A young child surveys the devastation after an earthquake struck in Nepal yesterday. The death toll had reached 1,341 last night. Photo: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

A powerful earthquake struck Nepal and sent tremors through northern India yesterday, killing more than 1,000 people, toppling a 19th-century tower in the capital Kathmandu and touching off a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.

There were reports of devastation in outlying, isolated mountainous areas after the midday quake of magnitude 7.9, Nepal’s worst in 81 years, centred 80 km east of the second city, Pokhara.

As fears grew of a humanitarian disaster in the impoverished Himalayan nation of 28 million, an overwhelmed government appealed for foreign help. India was first to respond by sending in military aircraft with medical equipment and relief teams.

A police official said the death toll in Nepal alone had reached 1,130, more than half of them in the Kathmandu Valley. A further 36 fatalities were reported in northern India, 12 in Chinese Tibet and four in Bangladesh.

The quake was more destructive for being shallow, toppling buildings, opening gaping cracks in roads and sending people scurrying into the open as aftershocks rattled their damaged homes.

Indian tourist Devyani Pant was in a Kathmandu coffee shop with friends when “suddenly the tables started trembling and paintings on the wall fell on the ground.

“I screamed and rushed outside,” she told Reuters by telephone from the capital, where at least 300 people died.

“We are now collecting bodies and rushing the injured to the ambulance. We are being forced to pile several bodies one above the other to fit them in.”

An Indian army mountaineering team found 18 bodies on Mount Everest, where an avalanche unleashed by the earthquake swept through the base camp, where more than 1,000 climbers had gathered at the start of the climbing season.

People survey a site damaged by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake which hit Kathmandu, in Nepal, while rescue workers carry the body of a victim on a stretcher. Photos: Reuters

Choti Sherpa, who works at the Everest Summiteers Association, was unable to call her family and colleagues on the mountain. “Everyone is trying to contact each other, but we can’t,” she said. “We are all very worried.”

A second tourism official, Mohan Krishna Sapkota, said it was “hard to even assess what the death toll and the extent of damage” around Everest could be.

“The trekkers are scattered all around the base camp and some had even trekked further up. It is almost impossible to get in touch with anyone.”

Around 300,000 foreign tourists were estimated to be in various parts of Nepal for the spring trekking and climbing season in the Himalayas, and officials were overwhelmed by calls from concerned friends and relatives.

Nepal, sandwiched between India and China, has had its share of natural disasters. Its worst earthquake in 1934 killed more than 8,500 people.

Political instability does little to boost Nepal’s resilience; it has still not upgraded its weather forecasting system despite being surprised by unseasonal blizzards last autumn that killed 32 in the Annapurna massif.

In 2001, Nepal burst into global headlines when the crown prince, Dipendra, gunned down 10 members of his family, including his father, King Birendra Shah, before killing himself.

A Maoist rebellion subsequently transformed the kingdom into a republican democracy and abolished the monarchy altogether in 2008. A new constitution has yet to be agreed, however.

“This earthquake is the nightmare scen­ario,” said Ian Kelman of the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction in London.

“The country has suffered terrible conflicts, poor governance, and heart-wrenching poverty, all of which created and perpetuated the vulnerability which has been devastatingly exposed during the shaking.”

As bodies were pulled out of the ruins, a policeman said up to 200 people had been trapped inside. At the main hospital in Kathmandu, volunteers formed human chains to clear the way for ambulances to bring in the injured. Across the city, rescuers scrabbled through the rubble of destroyed buildings, among them ancient, wooden Hindu temples.

Maltese mother’s concern for daughter in Kathmandu

The concerned mother of a young Maltese woman currently stranded in Nepal has said her daughter is sleeping on the streets of Kathmandu with countless others as buildings remain unsafe in the aftermath of yesterday’s earthquake.

Bernardette Portelli told The Sunday Times of Malta that her daughter Martina was staying in a guesthouse in Kathmandu when the earthquake struck.

Ms Portelli’s daughter, who was travelling with a friend to carry out voluntary work, was unharmed but could only send word through brief messages on WhatsApp, as power had become scarce across the city.

With the airport in Kathmandu closed, Ms Portelli said her daughter had been advised by the Maltese consulate in New Delhi, with whom she had been in contact since the earthquake struck, to stay in the city, as travelling could be even more dangerous.