He carried her back to their mud-walled home and laid her near her two children.

A short time later, three soldiers came to the mud-walled home of 25-year-old Jose Arnoldo Cerritos.

He saw nothing which had a walled garden, but he did find a small mud-walled home that had a courtyard and he dropped his pack in the main room as a sign of ownership.

In the old city, a jumble of mud-walled homes that can be seen for miles in each direction, some streets have hardly any homes that have not been hit by rockets or shells.

This evening, Indian state television showed pictures of the devastation, with scenes of crumbled mud-walled homes and twisted piles of corrugated-metal roofs.

I gazed through the tinted windows at roadside vegetable sellers, horse-drawn carts and mud-walled homes, the commonplaces of everyday Chinese life that I might never see again.

People were still digging bodies out of the rubble of their mud-walled homes on Tuesday afternoon, he said.

His family lived in a mud-walled home dug out of a hillside in the loess plateau in Shaanxi Province, in northwestern China.

Officials said later that one person in the mud-walled home had been killed.

A group of children had been playing a noisy game of tag near their mud-walled homes.