In Saibag, Maj. Nishat Chida was watching television, waiting for a cricket match to start, when his army barracks started shaking on Friday. Within 15 minutes, he and a team of about 30 soldiers had rushed to the collapsed building and immediately began removing rubble. A crane lifted a huge slab of concrete from the top of the heap and uncovered two sisters who had been lying in bed. The mattress had cushioned the blow, and one survived.

Then the soldiers and neighbors heard the cries of a mother and her children, and the sound of them pounding on a metal cabinet. The soldiers managed to break through a wall and pull two brothers to safety.

But the mother was still trapped, with another of her sons who had died from a blow to her head.

''She was just crying about her little one who died there on her lap,'' Major Chida said this morning as he gestured to the cave in the rubble where the soldiers had crawled in to get her. ''She was hysterical. She was not willing to come out. She did not want to leave her child.''

As night fell, and the soldiers continued passing huge chunks of debris and metal pots filled with rubble along an assembly line into the street, neighbors brought them steaming cups of tea and coffee and savory vegetable pakoras to keep them going. Finally, after midnight, the soldiers widened the opening and persuaded the mother to come out with her dead son.

Most of Ahmedabad, a bustling city of four to five million people, was still standing and slowly got back to business this morning. More than 350 people died here, but Bhuj bore the full brunt of the quake. About 1,400 people are dead there, said Ramesh Chandra, subinspector of police in the state's emergency control room.

More than a dozen aftershocks kept residents, some huddled around bonfires, outside throughout the night in the chill air.

Ahmedabad's hospitals were scenes of confusion and heartbreak. ''Several victims, most of them women and children, with their skulls broken, limbs and backs badly bruised, awaited immediate attention at the same time,'' the Press Trust of India reported.