When powerful - and shallow - twin earthquakes struck southern Japan barely 24 hours apart, the verdant hills that gracefully dominate the landscape turned into deadly cascades of mud.
Thousands of tonnes of soil and rock crashed through villages and across highways, severing transport links and crushing houses as people slept.
At least 41 people died in the double disaster, many killed by falling debris as yesterday’s 7.0 magnitude quake finished off what a smaller tremor had started late Thursday.
Others suffocated when torrents of earth buried their homes.
From the air, the scale of the devastation becomes apparent; huge hillsides just gave way and great fissures opened up in the ground, swallowing roads, car parks and buildings.
Even where the mud did not reach, the fury of the quake wreaked ruin on the picturesque towns and villages of Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu island, an area known for its natural beauty and dominated by Mount Aso, Japan’s largest active volcano.