Now, the endless ache of grief

Kham Promnich has been sleepwalking for four days. Yesterday, he paced up and down the patch of land where his house once stood, tracing the perimeters of his shattered life.

Promnich was away visiting friends when a 9m wall of water crashed on to Khao Lak beach in southern Thailand and swept inland for half a kilometre, leaving behind a trail of destruction.

When he returned, his house was gone. So were his wife, Janjira, and their two young children.

A small, neat man, aged about 30, Promnich struggled to find words to describe his nightmare.

"Everything has gone," he said, gesturing at the twisted pile of plywood and corrugated iron at his feet.

Then, returning to his reverie, he bent down and picked up a fragment of a child's toy, examining it closely.

Khao Lak, on the Thai mainland, north of the resort island of Phuket, is the blackest spot in a country in mourning.

It was cut off from rescue efforts for two days because of floods and blocked roads, so the full extent of the damage wrought by the murderous tsunami is only now coming to light.

The 9.6km stretch of beach, studded with upmarket resort hotels, has yielded more than 1800 bodies.

Local authorities expect at least another 1000 to be retrieved from the wreckage of buildings and debris-strewn mangrove fields.

Many foreign visitors perished at Khao Lak. So did countless Thais, attracted to the area by a newly booming tourism industry that was a quieter alternative to the frenetic pace of neighbouring Phuket.

Promnich moved there three years ago from a nearby province, to work as a waiter in a local hotel. His wife was a chambermaid.

They built a house in the shade of a casuarina tree in a small community near the beach. That village is now a wasteland, obliterated by the wave.

A kilometre north, an even more hellish scene unfolds in the heart of Khao Lak, where beachfront resorts and holiday bungalows clustered together, overlooking the Andaman Sea.

The beach is a ruined landscape, eerily quiet, save for the hum of mechanical diggers searching for corpses.

Chunks of masonry litter the sand; among them lie the relics of human lives cut short - mattresses, televisions, a coffee mug, a necklace. Bodies are everywhere, wedged into cracks in the walls of crumpled buildings and floating, blackened and bloated, in the receding floodwaters.

Those excavated lie in untidy heaps on the sand. Others, wrapped in blue tarpaulins or bloodstained sheets, are lined up at the roadside, awaiting transport.

Exhausted rescue workers sit among them, eating their lunch. The stench of death is overpowering.

It is difficult to confront such a desolate vista.

When a bomb explodes, we can vent our anger on the people who planted it.

But it was nature that destroyed this pocket of Thailand, and many other places in Asia.

What can you say or feel about a human tragedy on this scale that is nobody's fault?

In Khao Lak, the dimensions of the tragedy are sharply delineated.

The wave reached the main north-south highway.

Beyond the highway, buildings and tropical vegetation are untouched. In front, of it lies devastation - but only two storeys up.

The third floors of gutted hotels are intact, with curtains neatly tied back at the windows.

Thousands of Thai people are homeless in Khao Lak, where emergency relief centres have been set up.

Among the tales of grief and loss are glimmers of hope.

Yesterday Suthipong Pha-opal, a local fisherman, was reunited with his 4-year-old son, Vathanyu, who survived for more than two days by clinging to the top of a tree. "It's a miracle that he's still alive," said his father.

But the overall mood in Khao Lak is of despair. Outside Takuapa Hospital, 200 decomposing corpses were laid out in the dirt beneath a threadbare canopy, some with hands clasped in front of them as if in prayer.

Local people threaded their way wordlessly between them, scouring unrecognisable features for something familiar.

A young man wailed inconsolably as his family loaded a cheap wooden coffin on to a black pick-up truck.

Another truck drew up beside it, and the driver placed six tiny bundles gently on the ground. They were babies.

- INDEPENDENT