BAM: One by one, thousands of faces appeared on three computer screens set up in the back of the car, most of them horribly disfigured. Outside a silent crowd pressed their noses to the car windows, jostling in silence for a better view.

As a memorial to the tens of thousands of Iranians who died in the earthquake on Dec 26, the slideshow in Bam's main graveyard would have been shocking enough. But the crowd had gathered not to remember their dead but to find them.

The faces were of people pulled from the rubble and photographed by rescue workers who guessed that this would be the only way for those who survived to discover for certain who had died.

"I'm looking for my husband, I haven't seen him since the city collapsed," said Razieh Sabeti, 47, staring at the flickering photos of the dead, each marked with the number of its grave.

He had travelled to Bam from an outlying village, looking for work, the day before the earthquake, Mrs Sabeti said. "I am sure he is dead. But if that is true, I hope he is here. Then I will find his grave."

He probably is dead. According to the government's latest estimate, the earthquake probably killed about 50,000, a quarter of the population of Bam and the surrounding villages.

Even so, she is unlikely to find him. Several thousand were buried in the cemetery in mass graves within hours of the quake, and were not photographed.Many of the faces that were photographed and numbered are unrecognizably damaged.

The most disfigured were covered with cloths and only a brief glimpse of hair or a small patch of skin is revealed, making it almost impossible to determine the age or sex.

Near the car three black-turbaned mullahs slumped, exhausted. They had been burying bodies for three days and nights with almost no sleep, praying over one then moving on to the next.

But the tide of corpses turned to a trickle the other day. For up to an hour there were no new burials. Several thousand victims are still formally unburied, according to the government, but most of them are lying deep in the powdery rubble of the city.

In Bam's vast cemetery hundreds were searching for the graves of people they had loved. Some had seen their relatives buried, and marked the graves with stones, branches or tin cans.

Others searched blindly, crossing thousands of small mounds and a dozen long sandy ridges marking where hundreds of corpses lie tangled together. Crawling on his hands and knees, Hussein, 13, sniffed the sand.

The twig with which he had marked his parents' grave had been removed, making it indistinguishable from dozens of others nearby. So he was trying to smell his dead mother's scent. "I know my mother's smell so well, I am sure I will recognize it," he said.

Hachimeh Ghamari, 25, and three of her few living relatives had not even that desperate hope as they searched the thousands of identical mounds for some unknown sign of her mother's grave. "She was not registered: I have looked at the photographs for days," she said.

She lost 15 close relatives in the earthquake, including her five-year-old son, her husband, both her parents, her three brothers and their children. In all, she lost two hundred relatives.Hachimeh and her four companions huddled around theGuardian interpreter and staggered to the ground, sobbing, kissing and embracing in the sand.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.