DRUMBEATS called the faithful to a Sunday Mass praising God amid a scene resembling the Apocalypse – a collapsed cathedral in a city cloaked with the smell of death, where aid is slow to reach survivors and rescue crews battle to pry anever-smaller number of the living from the ruins.

Rescuers pulled a dehydrated but otherwise uninjured woman from the ruins of a luxury hotel in the Haitian capital early today, an event greeted with applause from onlookers witnessing rare good news in a city otherwise filled with corpses, rubble and desperation.