Nepal - aftershocks: Villages near epicentre desperate as toll tops 3,800

Residents of remote mountain villages at the epicentre of Nepal's powerful earthquake said on Monday that they were running out of food, and that two days after the quake they had seen no sign of outside assistance.

"We have no shelter, no food and all the bodies are scattered around," said Parbati Dhakal, a woman from Saurpani, an ethnic Gurkha village at the quake's centre, about 50 miles northwest of the capital, Kathmandu.

Villagers described a landscape of destruction. There had been 1,300 houses in Saurpani, but one resident, Shankar Thapa, said, "All the houses collapsed." Several dozen villagers walked two hours down a jungle path on Monday to the banks of the Daraudi River to bury their dead.

They carried 11 bodies attached to bamboo poles and lowered them into holes along the riverbank. An excavator from a nearby construction site dug the graves and covered up all but two bodies with dirt and boulders. Families of the other two insisted on a traditional Hindu ritual, with funeral pyres made from sticks collected from the surrounding jungle.

Shankar, a former soldier in the Nepalese Army, pointed into the crowd at the relatives of the dead. "Father just buried, mother just buried, sister just buried... We don't even know how many people are missing."

On Monday night, Nepalese authorities raised the death toll to more than 3,800, but the full extent of the casualties and the damage was still unknown.

The magnitude-7.8 earthquake shook a vast portion of central Nepal on Saturday, from Mount Everest to Kathmandu and points west. But as rescue teams began to arrive from around the world, much of the stricken area remained inaccessible, locked in mountainous terrain with some roads blocked by landslides.

Reaching this village in Gorkha district requires a five-hour car ride from Kathmandu and an overland trek beyond the spot where a landslide on Sunday blocked the road with boulders and mud.

No rescue crews or security forces were visible in the area on Monday. Helicopters passed overhead several times, but villagers said they were probably heading to Barpak, one of the worst affected towns, where at least 100 people are believed to have been killed in the earthquake.

©2015 The New York Times News Service