Island reels as the dead add up

PHUKET, Thailand -- They were supposed to be relaxing on the beach or playing a round of golf on yet another sunny day of vacation on their refuge from the harsh winter of Norway. Instead, Leif Giske and his wife stood on the concrete driveway of a hospital amid the stench of corpses at an overflow morgue.

They lifted the blue plastic sheeting that wrapped one of the bodies, then recoiled at the sight: It was their niece, her flesh bloated from the waters that claimed her, her skin purple. Flies buzzed around cuts in her flesh.

"This is incredible," Giske said. "I'm having trouble believing this."

A day after a series of devastating tsunamis swept over the coconut palms fringing the beaches of this Southeast Asian island, rescue workers continued to extract bodies from a landscape of waste -- from collapsed buildings and from the shores, where each incoming tide deposited a fresh harvest of dead.

Thai authorities said more than 839 people had died following the waves triggered by Sunday's monumental earthquake, with many more still unaccounted for. But the scene at the morgue here in Patong Beach, the busiest stretch of coast on one of Asia's most popular tourist islands, spoke of loss and pain, of holidays gone tragically wrong, and the likelihood that there were many more bodies on the way.

"When you hear the sirens now, it's only dead people coming in," said Ed Plunkett, a volunteer coordinator at Patong Hospital, whose morgue had taken in more than 100 bodies by last night, after 58 the day before.

Hospital staff loaded bodies into plywood coffins as relatives kneeled next to their dead with incense in their hands. A German man in a blue tank top stepped gingerly through the checkerboard of corpses, pausing at a wall of photos -- faces of the dead connected to contorted bodies. He bent closer, seeking, then shook his head and walked away.

A young Thai woman sat in the back of a pickup, her forehead resting on a coffin cloaked in golden fabric. Another new widow arrived, collapsing at the sight of her dead husband.

Giske, a Norwegian real estate investor, and his Thai wife had been enjoying the holidays in the villa they own here. On Sunday, they were down at Patong Beach when everything changed.

"Suddenly we saw the ocean was disappearing," Giske said.

In the span of about 15 seconds, the water's edge backed off the beach and simply vanished.

It was about 10 in the morning, and the sea was packed with families. The undertow was so powerful that anyone in the water was instantly sucked out, witnesses said. Then came a strange period of calm, the ocean gone, fish flopping on the sea bed. Some people wandered out for a look.

"Suddenly, we saw this big wave coming," Giske said. "It took all the yachts and swept them in. We didn't understand. We were just paralyzed."

And then they were running full speed toward a hotel above the beach -- Giske, his wife, and his niece, 32, a mother of two.

The water gave chase. His wife ran through someone's first-floor hotel room. He got up to the safer ground of the second floor.

Where their niece went no one really knows.

As the water crested over the beach, it tore furiously into the shops and hotels on the seaside strip. "Big cars and boats were coming, crashing into the hotel," Giske said.

When it passed, he found his wife after about 10 minutes. Their niece they did not find, until yesterday at the morgue.