Heavy rain and bad visibility hampered relief efforts yesterday. At dusk, temperatures fell and rain turned to snow in parts of the mountains. Survivors huddled around fires to keep warm, covering themselves in blankets and sipping hot soup.
Some 1,500 workers from the Iranian Red Crescent fanned out in teams, bringing food, tents, and tarpaulins.
''Where have you gone? I had a lot of plans for you," Hossein Golestani lamented as he held the lifeless form of his 7-year-old daughter, Fatima. The body of his 8-year-old daughter, Mariam, lay beside him in the hard-hit village of Hotkan.
Golestani and his wife were out tending their herd of goats when the quake struck at 5:55 a.m., wrecking their home.
Other survivors slapped their faces in grief as they sat next to the dead, who were wrapped in blankets in hospital morgues or on roadsides.
Some 40 villages were damaged in the quake, which struck a region 150 miles from Bam, site of a catastrophic earthquake in December 2003 that killed 26,000 people and leveled the historic city.
Mohammad Javad Fadaei, deputy governor of Kerman Province, said the search would continue through the night in Hotkan and two other villages, Sarbagh and Douheieh, which emergency crews had had the most difficulty reaching. Rescue efforts were finished in other villages, he said.
The quake was centered in the outskirts of Zarand, a town of 15,000 people in Kerman Province about 600 miles southeast of Tehran, Iran's geological authority said.
Though comparable in strength to the 6.6-magnitude Bam quake, yesterday's temblor hit a more sparsely populated area and was centered far deeper -- about 25 miles, compared with 6 miles for Bam -- limiting the damage.
Still, the tiny villages that dot the central mountains -- most of them made in fragile mud brick -- were heavily damaged. In Douheieh, every building except a mosque with a golden dome had collapsed. At least 80 percent of the buildings in Sarbagh were leveled.
Fadaei said the death toll stood at 420, with some 900 injured.
