It was as though Turkey had arrived in southern Moscow. An eight-storey apartment block had simply disappeared into a hole in the ground.
It was as though a building the size of O'Connell Bridge House in Dublin or Fanum House in Belfast had simply disappeared.
Neighbouring apartments appeared to be barely damaged. The area seemed to have been subjected to an implosion rather than an explosion.
All around was the gruesome activity of searching for bodies and the removal of the dead.
Grey-white smoke plumed from the crater where Section 3 of Kashirskoye Chausee No 6 once stood. The extended red arm of a crane jutted out from the centre of the rubble.
A pathetic hand-written notice on a nearby low-rise building announced that school would be closed today. Many of the dead were children.
A man approached and pointed over my shoulder saying: "Look. He's still here. He has survived if others have not."
Behind me less than 50 yards from the hole in the ground stood a 10-metre high slab bearing a mosaic of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, looking out over the scene of devastation.
Chunks had fallen from the rear of the slab, but the image of Lenin was totally intact. Perhaps it had been constructed more solidly than the apartment block.
As the rain poured down steadily Elena Petrova was railing hysterically against the politicians, especially against Moscow's Mayor, Mr Yuri Luzhkov.
"That Luzhkov!" she exclaimed. "He has sold Moscow to the Churki," she said, using a derogatory term for natives of the Caucasus.
"It's not Luzhkov," said pensioner Nina Sytnina who used to work in a vacuum-cleaner factory. "It's Yeltsin." She was told not to be silly. "Yeltsin's not a person," screamed Elena Petrova. "He's a dead man. He's a puppet."
Already, just six hours after the building ceased to exist, Russians were looking for someone to blame.
Flora Maratovna was keeping as quiet as she could. Her surname and patronymic would have pointed her out as being of Islamic provenance, a Tatar from the Volga region. "It happened at exactly one minute past five this morning. I know this because that's when our clock stopped.
"I live just over there," she said, pointing to the Warsaw Chausee, which runs parallel to Kashirskoye.
"I am still trembling. My 13-year-old daughter has been crying ever since the big explosion at Pechatniki. We won't sleep tonight. How could we with this horror so near to us."
A green Mercedes pulled across the tram tracks which separate the housing complex from the main road.
Two men who would have been described by Elena Petrova as "Churki" opened the boot to reveal neatly packed lunches of milk, bread and sausage. They were being brought from the Caucasian traders of the Navinkina Market to help feed the rescue workers. "We have made up 400 packed lunches," said Boris Bruidze, a Georgian who came to help the rescue effort.
The Moscow emergency services were backed up by rescuers from Tula 200 km to the south where Tolstoy's estate still stands at Yasnaya Polyana. "We had just finished work at Pechnatniki and gone home for some sleep when we were called back to Moscow this morning to help rescue people from this new explosion," said one driver.
At this stage there were very few people to rescue. The Minister for Emergencies, Mr Sergei Shoigu, who was on the scene spoke to reporters.
"There are 126 people registered as living in the building. We don't know how many were at home. We do know that only four people have been found alive."
Alexander Zhdanovich of the FSB, the internal successor to the KGB, said the modus operandi at Kashirskoye and that at Pechnatniki, where the death toll had reached 92 by Sunday night, were similar.
Terrorists had rented apartments and then gradually filled them with explosives over a period of time before setting them off.