A man surveys hundreds of bodies of earthquake victims at the morgue in Port-au-Prince, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) #

[N]othing 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.”