PAKISTAN: Prayer Time

It was 5:40, the time for morning prayers, as the crack Pakistan Mail raced westward across the Sind desert one day last week. In the wooden cars at the front of the train, crowded beyond normal capacity, shivering Moslem passengers balanced precariously on narrow wooden seats to bend their knees in the direction of Mecca. In cars reserved for them, veiled womenfolk nursed babies and tied up bedrolls in anticipation of arrival at Karachi in an hour’s time. Pakistan’s bearded Foreign Minister Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan made his devotions in the quiet of an air-conditioned carriage.

There was little time for formal prayer, however, in the cab of the Mail’s locomotive as it rounded a bend 75 miles from Karachi at 60 m.p.h. Sprawled athwart the rails dead ahead were two tank cars, filled with gasoline, from a freight which had run off the track ten minutes earlier. Before the Mail’s engineer could even slam on his brakes, the locomotive was plowing through the tank cars. An explosion rent the air, and the first two cars burst into flame like struck matches. A thick column of smoke boiled into the air as the fire spread along the wooden ties setting car after car aflame. Before the flames reached his car, Foreign Minister Zafrullah Khan was hauled to safety, but others were not so lucky. Despite an official claim of only 150 dead, some survivors estimated that nearly 300 had lost their lives in the wreck. One railroad worker bound for his brother’s wedding raced forward to the women’s flaming car to check on his wife and five children just after the crash. They were all dead. “There was not a wail of anguish,” he said later, “not a cry for help. They were all killed in a second. And for three months my wife had been preparing for the wedding.”