Five days after an angry deluge tore through the mountain passes of Nepal, family members arriving after long journeys looked for something — anything — that could identify their loved ones amid the hundreds of mangled bodies.

In one hall in the downstream city of Bharatpur, men and women stared at a small television screen, watching a slide show of recovered remains in complete silence.

Next door, another government hall turned makeshift morgue housed the remains of 270 people whose photos had been flashing on that screen. Nearly all remained unidentified.

Bharatpur, over 100 miles from where the floods first hit, had no capacity to preserve the corpses that washed up to its riverbanks, and could not keep them any longer. They were being transported to a forest for a mass burial before darkness took over the city.

At the burial spot, security forces in protective gear offloaded the bodies one by one onto stretchers, as cameras documented each step. Nearby, rows of metal numbered signs stuck into concrete-filled pots — the markers for each grave — awaited.

Only a fraction of the missing are turning up among the dead, underscoring a bleak reality: The death toll is likely to keep rising.