Stunned and injured villagers emerged yesterday from Papua New Guinea's remote northern jungles, the survivors of three massive tidal waves feared to have killed 3,000 people.
The Prime Minister, Mr Bill Skate, declared a state of national disaster and said he would journey inland to comfort those who fled to high ground after the tsunami struck on Friday night.
"Mostly I'm going to share their tears," he said as he moved around what was left of one of the worst-hit coastal villages, Sissano.
Survivors sat patiently under tarpaulins in makeshift hospital wards dotted along the devastated 30-km stretch of coastline, where they had been ferried by a fleet of helicopters. Their minor wounds and fractures developed serious infections in the steamy weather.
The hospital at Vanimo, where an Australian-led relief force is based, was full of horribly wounded villagers who told of the night their homes were engulfed by a black wall of water. Many had thought the deafening noise was an aircraft approaching and some had run excitedly to the beach to watch it land. The ones who survived had run for their lives in the opposite direction.
Mr Bonney Sule, from the village of Arop, said he was standing with his wife and son outside their hut when the rumbling began. As the wave approached, the heavily-pregnant woman passed the three-year-old boy to him before they were tossed into the lagoon behind the villages. Mr Sule's wife disappeared into the torrent, but he saw his son flailing nearby and saved him, holding on to a floating log until the water subsided.
"I thought I would die but I prayed to God and he saved our lives," said the 24-year-old man who escaped with serious facial wounds and abrasions.
The hospital's director, Dr John Novette, who treated the injured there alone until Sunday when help arrived, said Mr Sule's son was one of the lucky ones. "There are not many children from here. We lost most of them. It was the school holidays and they were all at home."
Meanwhile, other survivors drifted back to the settlements of Sissano, Arop and Warapu to pick over the remains of their villages, which were still littered with corpses.
Mr Aran Meke, who saved himself by clinging to a coconut palm, said: "My wife and my children are gone now, I couldn't save them from the water."
Helicopters delivered teams of workers armed with masks and shovels to bury the dead where they lay. Some villagers buried their own loved ones and sat weeping over the mounds of sand and simple crosses.
Looking at the disaster scene it was hard to believe that only a week ago bustling villages had lined the coastal strips.
All that remained at Sissano yesterday were battered palm trees, scraps of corrugated iron and fetid pools of water which reeked of decomposition from the bloated bodies, many of them children.
The Prime Minister, who is usually mobbed when he appears in public, walked silently through the wreckage.
In a country still reeling from an El Nino-related drought that killed more than 500 people, Mr Skate said he would have to ask the international community to help rebuild.