Desperate efforts have been mounted in Mianzhu as rescuers still have some hope of reaching survivors. The roads were black and eerily quiet for a city of such size. But on a street near the centre, floodlights and the grind of cutting equipment announced that rescue workers were toiling through the night. It had been a commercial bank, said one bystander; a Bank of China, said someone else. You couldn't tell any more. All that was left was a great mound where the building had slid forward into the road as if it were melting butter. Slumped against the ladder of his vehicle, a firefighter tried to recover his strength. His team, from the paramilitary police, had begun work at one in the morning. Twenty-one hours later, they had not stopped. Behind him, a bulldozer scooped plaster, brick and metal from the wreckage. Rescuers had pulled out seven people overnight, only for one to die later. In a whole day, they had found just one survivor. No one knew how many people were inside when the building collapsed so abruptly. So far no dead bodies had been found. Perhaps most inside got out in time; perhaps they lay beneath too many feet of debris.