The city of grief

As bodies began to be moved from the rubble which was once the twin towers and a warship arrived in the city's harbour, New Yorkers began to ask what would come now.

The death toll was still uncountable, the smoke still billowed from the wreckage and the grief began to feel palpable.

Into the night, ferries carted loads of bodies across the Hudson River. Three cab companies ripped out seats from vans to help carry the dead to the Military Ocean Terminal, in New Jersey.

New York officials did not provide estimates of the number of dead transported.

"It is unimaginable, devastating, unspeakable carnage," said Scott O'Grady, a firefighter. "To say it looks like a war zone, and to tell you about bodies lying in the street and blood and steel beams blocking roads, would not begin to describe what it is like. It's horrible."

Firefighter Rudy Weindler spent nearly 12 hours trying to find survivors and only found four - a pregnant woman sitting on a curb and three others in the rubble of a building in the trade centre complex.

"I lost count of all the dead people I saw," Weindler said. "It is absolutely worse than you could ever imagine."

When asked how many of his comrades he thought had fallen, he burst into tears and could not speak.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen estimated that more than 300 firefighters were missing. "Many of them are gone," he said.

Three top fire department officials were among those who died. Dozens of police officers were also feared missing.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said police had received mobile phone calls from people trapped in the debris.

"There are people that are still alive," he said. "We'll be trying to recover as many people as possible and trying to clean up the horrible mess made by this."

Cranes 120ft tall and bulldozers were brought in to clear the streets. Rescue workers were armed with pickaxes and shovels.

"I must have come across body parts by the thousands," said Angelo Otchy, a mortgage broker who came in with a National Guard unit from Dover, New Jersey, to help dig through the debris.

City paramedic Louis Garcia said: "There's two feet of soot everywhere, and a lot of the vehicles are running over bodies because they are all over the place.

"There were people running up to us who were totally burned no hair, no eyebrows."

Normally, 50,000 people work in the twin towers, but the first attack came when many workers were not yet in their offices.

Officials estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 people were in the buildings when the first plane crashed. Many fled, rushing down dozens of flights of stairs before the second jet hit and the towers collapsed.

The 1,250ft towers, which survived a terrorist bombing in a basement parking garage in 1993, were reduced to a pile of stone and steel about five stories high.

Mayor Giuliani, whose fire commissioner was among those killed, said: "This city is the greatest city in the world, has the greatest people, and a bunch of cowards cannot change that."

He said the death toll "would soon mount to a number too high for anyone in this city of grief to bear".

Few people went to work, schools were closed and the whole south of the usually bustling Manhattan island was sealed off.

Where people once looked at the shining silver and glass twin towers, there was a cloud of smoke and ash which parted for seconds at a time to reveal precisely nothing.

A gaping wound in the ground was being reflected by a gaping wound in thousands of homes where fathers, mothers, sons and daughters had not come home and never will.

Across the city, people gathered to pray in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques, while diners and cafes were packed with people still huddling around televisions, eager for news.

In the harbour, usually a place for pleasure cruises, an aircraft carrier laden with navy jets arrived to offer fresh reassurance to the city, and the air above was silent but for the roar of fighters and military helicopters.

Hospitals were still on standby, waiting for casualties who never came, but dealing too with the rescuers and the relatives of the casualties.

At St Vincent's, the hospital closest to the carnage, firefighters were treated for cuts to their hands after tearing at the debris to reach their 200 trapped colleagues.

At other hospitals, exhausted paramedics were being given rest breaks, food and water before making the awful journey back to the remains of the World Trade Centre, where convoys of emergency vehicles waited and waited.

Like a scene from film Independence Day, National Guard troops with assault rifles patrolled the silent streets in full camouflage and police and rescuers from everywhere had poured in to help the embattled police.

At barricades and on street corners, police who usually pound the streets of small-town New York State, guard parks and prosecute chequebook fraudsters stood side-by-side with dust-caked local officers who had yet to rest since the attacks.

They were the only visitors to New York, the city which tourists normally come to look at in awe but which last night was a spectacle of horror rather than wonder.

Stripped of its iconic twin towers, the city had lost citizens - but not its belief.

Speaking for all, Mayor Giuliani said: "We will rebuild. We will recover, stronger than ever."