(Agenices)
Updated: 2008-05-17 03:50

BEICHUAN -- Piles of broken concrete rise seven stories high, and a few buildings stand askew, knocked at odd angles. People cry out the names of missing family members while rescue workers shout "Is anyone there? Is anyone there?"

On Friday, amid the little that is left of the city of Beichuan 100 hours after a massive earthquake struck central China, answers came in faint taps on concrete or muffled cries. After one such call, five volunteers dug with hands and shovels for more than four hours, freeing a middle-aged woman from a crumpled apartment building.

The woman's rescue was followed by another, and then more people were rushed away on stretchers, bruised, bleeding and covered in dust. Thirty-three in all, the government said.

The rescues brought momentary relief to the remote mountain town that collapsed on itself. Many of those left in Beichuan or who came back to search for lost family have steeled themselves for the deaths of their loved ones.

"I've called her countless times but there's no answer. Now the phone is dead," said Zhang Mingfeng, who traveled from nearby Jiangyou city, to find her 39-year-old sister who was at work at Beichuan's Commerce Bureau when Monday's quake struck. The office is now an enormous heap of brick and twisted metal, speckled by books and green metal filing cabinets.

"My cousins and I have spent the last few days crying," said Zhang, her eyes tearing as she surveyed the ruins. "The last time we saw her was Sunday, when we had lunch together. It was family time."

Beichuan, set deep in a verdant valley 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu, is surrounded by small coal and gold mines and tea plantations. Rare pandas live in its forested hills.

Among the cities hardest hit by the quake, Beichuan looks like a pile of matchsticks. Mounds of debris stand seven stories high, and smoke plumes rising from some of the wreckage. Landslides raked gigantic gashes in the mountainsides. Roads leading into the county buckled like freeway off-ramps leading to nowhere, isolating the county's three larger towns and 13 hamlets and most of its 160,000 people.

On Friday, Beichuan was abuzz with activity with soldiers, police and emergency workers who flooded into the disaster zone. Sirens wailed, eavy machinery whined and the acrid air smelled of smoke, rotting food and chemicals.

Going the other way were dozens streaming out, looking for food and shelter after days trapped.

"We've been terrified since the earthquake destroyed our home," said Shen Xinyong, who trekked for six hours down a mountain to Beichuan with her husband, two children and parents, hoping to reach Mianyang city 90 kilometers (56 miles) away.

"We've been digging the earth for our food -- gourds, potatoes -- anything we've planted," said the 27-year-old Shen. Dressed in jeans and a white sweater, she said the family brought little more than the clothes they were wearing because of the long journey.

Some brought more. Two men carried a wide-screen television, while another pushed an elderly woman on a wheelchair. Another struggled with a plastic-wrapped corpse in a wheelbarrow.

Walking through the tumble of mud, chunks of concrete, steel and glass on what is left of Beichuan's streets, hundreds of soldiers and desperate relatives searching for family, some gripping bags of food and medicines.

Among them was Liu Jingyong, a 43-year-old migrant worker, who rushed back from Zhenghzou city several provinces away to try to find his cousin.

"I have not had any information from him," said Liu who spent two days on a bus and hiking. "This is so hard on me. I don't know what is going on."

Throughout the day, teams of volunteer rescue workers from all over the country, some with dogs trained to sniff out survivors, made their way through the debris shouting for survivors.

A teenage student was pulled from the debris of her school by the five volunteers who heard her tapping and then tracked the sounds. The girl shielded her eyes from the sun when she emerged, said Xu Tao, one of the volunteers.

The same team later rescued the middle-aged woman, who after crying out to them was too weak to speak once brought to the surface. "She had the will to live," said Xu, a demobilized soldier and now an office worker in the eastern city of Tangshan. "I'm just exhausted."

One survivor, 46-year-old Peng Zhijun who suffered bone fractures and light injuries, lived by eating cigarettes and paper napkins and drinking his urine, the Xinhua News Agency said. Peng said more than 10 others had been buried with him but died because they did not listen to his advice to drink their urine, the report said.

Others were freed elsewhere in the disaster area, a mountainous area the size of Maryland. In Yingxiu, at the other end of the quake-zone yet like Beichuan one of the worst affected areas, two people were pulled from the rubble, one a man whose right foot was partly missing and covered in a bandage red with fresh blood.

White-helmeted soldiers spent hours swarming over the debris of a crushed three-story building on the grounds of a fertilizer factory in Yinghua town, to the south, near Shifang city.

Dozens of soldiers pulled free a single survivor. Described by bystanders as a 50-year-old driver, he was quickly wrapped in a floral blanket and placed on a stretcher. As rescuers carried him out to a waiting ambulance, clapping rang out.

The moment of celebration was brief -- shortly afterward, rescuers pulled out yet another body. The remains were placed inside a yellow bag and loaded into the back of a truck.

In what had been Beichuan's commercial center, alleys of restaurants, convenience stores and shoe and clothing shops were impassable with debris, overturned cars, and scattered merchandise in the way.

People picked through the ruins, looking for food or other usable items. In one section, six bodies were lying on mattresses or bed frames covered with quilts.

"It's no use," said one volunteer worker as he searched fruitlessly for survivors in the area. "This is a city of the dead."