By Lucy Hornby ZIPINGPU RESERVOIR, China, May 18 (Reuters) - A slap on the back, a cigarette and two packets of chocolate milk. As the round-faced, unshaven man in glasses and dirty blue pants lurched out of the boat, his worried neighbour leapt up from the bank to welcome him. Six days after a powerful earthquake devastated Sichuan province, volunteers, soldiers, medics and neighbours kept an anxious watch on the banks of the Zipingpu reservoir for small army boats bearing handfuls of survivors down the river from Yingxiu, where thousands died. A bulging bank of the reservoir, exposed when water was released to reduce pressure on the dam, was home to a few hundred young soldiers, tents, and piles and piles of cucumbers, crackers and bottled water. The relaxed atmosphere of the camp changed the instant a boat came into view. Nurses lined the hillside, and a tense young man held up a company sign, long before anyone in the boats could possibly read it. "Over 90 of our people have come out. We are only waiting for three or four more," he explained, before turning intently to watch refugees in orange life vests step out of the boats. Once reunited, the neighbours made quick calls to numbers on scraps of paper. Then they settled in to recount who was alive, and how they had escaped, their hands sketching an eloquent pantomime of the gyrating ground, the collapsing walls, the near escape from a falling roof beam. Yingxiu was a few dozen kilometres from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake that struck Sichuan on May 12. Less than 2,000 of its 10,000 people are still alive, and many that are trekked out for hours over destroyed roads. A truckload of food arrived in town on Sunday, the Xinhua news agency said, the first to make it through. "There's hardly anyone left in Yingxiu. The food ran out, so we waited for the rescuers and we left," said Mrs Ma, wincing as she hauled a heavy bag with an injured hand. "A lot of people died. My mother died. My daughter and son-in-law got the boat out yesterday. The principal of the school took the orphaned children out the day before, and only my husband has stayed behind to keep an eye on things." Before they left, Ma said, they had slaughtered their pigs and cooked them for the soldiers who marched in on empty stomachs. "They had nothing to eat. We thought they were really pitiful. (Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
A cat meows as it sits in the rubble of a house in the earthquake shaken town of Hongbai, Sichuan province May 18, 2008.Thousands of soldiers and families looking for missing ...
