PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With chilling regularity, a pickup truck from the Haitian police or a taxi driver with a station wagon pulled up to deliver more bodies to the morgue. Flies buzzed on many of the bodies. Civil servants unloaded the cargo, their expressions hidden by white surgical masks.
Hundreds of bodies, those of adults and children alike, were already piled outside the morgue, bloated under the blazing sun. Relatives picked their way around them trying to find the missing, trying to block out the putrid smell.
"They took away my daughter, finally," said one stunned man, Roilin Élysée, 58, who had watched men in a Nissan pickup with the word "Police" painted on its side collect her body from in front of the French Embassy on Thursday. "I do not know what is next for her body."
For many Haitians like Mr. Élysée, it was better not to think about what lay ahead.
"I'm trying to find my brother," one dazed man said as he stared at the pile of bodies. "Brother!" he cried a few times.
No one answered him.
A man dressed in white wandered among the onlookers, repeatedly shouting into a loudspeaker, "God is coming back!"
But the grim pileup of bodies all but masked one positive note: Haiti's barely functioning state had begun to work, if still just minimally, by sending the police to gather bodies. The police pickup trucks were virtually the first organized recovery efforts seen in many parts of the city.
The residents of Port-au-Prince, the capital, also began taking responsibility for cleaning up on Thursday: clearing streets, collecting debris and searching for trapped survivors.
"I heard several of my co-workers are alive some place inside there," said Pierre Ricky Constant, 24, an inspector who showed up Thursday morning, wearing a motorcycle helmet and armed with a tire jack, to start digging through the rubble of the Transportation Ministry building, where he worked.
"Tell President Obama we need his help," said Mr. Constant before beginning his search of the ruins with a few colleagues.
Next to Mr. Constant's ministry it was a similar story. The Ministry of Finance: destroyed. The Ministry of Justice: destroyed. The Fire Department: destroyed.
To get on with the task of picking up the pieces, the living literally still had to step over the dead on this city's streets. Even as the police picked up what bodies they could, others that were shrouded in white sheets or that had been simply dragged outside without any covering lined the sidewalks.
A block from the crumbling presidential palace, close to the morgue, a group of about 10 young men ran toward a reporter, yelling: "Hey! Food! We are hungry! Do something!"
Doing anything remained a logistical nightmare. Electricity remained nonexistent. Gasoline remained in short supply. Thousands remained camped in parks, in the street, under trees. One of the biggest such camps was in the park of Champs Mars near the presidential palace.
"My home and my store are destroyed, so we are staying here," said Deliverance Sanveur, 49, a shop owner who was staying under a sheet in the park with 15 of her relatives.
Still, nothing approached the misery in front of the morgue, which is almost adjacent to the general hospital. Outside the hospital, the wounded waited patiently for treatment. Those who died during the wait were simply dragged next door to the morgue.
In the waiting area for those about to die, one woman moaned, her leg severed at the knee. An elderly woman gargled blood. Several people, hardened already to such suffering, walked by.
Among the bodies that had been moved a few feet over to the morgue, it was rare to find any that were identified. Someone wrote the name "Evise Melus" on a piece of paper and tied it with a rubber band to one woman's right toe.
No one working on the corpse detail could say where, or how, Ms. Melus would be buried. One morgue worker was pouring a concoction that looked like blue laundry detergent on the smelliest bodies.
"I will not go near that morgue," said Georges Michel, 55, a historian who spent part of Thursday driving around the city taking in the scenes of destruction and despair. "The lucky ones are those buried in their own yard," he said. "For those less fortunate, they will join the other corpses in forming mountains of the dead."
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