The heat cloud caught them asleep in their beds or talking on their phones, leaving a trail of death as it rolled silently over the village near Indonesia’s Mount Merapi volcano.

Search and rescue teams pulled 31 bodies from one group of houses in Argomulyo yesterday morning but other parts of the village – some 18 kilometres from the volcano – were still too hot to enter.

The cloud was followed by a torrent of ash and mud which poured down the dry bed of the Gendol river, smothering homes in a sticky, burning tar.

“I found three bodies: a child, mother and father, still on their bed. They must have been sleeping when the hot ash struck their house,” rescuer Utha said as he delivered 10 bodies to a hospital in the city of Yogyakarta.

“Their bodies were badly burnt. We also found a dead man with a phone still on his hand.”

Another rescuer, Niko Andrian, loaded his pick-up with 10 bodies but counted 20 more still in the ruins of the village, which lies well outside the official danger zone.

“We found most of the bodies on the bank of the river,” he said.

Around nine houses had collapsed into the river and smoke rose from the smouldering mud.

“We have to step back as the temperature there is extremely hot. With that temperature, a steel stick would melt,” soldier Widodo said.

Elsewhere, witnesses described scenes of chaos and panic as residents scrambled in the pre-dawn darkness to escape what scientists have called the mountain’s most violent eruption in a century.

Indonesia’s most active volcano killed around 1,300 people in 1930 but, even though the total death toll from its latest series of eruptions since October 26 is only about 100, they are considered the biggest since 1872.

“Judging from the material emitted, Merapi’s eruption this time is bigger than the 1930 eruption,” government volcanologist Subandrio said.

The government no doubt saved many lives when it ordered a general evacuation on October 25.

More than 100,000 people are crammed into temporary shelters around central Java, waiting for the 2,914-metre “Mountain of Fire” to calm down.

Merapi is a sacred landmark in Javanese tradition. One of the first to die on October 26 was the volcano’s spiritual guardian, Grandfather Marijan, who refused to evacuate and was killed as he prayed on the mountain’s slopes.

A catalogue of deadly disasters

Many disasters occurred around the Indian Ocean this decade:

2004

December 26: An undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra island triggers a tsunami that kills 220,000 in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.

2005

February 21: A refuse landslide buries a shantytown southeast of Jakarta, killing more than 140.

2006

March 28: An 8.6-magnitude quake on Nias island kills at least 900.
May 27: A quake in Indonesia’s Yogyakarta region kills 5,800 and leaves 1.5 million homeless.
June 20-24: Sulawesi floods leave 350 dead and missing, 13,000 homeless.
July 17: 650 die after an undersea quake strikes off Java, unleashing a tsunami.
December 24-29: More than 300 die after Sumatra floods, 350,000 left homeless.

2007

February 1: Jakarta floods leave at least 80 dead.
March 6: Sumatra quake kills 73.
July: Over 130 die in Sulawesi floods, landslides.
December 26: More than 130 die in Java floods, landslides.

2009

September 2: Quake rocks Java, killing at least 100.
September 30: Earthquake hits near Padang city in Sumatra, killing at least 1,100 people.
November 8: A landslide in Palopo district, South Sulawesi province, kills at least 30 people.

2010

February 23: At least 85 are left dead or missing after a landslide near Bandung to the south of Jakarta.
October 4: Flash floods that strike a district in eastern Indonesia’s West Papua province kill at least 148 people.

October 25: A powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake hits a remote island chain off western Sumatra, triggering a tsunami that kills 428 people and leaves 15,000 homeless. Another 74 people remain missing, feared dead.

October 26: Mount Merapi erupts in central Java, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee and killing more than 100 people as the volcano continues to erupt over the succeeding days.