DUJIANGYAN, China: The children who were considered fortunate escaped with a broken bone or a severed limb. The others, hundreds of them, were carried out to be buried, and their remaining classmates lay crushed beneath the rubble of the schoolhouse. "There's no hope for them," said Lu Zhiqing, 58, as she watched uniformed rescue workers trudge through mud and rain toward the mound of bricks and concrete that had once been a school. "There's no way anyone's still alive in there." A man and woman walked away from the rubble together. He sheltered her under an umbrella as she screamed, "My child is dead! Dead!" As dawn crept across this shattered town on Tuesday, it illuminated rows and rows of apartment blocks collapsed into piles, bodies wedged among the debris, newly homeless families and their neighbors clustered on the roadside, shielding themselves from the downpour with plastic tarps. The earthquake originated here in Sichuan Province, killing almost 10,000 people and trapping thousands. One of the most jarring tragedies of the disaster was the school collapse in a suburb of Dujiangyan. Several hundred children were killed, perhaps as many as 900. On Monday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew here to survey the destruction, but he was powerless to ease the suffering of the survivors. In the center of town, a woman said that she had called local government officials 10 times to plead for help in rescuing her son and mother, but no one had come. So Tuesday morning, she could do little but stand crying in front of her collapsed apartment building. Her 5-month-old son was still buried in there, as was her 56-year-old mother. "I was outside when the earthquake hit," said the woman, Wang Xiaoni, 26. "I ran back even while the ground was still shaking." She shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Who's going to help them now?" More than 10 people had been killed in that building alone, she said. She pointed across the street to a young man picking through the debris from another apartment building. "His entire family is in there," she said. People walked up and down the street taking photos with cellphones and digital cameras. "This isn't even the worst-off area," one man said. One block over, the fa