Smoke began to pour from the cone early in the morning, but people in the village of San Miguel Los Lotes, five miles below, were accustomed to the sight. Volcán de Fuego is an active volcano and frequently expels smoke and flaming debris into gullies near the top.

The Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala exploded on June 3, throwing a billowing tower of ash more than a mile into the sky. Burning lava, rocks and gas cascaded down the slopes of the volcano.

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San Miguel is a ghost town, many of its dead entombed, life stopped in an instant. This truck and a nearby shed were buried in about three and a half feet of the debris left by the pyroclastic flow — a current of gases, sand, ash, rocks and tree trunks.

But nobody was prepared for the explosion at lunchtime, when a pyroclastic flow as hot as 1600 degrees Fahrenheit engulfed the village in deep ash, draining vivid color from the details of ordinary life and coating them in dull gray.

“I’ve lived there 50 years,” said Hilaria López Hernández, 58, who survived. “The volcano would grumble and make noise. We never thought it would take our things and leave us with nothing.”

Guatemala’s National Institute of Forensic Science, known as Inacif, has counted 135 dead and 287 are still listed as missing from several hamlets on the volcano’s slopes. Neighbors believe as many as 400 people died in San Miguel Los Lotes alone.

The survivors who managed to run away, as they heard the screams of their trapped neighbors, exist in limbo. Reliving the grief that they could not save their loved ones, they spend their days at shelters in nearby towns, in a mix of boredom, despondency and faint hope.

Bicycles in the entry hall of a home engulfed in volcanic ash in San Miguel Los Lotes, Guatemala. Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press

Bicycles in the entry hall of a home engulfed in volcanic ash in San Miguel Los Lotes, Guatemala. Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press

Many tried to return to San Miguel in the first few days after the explosion to look for survivors, but steady rain set off fast-moving mudslides of volcanic debris, called lahars. Most have now accepted that their relatives are dead, and although rescue workers are still working to recover the remains of those who died, officials are reviewing when to declare the town “campo santo,” or hallowed ground, to be sealed off and guarded as a vast cemetery.

There are plans to move the survivors to a new community to be built farther to the south, where the soft mountain air gives way to tropical heat. But it will take six months, probably many more. Survivors are reluctant to move and worried that there will be no work for them there.

“Only God knows what’s going to happen to me and my family,” said Demetrio Cárdenas García, 70, a farm worker. “I don’t know anything about my future. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

An earlier version of this article listed the death toll at more than 150, based on an estimate from Inacif in June.

A rescue worker embraced Angélica Álvarez after she found human remains inside her mother-in-law’s home while looking for her children in San Miguel Los Lotes, Guatemala. June 14, 2018. Carlos Jasso/Reuters