The toll from the disaster climbed to more than 52,000 dead,
with many unaccounted for.
Images from around the region presented a tableau of unrelenting grief. Bodies were arrayed in long rows in hastily dug trenches. Villagers sat by ruined homes, stunned. Hotels in some of Thailand's most luxurious resorts were turned into morgues.
Jimmy Gorman, 30, of Manchester, England, said he saw 15 bodies, including up to five children and a pregnant woman, on Phi Phi island, one of Thailand's most popular destinations for Westerners,
''Disaster. Flattened everything,'' Gorman said. ''There's nothing left.''
The International Red Cross and government officials here, as well as those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the Maldives and as far away as Somalia, warned that with hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the open without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other waterborne diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.
''This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas,'' said Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for the United Nations, speaking at a news conference in New York. ''Bigger waves have been recorded,'' he added. ''But no wave has affected so many people.''
On the western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the destruction was doubly fierce, caused by both the earthquake itself 150 miles away and the tsunamis that followed. The U.S. consulate in nearby Medan has received reports that waters around Banda Aceh reached as far as 10 miles inland. The floodwaters reportedly inundated one city hospital, drowning patients inside. The area has been closed to journalists and aid workers because of a civil war, and only a few journalists have gotten in.
India reported more than 4,000 dead on the mainland. Hundreds were dead or missing in the southern resort islands of Thailand, many of them foreign vacationers.
Amateur videotape played on television showed terrifying scenes from several of the countries hit the hardest by huge walls of water crashing through palm trees and over the tops of buildings and roaring up coastal streets.
Deaths were reported in Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Seychelles, as well as along the distant African coastline, particularly Somalia where entire villages were reported to have disappeared.
In Thailand, the government said 918 people had died, 7,396 were injured and thousands were missing, mostly on small resort islands or among boatloads of recreational divers who had headed out to sea in the morning before the wave struck.
''I would say the death toll would definitely exceed 1,000,'' Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said after visiting Phuket island, the most prominent of Thailand's beach resorts, where the death toll stood at 130. ''We have a long way to go in collecting bodies.''
In Sri Lanka, the government said as many as 200 foreign tourists had been killed. In Thailand, an official estimated that 20 to 30 percent of those killed had been foreigners spending their Christmas holiday on its beaches.
The total number of American victims stood at eight.
The foreign casualties were tiny, though, compared with the devastation suffered by the mostly poor fishermen, farmers and laborers who populate the low-lying coasts of the South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning was the fourth largest in a century and the largest in the world since 1964, when an earthquake measuring 9.2 hit Alaska.
