It was delicate work for the searchers to remove the woman’s body from the rubble of a village that effectively ceased to exist in Morocco’s deadliest earthquake in over six decades.
Her 25-year-old fiance Omar Ait Mbarek watched the digging Sunday with his eyes red and full of tears, and surrounded by onlookers, just kilometres from the quake epicentre in the Atlas Mountains.
On September 8, the strongest-ever quake to hit Morocco killed at least 2,012 people and injured over 2,059, many of them critically, according to the latest official figures.
Friday’s 6.8-magnitude quake struck 72 kilometres (45 miles) southwest of the tourist hub of Marrakesh, wiping out entire villages in rural areas.
Mbarek was on the phone with his fiance when the shaking started and he heard kitchen utensils crash to the floor before the line cut out. He knew she was gone.
“What do you want me to say? I’m wounded,” he told AFP after Mina Ait Bihi, weeks from becoming his wife, was carried away in blankets to a makeshift cemetery that already held 68 others.
The men who had carefully used their hands to scoop away the dirt that covered her also found her phone and handed it over to the grieving man.
Read: Frightened Morocco quake survivors camp out on streets
All around him the village of Tikht, previously home to at least 100 families, was a tangle of timbers, chunks of masonry as well as broken plates, shoes and the occasional intricately patterned rug.
“Life is finished here,” said Mohssin Aksum, 33, who had family living in the tiny settlement. “The village is dead.”
Like many of the hardest-hit villages, it was a small rural place with a significant number of buildings constructed with a traditional mix of stone, timber and a mortar composed of mud.
Dozens of residents, mourning relatives and soldiers were gathered at the ruins. Several said they could not remember any previous earthquake in the area.
“It wasn’t something people here thought about when building their houses,” said 23-year-old student Abdelrahman Edjal, who lost most of his family in the disaster.
But the quality of the building materials was not uppermost in his mind as he sat on a boulder among the rubble under the strikingly blue sky and surrounded by mountains.
He had gone out for a walk after dinner when the shaking began, and saw people trying to escape their collapsing houses.
He pulled his own father from the ruins of the family home, but the injuries were too serious. He died with his son close by.
Twisted steel reinforcement rods poked out of the debris in Tikht, so clearly some more recent building techniques were part of the local structures.
Daily life was already hard in the area, which is a roughly two-hour drive from the jobs that Marrakesh’s massive tourist industry can offer.
Aksum, who has local roots but lives in Rabat, said the quake has taken away the little bit that people had.
As he spoke, he gestured to his nose, and said the livestock that had been kept by locals was now buried under the debris and beginning to rot.
“Now, people have less than nothing,” he noted.
While he spoke, two young men in clothing streaked with the white dust of the ruins sat on boulders and cried, but said nothing.
By Sunday, emergency housing in the form of yellow tents was visible on the road into town.
Members of the government’s civil protection service were carrying camp beds from a military-type truck toward the tents.
Non-profit groups were also in the area, assessing what the people remaining in villages like Tikht need, beyond the obvious shelter, food and water.
Several people said they were still in shock over their losses and the scale of the damage, and could not say with any certainty what their next steps might be.
But Omar Ait Mbarek said he was sure of one thing.
“I will rebuild my house,” he said, still holding his late fiancee’s dust-covered phone, before walking away into the debris.
