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For seven hours, through the dead of night, the screaming winds whipped across the Bay of Bengal at up to 100 m.p.h., pushing before them a thunderous storm surge that crested as high as 50 ft. On Char Clarke, an islet seven miles southwest of Urirchar, Ali Ahmed, 46, first heard the wind gusting violently during the early part of the night and saw the mangroves swaying wildly. As island elders huddled around a radio, trees and whole huts began crashing to the earth around them. Finally the huge tidal surge ravaged the settlement, submerging all except those who managed to struggle their way to the safety of a few brick buildings. Ahmed was relatively lucky: he lost only one of his five children.
By the time dawn came and the murderous storm had headed farther north, the afflicted area was stripped clean. Thatched huts and small shops, animals and people had been swept beneath the waves; thousands of fishing boats had vanished. Whole settlements had been swamped or washed into the sea. Across the length and breadth of Urirchar there hung an eerie silence, broken now and then by the wails of survivors. Only a few houses remained, among them the Forestry Department building. Of some 10,000 residents of the islet, mostly peasant farmers and a few shopkeepers, up to 7,000 were dead or missing. The flat, wet land was dotted with corpses and the carcasses of cattle; vultures and crows feasted. Upon the muddy waves of the Bay of Bengal floated hundreds upon hundreds of blackened, bloated bodies.
The great cyclone devastated seven districts in southern Bangladesh in all and affected nearly half the 10 million people who live in the area. At week's end relief officials estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 people, many of them children, had perished; thousands were injured and a quarter of a million left homeless. With so many simply washed away by the storm's fury, and with at least 400 sparsely populated chars, or tiny islands, still cut off from the mainland, it was assumed that the final death toll could double.
For almost every one of its 14 years as an independent nation, Bangladesh has been buffeted by fatal storms and floods and famine. The latest tempest, however, was the worst since 1970, when another killer cyclone took more than half a million lives in the same area.
In the wake of the tragedy, the entire country was stunned into shock and silence. Proclaiming a day of national mourning, Bangladesh's President, Lieut. General Hussain Mohammad Ershad, postponed a planned state visit to China and hurried to Urirchar. After traveling through winds so fierce that his helicopter had to land before continuing, the President gave drinking water and biscuits to a few children, handed out clothes and looked on as bodies were buried. He could find no words adequate to the tragedy. "The devastation," he said simply, "is beyond description."