CAIRO — Gamal Kamal Mohammed searched Sunday for a brother who had left their home village years ago for the big city to work in a juice shop; he lived with a wife and daughter in a shantytown beneath cliffs the color of butterscotch and honey.
Tons of stone and rock broke away from the Muqattam cliffs Saturday, killing at least 32 people, injuring dozens and leaving as many as hundreds missing in the ruins of an eastern Cairo slum. Rescue crews worked for a second day with pickaxes and heavy machinery to reach those trapped in about 50 smashed houses and apartment buildings.
"I asked at hospitals, but his body has not been found yet," said Mohammed, who traveled with 10 cousins from Upper Egypt to search for his brother, Abdel.
One of the cousins added: "We went to dig for ourselves, but we found nothing. Today, the police evacuated us and said they would search for the bodies. . . . We won't leave here until we find him, even if he is just a pack of bones."
Police cordoned off the Douaiqa shantytown. Ambulances moved through as families from nearby houses, fearing more boulders would tumble from the weakened cliffs, loaded trucks and carts with possessions and fled.
Many of them were like Abdel Mohammed, villagers drawn to the city, living on low-paying jobs and settling into illegal slums while waiting for subsidized apartments. Mohammed has been waiting a decade for an apartment.
The Egyptian government wants to demolish neighborhoods such as Douaiqa, but with a scarcity of subsidized apartments, the slums ringing this city of 17 million people seem to be expanding overnight. President Hosni Mubarak announced that the government would compensate the families of Douaiqa. But many blamed the regime for not moving them earlier and charged leaders with neglect for the slow response of emergency crews Saturday.
"The government only acts when a catastrophe happens. They do not care because the people who live here are poor," said Nasser Shaaban, a textile worker whose tenement is one block from the limestone cliffs. "They cannot feel for us because they have very comfortable lives. We are almost dead here while other people live in villas and huge houses."
Shaaban and his wife, Amal, live with their three children in a room with broken walls, a sagging ceiling and one bed. He earns $75 a month, not enough to weather the nation's relentless inflation and afford an apartment without a subsidy. So the family lives amid cliffs made brittle and dangerous by quarry mining and the sewer and water lines that thread the illegally built, crowded slum.
