At around 3 o'clock in the morning of Saturday August 14, Kanieh Topal woke in her three-storey apartment block in the western suburbs of Izmit to hear a strange sound. Then the cat sat on the floor, gripping the carpet with her claws. Nature, it seems, was trying to warn the people of Izmit and Yalova and Golcuk and Istanbul and a thousand other towns and villages across miles of Turkey.
Twelve miles beneath them, the great tectonic plates of the north Anatolian rock fault had begun to move again. On Monday, they say in Yalova, the birds went silent but began to fly from tree to tree, never resting on a branch for more than a few seconds. At 3 o'clock on Tuesday morning - exactly 24 hours after the dogs had given the people of Izmit their final warning - the mile deep fissure cracked, snapping open the earth's crust and visiting desolation on the sleeping humans above.
In the space of 45 to 90 seconds - some buildings took longer to collapse than others - well over , apartment blocks, hotels, hospitals, shops, factories and private houses thundered to the ground in what one survivor described as an "atomic" explosion. Some describe its effect as "evil" - the cracks veining the walls of luxury homes, the shrieks of people ripped apart between elevators, walls and balconies, the blood washing out beneath sandwiched floors - others as a final, terrible spiritual experience.
The Turkish journalist Fehmi Koru was in the Bosphorus resort of Yalova when the world stopped and, in what must be one of the finest pieces of reportage on the catastrophe, recalled the calamity in biblical terms: "What I saw during and after the earthquake was reminiscent of the events of the Day of Judgement described by the holy books of the divinely inspired religions. Every man and woman was by himself, all alone, helpless; many were wandering aimlessly around, unable to help others in need.
The day after is even more grotesque: the people, caught unaware in the middle of the night, were trapped inside their homes and could not move; the people lucky enough to be alive and well were standing in front of their loved ones' abodes - they were helpless too. As the sun dawned a dark crimson through the dust that hung for miles above north-western Turkey, it was clear that its people had suffered the equivalent of a small-scale nuclear holocaust.
