BALI: The four fridges in the Sanglah hospital mortuary were overflowing with body parts. There was also no space in the two workrooms and a storage room, and in the foyer the bodies were stacked two high and often wrapped in nothing but ripped dustbin-liners.
Hardly a single one of them was complete. Most were missing at least one limb: many were, if not burnt beyond recognition, so badly scarred the clothes had stuck to the skin.
A few of the dead looked peaceful: the car-bomb outside the Sari bar in Kuta, Bali, had evidently killed them instantly, leaving no time to register a reaction.
But the majority appeared to have died agonisingly painful deaths. Fingers were clenched, heads thrown back and mouths stuck open as if they had died screaming. They had had no way to escape the hour-long inferno as the bar and the surrounding buildings went up in a massive fireball.
And then, on top of the assault on the eyes, was the nauseating stench of death in the stifling tropical heat.
The mortuary staff worked on uncomplaining. "We have no idea how many more bodies there are to come," said one assistant, Ketut Aristika, as he dealt with number 118. "But we have no choice; there is nowhere else to take them."
Six hours later, and the mortuary had been extended by wrapping bales of cloth round covered walkway posts 40 metres apart. There they made space for the additional 60 corpses that had been brought in during the afternoon.
By then attempts to identify the bodies had taken on a multinational atmosphere. One forensic pathologist was talking in Japanese, another in Korean, and the nurses were answering in Indonesian. These experts in their field had been so deeply affected by the bombs that they felt compelled to help.
"I was here on holiday and I reckoned they would need some help, so I rushed to the hospital," said Dr Horashi, from Osaka, Japan.
Such spontaneous charity was not confined to the mortuary. All around the sprawling complex dozens and dozens of volunteers, foreign and Indonesian, were doing their bit to help the local doctors, nurses, orderlies and clerical staff who, early in the morning, had been on the verge of collapse under the sheer weight of the horrific events.
Some like Dr Horashi were clearly qualified to do a specific job. But many, like Margaret Barry, had no experience of working in a hospital at all. This Australian fashion and accessories designer who lives in Bali arrived with three friends at the hospital just after dawn.
"We decided that each of us would select one of the more critically injured people and just look after them," she said. Her patient was Paul Lawrenson (37), from Chippenham, near Swindon, who was in the Sari bar when the bomb exploded and probably survived because those around him took the full impact of the blast. He has no idea where any of them are now.
"The pressure of the explosion was so great on my body it was like some one pushing down on me. I couldn't get up," he said.
Amazingly Mr Lawrenson was not burned but suffered such bad shrapnel lacerations and lost so much blood that he almost lost an arm.
"But amazingly we found a vascular surgeon who sewed him back together, and now he has a strong pulse," said Ms Barry as she mopped Mr Lawrenson's brow with a damp cloth.
Two hours later Mr Lawrenson took a serious turn for the worse, but within minutes three foreign volunteer doctors and a foreign nurse had taken control and were pumping more liquid back into him so he would survive an evacuation flight.
"This is such an outpouring of genuine humanity," Ms Barry said. "Out of a terrible catastrophe the whole community has come together to do whatever it can. It's a type of defiance as well. We will not be beaten by the terrorists."
While hundreds of people, like Ms Barry, were volunteering, others rallied to the cause thanks to the intervention of modern technology.
Emma Cort (27), from the Gower, south Wales, said she rushed to the hospital after getting numerous text messages on her mobile phone that there was a massive shortage of blood.
She said: "Within a few minutes all my friends seemed to know of the crisis so we came down to give what we could."
Perhaps the most surprising assistance came from the local "mafia" set up by President Megawati Sukarnoputri's political party, officially known as the Forum Peduli Denpasar (the Forum that Cares for Denpasar). Summoned to the hospital to look intimidating during Ms Megawati's fleeting visit, a few stayed on to run errands.
Some of the Sanglah hospital staff could barely contain their emotions as the sun began to set. "If it hadn't been for all the volunteers, the death toll would have been much, much higher," said Astrid, a nurse in the Melati (jasmine) ward where the most seriously burned were treated. She said they had probably saved dozens of lives. - (Guardian Service)