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For the people living alongside the Payapon River - a branch of the mighty Irrawaddy - the slow-moving waters have always been a sustainer of life. The river has provided irrigation for their crops, as well as clean water for bathing, and the fish from which so many make their livelihoods.
Now the same river is delivering the dead. Hundreds of corpses of people killed by Cyclone Nargis, swept away by the storm's surging tidal wave, are being washed back.
They lie on the river's edge, snagged in the roots of the mangrove swamps, bloated and burnt by the sun. Many corpses have already been buried by family or friends but plenty more are lying abandoned, anonymous in death.
"The storm happened on the Friday night and the next morning the bodies started appearing," said Zaw Zaw, a boatman. "Further downstream I have seen places where there are 20 bodies, another where there were 30 and then one where there were 50 bodies."
We have boarded the young man's boat at the port city of Payapon, known for the quality of its rice but now, like most communities in the delta, resembling a war zone.
Officials said that up to 100,000 people were killed by the storm that struck last weekend, most of them living in this expansive swathe of southern Burma.
Zaw dipped his boat's propeller into the water, promising to take us to the bodies. We did not have far to go.
On the opposite side of the river, the corpses were lying at the water's edge. Some were being gnawed on by dogs, others lay with their arms and legs outstretched next to the carcasses of cattle and buffalo. Within just a few hundred metres, the sour-fish smell of the jetty had been replaced by the foul, sweet odour of decay.
Experts say that, at its height, Cyclone Nargis blew at 210km/h. The river provided a terrifying insight into what such numbers mean in human terms. While the river has become a gathering place for corpses, the water's edge has also become a graveyard for countless ships and boats that were forced on land by the surging tide, then left stranded by the receding waters.
In just a few kilometres there must have been 40 different vehicles.
But where had all the corpses come from? Aid workers and officials believe that tens of thousands of people from the communities on the southern fringes of the delta, towns like Labutta and Bogale, were washed out to sea by the surge, their bodies returning with the tidal flow.
But even near Payapon, three hours' upstream from the coast, the storm had been terribly lethal.
We branched off the river down the Noke Phin Toe creek. On either side were the flimsy hamlets that had been flattened. Everywhere people were busy rebuilding, cleaning or washing their clothes or themselves in the river.
"The water came up to here," said U Hoa Aye, 61, a wiry fisherman who pounded on his chest to illustrate the level it had reached. He claimed that more than 200 people had been killed in his village and another on the opposite side of the river. Most of those who died were old men and children.
The villagers said most of the dead had been gathered and hastily buried in a cemetery.
But, in the absence of help from the authorities, many had been left where they were lying. For now, this river of life has become a river of the dead.
- INDEPENDENT
