TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - As cries for help increasingly turned to ominous silence, rescue teams battled the clock today to save nearly 2,000 trapped and missing victims of Taiwan's devastating earthquake. More than 60 hours after the earthquake struck, at least 2,103 people were known dead, 7,800 injured and 1,844 still unaccounted for - the vast majority of whom were believed buried under rubble and landslides, the Disaster Management Center said.

The center said 2,268 people had been rescued, many of them extracted from some 6,000 completely destroyed housing units across the island.

Local newspapers said several hundred thousand people were homeless but this could not be officially confirmed.

The Tuesday temblor had a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 - about the same strength as the devastating tremor that killed more than 15,000 people in Turkey last month.

Although many people were still trapped in buildings, Wednesday's rescue efforts yielded only nine who were safely brought out, officials said.

And in some isolated, mountain villages of central Taiwan, the worst-hit region of the island, rescue efforts have just begun.

Rescuers had to walk for hours through rugged terrain Wednesday to reach the village of Kuoshin, where a massive flow of mud and rock off three hillsides killed 60 villagers and buried 40 others, the China Times reported.

Only 50 people, a third of the population, are known to have survived as the hills virtually collapsed and filled up a valley, the newspaper said.

One mother, identified as Mrs. Chang, said she and her two daughters were carried along on the slide for a half-mile ``as if sitting on a magic carpet.''

The village is located in Nantou County, where 830 people were killed, while more than 970 died in neighboring Taichung County.

These two hardest-hit counties are to receive the bulk of $90 million the government says it has allocated for immediate disaster relief.

The Taiwanese government said today it will spend $32 million to build 2,000 temporary homes to shelter homeless earthquake victims - with an ambitious deadline of three weeks to get the job done.

Many people have complained that not enough was done to rescue trapped relatives. Some people have stood outside wrecked buildings, listening in vain to cries from trapped friends and family. In many cases, the screams have faded into silence.

Inspecting damage in the town of Touliu, President Lee Teng-hui was confronted by an angry woman who asked for a full investigation into why the building where her elderly in-laws were trapped had collapsed.

``My parents are in there. They are dead,'' she told Lee. ``If we don't pay attention to these problems, it's going to happen again and again.''

The woman, who gave her name only as Liao, said her family rushed back from Los Angeles, where they reside, as soon as the earthquake struck to be with her in-laws.

Many high-rises were left partially toppled in the quake, leaning over in bizarre angles against other structures - perhaps the result of stout construction on top of a weak foundation, rescue teams said.

Engineers and seismologists from around the world are flying to Taiwan to find out why some buildings failed while others survived the quake.

Robert Geller, a professor of geophysics at Tokyo University, said that weak, wide open spaces on the ground floor can leave an entire building very vulnerable to the kind of potent, sideways motion generated by earthquakes.

The ground floor of many collapsed buildings may have been very weak structurally because of the presence of a garage or a shop, Geller said.

A contractor was arrested Wednesday in connection with the collapse of three buildings he built in Touliu, a prosecutor said. In Taipei county the assets of a building company were reported frozen on similar grounds.

The Health Department warned of possible epidemics from lack of water and improper care of corpses. With morgues overflowing, medics have been forced to lay bodies on the floors of hospitals and community centers.

Water shortages were predicted for the island's third-largest city, Taichung, after the quake ruptured a section of the Shihkang Reservoir. Water was streaming through the opening in the dam, said the United Daily News.

``We are just trying to bring peace and calm back into these people's lives,'' said Miao Yun, leading a group of Buddhist nuns and monks through Taichung's largest hospital where 100 people were being treated.

The group, dressed in yellow and gray robes, gave out wooden-beaded prayer bracelets and prayed over bodies of battered victims.

Rescue efforts were hampered Wednesday when three strong aftershocks rocked the island, forcing emergency workers to move back from collapsed structures where they were trying to save as many lives as possible.

Assisting hard-pressed local teams were more than 500 specialists from 14 countries, the United Nations and the International Red Cross. Fifty sniffer dogs accompanied some of the teams.

China, which has not wavered from its goal of annexing Taiwan, offered condolences and aid to quake victims.

The fresh jolts triggered massive mudslides and cracked Sun Moon Lake Reservoir, one of Taiwan's largest dams and a prime tourist attraction. Restaurants and temples set amid mountains were reportedly destroyed or severely damaged.