Wayne Arnold and Eric Lichtblau, Lhokseumawe – Mulyana, a 24-year-old housewife, had just sat down to a wedding party on Sunday morning when the tsunami struck. She ran and held on to a coconut tree. But the water pulled her away anyway, far out to sea.

"I was alone in the middle of the ocean," she said from her hospital bed in this town on the northeastern coast of Aceh Province, the area of Indonesia hit hardest by the disaster. "I was afraid of being pulled all the way to India."

Mulyana, who cannot swim, grabbed to a coconut tree floating nearby and clung to it. With the weight of her clothes pulling her down, she ripped off everything but her bra and prayed to God to help her. Four hours later, a group of fishermen found her as they were pulling bodies from the water.

Each morning's tide brings with it the bodies of more victims who, like Mulyana, were washed out to sea but who were not so lucky. Others are being found caught in branches of trees where the waters hurled them.

Mulyana is one of more than 200 survivors who have filled the hospitals here, many with similarly harrowing tales of how they survived a tempest that Indonesian and international relief officials fear may have killed more than 27,000 people in this country alone.

"We're seeing devastation and death beyond belief," Michael Elmquist, who leads the United Nations assistance office in Indonesia, said in an interview in his office in Jakarta. "I've been through many disasters around the world, but I've never seen anything like this. There's really nothing to compare it to."

While relief workers rushed today to get food and medical supplies to the survivors to stave off starvation and disease, Indonesian officials said 4,775 people had been confirmed dead in North Sumatra, where Aceh sits, near the epicenter of the quake. Local officials were preparing makeshift graves even as unclaimed bodies remained on streets and shorelines.

The United Nations office in Jakarta received an unconfirmed report late today that as many as 40,000 people had perished in the town of Meulaboh, on Sumatra's western shore. "If that is true," Mr. Elmquist said, "that's going way beyond any of our initial estimates."

Officials fear that many more people may have drowned in a remote set of smaller Indonesian islands off Sumatra, including the island of Nias. But officials emphasized that for now it was difficult to assess the full extent of the devastation.

"Those islands are really the dark side of the moon in terms of communications, and we really have no idea what's going on there," Herbie Smith, who is heading the disaster response team for the American Embassy in Jakarta, said in an interview. "The devastation may be even worse than we know, and that's the tragedy here."

Aceh Province stands out amid the disaster's deepening toll, not only because it was closest to the earthquake's epicenter, but because the disaster has intruded on a region in the grip of a civil war. Aceh has been under martial law since May of last year, when five months of peace talks between separatist rebels and the government broke down.

The president at the time, Megawati Sukarnoputri, dispatched 40,000 troops to secure the province, whose oil and gas resources are vital to government revenue. The government declared a cease-fire after the earthquake, and observers said the truce appeared to be holding, allowing relief workers to tend to survivors.

In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, reports are filtering in of thousands of bodies, some lined up outside a city mosque. Others are being carried away in army trucks. The American Consulate in Medan, more than 200 miles down the eastern coast, received reports that the waters around Banda Aceh had swirled as far as 10 miles inland. The waves were reported to have inundated one city hospital, drowning patients inside.

Local television stations broadcast images from Banda Aceh that showed a city drenched with mud and debris, with bodies lying in the street or wedged among the flotsam and jetsam. Where the bodies have been lined up, anxious survivors peer under makeshift shrouds in search of loved ones.

With phone lines down, relatives of Banda Aceh's residents are still waiting for news. At the airport in Medan, worried Acehnese crowded ticket booths, trying to squeeze onto flights to the ruined city. Employees at Indonesia's national airline, Garuda Indonesia, said they were trying to obtain larger aircraft to accommodate them.

Lhokseumawe, about midway between the Medan and Banda Aceh, looks like a city under siege. Soldiers with assault rifles patrol the streets on foot and in trucks and armored vehicles.

Across Aceh, because of the civil unrest, army outposts dot the roads, and soldiers with automatic rifles periodically stop travelers. In one place, soldiers were seen patrolling in a tank. Residents say sections of the main highway remain under the control of the rebel Free Aceh Movement.

As long as the cease-fire holds, the prevalence of military units here is coincidentally helping in relief efforts. Army trucks are helping to clear thousands of bodies that have piled up on the coast, and soldiers are directing efforts to remove wreckage and search for survivors.

It was soldiers, for instance, who found 45-year-old Kamaryah Hasan stuck atop a coconut tree on Sunday afternoon in Banda Aceh, her leg broken.

Earlier, Ms. Kamaryah had traveled from her home in Lhokseumawe to Banda Aceh on her way to make the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. She was preparing to fly to Saudi Arabia later that day when the tsunami struck.

"It sounded like a jet plane," she said from her hospital bed here. When she found herself perched at the top of the tree, she said, she used one hand to hang on and the other to wave to rescuers.

In the bed next to hers lay Khariyah Jamil, 25, who had been brought in from a village outside Lhokseumawe. Ms. Khariyah tried to run from the waves while clutching her two children, one 3 years old, the other just over 1. But the waters ripped them from her arms. Her husband has returned to their village to search for their bodies.

Relief workers say the next few days will be crucial in determining whether there is a second wave of deaths among survivors who have been left stranded in the open. Many huddled under makeshift housing and rationed food and gas to brace for the days ahead. Officials worried that an outbreak of disease could spread quickly.

"The situation is really critical right now, because the distribution system here for food and medicine has just really collapsed," Mr. Elmquist said. "The logistics and communications problems are just overwhelming for us, and if we don't quickly establish food and water supply systems, people will be in extreme danger."

With three of its own workers in the region still missing, the United Nations planned on Wednesday to send a relief plane with 12 tons of food and medical supplies to Sumatra. American officials, meanwhile, were also preparing planeloads of supplies, including plastic sheeting for temporary housing, and body bags.

Traditionally, Indonesia, with a proud nationalist streak, has not sought international aid for disasters and has accepted it only when offered.

But this week Indonesian leaders requested aid on their own for the first time in years, Mr. Elmquist said. "This time they're the ones requesting assistance," he said. "No one's fighting it. It shows the magnitude of the devastation."

The disaster has presented an unusual set of problems for search-and-rescue teams and relief workers. Relief crews have had to battle on two fronts, seeking survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings and from flooded towns and coastal areas.

In the center of Lhokseumawe, the local Red Cross has erected tents to shelter roughly 2,100 refugees from coastal villages and is providing them food, clothing and medicine. They chose a site next to an Islamic center so the people could run up into the building if another tsunami came.

On Monday, President Yudhoyono visited here and promised residents that the government would rebuild their homes. But for now few of the villagers had plans to leave the relief site.

Muktarudin Daud, a fisherman from the village of Pusong Lama, had just returned with his morning's catch when the first of the two giant waves struck. When the waters rushed out after the first wave, many of the village children walked out to collect the fish left on the exposed land, only to be caught by the second, much larger wave.

He managed to escape with his wife and three children, running for an hour ahead of the rising water, but everything they owned was washed away. "We are traumatized," he said. "We are afraid it will happen again."

[Wayne Arnold reported from Lhokseumawe, Indonesia, for this article, and Eric Lichtblau from Jakarta.]