With a cruel indifference that only nature can muster, wind and rain swept into one country while tectonic plates shifted in another. Tens of thousands were drowned or crushed while hundreds of millions around the world looked on in a mix of agony and helplessness.

Welcome to disaster in the modern media age — a murderous tsunami three years ago and now a cyclone in Burma and an earthquake in China.

Thirty-two years ago, an earthquake of similarly vast devastation hit China and passed almost unnoticed in the rest of the world. The Communist regime was, at the time, hermetic: It wanted no outside eyes looking on at its disaster. None did.

Three decades on, the country's Communist leaders have no such qualms. The world's media has reported without official restraint on the disaster in Sichuan province. Not far away, in Burma, the generals want little help and no coverage. Yet they cannot prevent the images and reports of mass death and desolation in the south of their country.

In this decade, where there is access to natural disasters, there is appetite for the stories that surround them. But faced with snapshots of the apocalyse, most reporters find that language almost fails them.

I speak from experience.

The language of disaster

The aftermath of huge earthquakes is hugely unsettling for any observer, as I learned on two separate occasions. The scale of death and destruction is far greater than anything that even many recent wars have inflicted in such a short period.

It is ironic, then, that when confronted by such scenes reporters fall back on the vocabulary of war. In recent days reporters have written of a town "looking as if it had been bombed," of buildings "looking as if they had been blown away," of rescue workers "fighting their way into villages," of "refugees fleeing, doing anything to escape the living hell."

Like a giant malevolent enemy, the earthquake had "wreaked its terror," read one purplish report.

In the wreckage of these towns, alongside the search for victims, there is the search for the telling detail to describe a once-normal life before the onslaught. One British reporter, trying too hard, described the scene at one Chinese school where hundreds of students lay buried in the rubble. Only "the blackboard managed to survive."

The metaphor of war is reinforced by the presence of Chinese soldiers and the images of them parachuting into remote zones cut off by blocked roads.

So tempting is the association that one reporter from the New York Times led with it: "The People's Liberation Army marched into this tiny village only to find that Monday's earthquake had destroyed the road leading deeper into the mountains."

But who wins

A war must have triumphs. And so, in this episode as with other earthquakes, after the first depictions of destruction come the stories of miraculous rescue — a child pulled from the wreckage of a school, a pregnant mother saved along with her unborn baby.

But small victories in a vast region of death are not enough and as the days pass there are, inevitably, fewer and fewer of them to extol.

In this, as in other disasters, the focus and the stories eventually turn to anger. The bereaved and the living victims seek to find human responsibility for so much death.

They scream at local officials, asking why so many schools collapsed when the buildings erected for Communist overlords did not. Local officials promise inquiries, promise that guilty builders and profiteers will be punished. Based on past evidence elsewhere, this never happens.

All of this is natural. It is also a kind of evasion. The miraculous rescues, the search for culprits to blame are all attempts to reduce this tragedy to a human dimension.

However, the bleak truth at the heart of such a catastrophe is that faced with a convulsion of the Earth almost all human responses can have only marginal effect.

Fallen Lisbon

The modern media avoid that bleak truth. In a week, most reporters and crews will have moved on, attracted by other stories.

You have to go back 253 years, to the massive earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon. It killed tens of thousands and terrorized the rest of the populace (the King of Portugal spent the rest of his life sleeping in tents).

It also produced a pamphleteer, a writer named Voltaire. When, three weeks later, he first heard of the tragedy, he sat down and penned Poeme sur le Desastre de Lisbonne, and then the novel Candide.

Together they represented a frontal attack on those who saw the earthquake as God's retribution for sins committed by the Portuguese.

"Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found," he asked. "Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?" In Candide, this French scourge of the Catholic church took aim at the doctrine that the planet was somehow the best of all possible worlds.

His uncomprisingly bleak message was wrapped in humour and became a perennial bestseller. It helped shape the Enlightenment's view of the Earth's place in the universe. For good measure, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was moved by the destruction of Lisbon to reformulate his concept of the sublime in his Critique of Judgement.

Earthquakes no longer provoke such philosophical discussion. For those watching from afar, they have become sets where the media dramas of destruction are played out, each following the scenario of rubble, miracle and anger.