in a bloody blanket. 'Khoda. Khoda. Khoda,' she cried, invoking the name of God, 'my world is over'.
Thirty-six hours after an earthquake flattened the ancient city of Bam killing more than 20,000 people, the woman stood by a small lane off the main street grieving as the corpses that had been her neighbours were carried out in sheets, mattresses and blankets and loaded on to a pink suburban bus.
The scene was repeated across Bam. Women wailed and slapped their faces in grief; men scrambled through broken concrete in an effort to extract the dead - for few held out hope of finding anyone alive.
As the woman's wailing continued, a few metres away Majid Bahman stepped aside as a confused and crying youth carried a dead child toward the street. Majid was in a state of shock, and his bearded face showed little emotion as he spoke.
'We started feeling the ground shake about two hours before the main earthquake, but it was a cold night so we did not leave the house,' he said, pointing to the pile of rubble that was once his home. 'After this house collapsed, five people were dug out without any injury. It was a miracle, but 15 or 16 members of my family are dead.'
Nearby, 20 men laboured brick by brick to clear rubble from one of Bam's thousands of collapsed buildings. A leg was found protruding from between two slabs of concrete. Bare hands dug out the body and soon it was wrapped in a blanket and added to the steady stream being loaded into the bus.