A relative of a passenger who was on board the sunken ferry cries as she holds a yellow ribbon to wish for safe return of her missing loved one at a port in Jindo, South Korea.

No. 150, a boy, had a snaggletooth. No. 111, a girl, was wearing pink slippers and a hairband on her right wrist. No. 87 had on pajama pants with teddy bears.No. 93 was clutching a Roman Catholic rosary in her left hand.The descriptions, some rendered in forensic detail, are the only evidence that many parents of the teenagers who died on South Korea's doomed ferry have of their children's fate. As bodies are steadily recovered from the sunken ship, they are carried to shore and the process of identifying them begins - starting with descriptions written on white boards in a tent set up for the grieving relatives.Eom Ji-young is one of the many mothers still waiting for word of their children.Several times an hour, she rises from the mattress in the tent city where she has kept vigil since the ferry sank last week. Her head bowed, her shoulders slumped, Eom, 37, walks down the road and enters the tent with the five white boards, searching for evidence of her 16-year-old daughter, Park Yae-ji.New descriptions are added less often than Eom checks, but she comes anyway, to be sure."I can't sleep," she said after another visit, a school photo of Yae-ji hanging from a lanyard around her neck. "What if she comes in? What if she's waiting for me? She's been waiting for me all this time inside the sea, and I don't sleep."As Eom moves back and forth between the two points that have delineated her life here, her mind is on a third point, in mist-shrouded waters off the south coast of Jindo. Eleven miles off shore, teams of divers working round the clock are urgently searching the ship, which rests upside down on the seabed in dark waters at a depth of more than 100 feet.It is slow, hard, dangerous work, yet the dive teams have been moving as quickly as possible to find and recover the bodies - to help provide relatives with closure but also to outpace decomposition, which has already begun to make identification difficult.A vast anchorage of rescue boats and support vessels - military and civilian, barges and battleships, dinghies and fishing trawlers - has formed at the site of the sinking. At the center of this constellation are two inflatable buoys marking the site of the wreck and a nucleus of rigid-hulled inflatable boats carrying divers, dozens of whom plunge into the Yellow Sea.They have descended in pairs, and in shifts often lasting about 30 minutes, progressively making their way through the waters that have filled the ship's corridors and cabins.The teams have had to contend with high turbidity that, at the depth of the wreck, has limited the divers' visibility to 4 to 8 inches, according to a diver with a national rescue squad. They have found their way through the vessel largely by touch.As they find bodies, they tie ropes to them and send them to the surface.No one still on the ship has been found alive.As of early Thursday, the death toll had reached 159, with most of the victims pulled by the divers from the wreck. Officials said 143 people were still missing and presumed dead. Most of them were students on a class trip.More than a week after the ferry's sinking, the exact cause remained unclear, but the ship began to tilt after making a sharp turn.In recent days, the routine of identifying the dead has unfolded with numbing regularity.Bodies arrive aboard boats, new descriptions are added in black marker to the white boards, and the death toll grows. Each entry has a stark simplicity.No. 63: "160 cm; black slightly wavy straight hair 15 cm; left hand Buddhist beads (white; flower decoration in the shape of ring on each unit); pearl piercing inside right ear; gold tooth, one each on the right and the left side on the top set of teeth."No. 118: "160 cm; chubby build, black horn-rimmed glasses, face round and rather chubby, long straight hair."Officials stationed at the emergency encampment have been taking DNA samples from family members to help identify bodies. But even before test results are received, some anxious families have been allowed to take bodies that they are certain are those of their children, on the condition that they not bury them until the genetic tests have provided confirmation.One family took custody of the wrong child and held a memorial service before DNA tests alerted them to the mix-up. Their own child had been left in a temporary morgue for two days without being claimed.Eom has given up any hope that Yae-ji is still alive.Another student who escaped the sinking ship saw Yae-ji inside a room on the vessel's fourth deck with other students. Announcements from the crew had said people should remain where they were, and so they stayed, even as the room filled up with seawater. Eom has been told that the room is now buried in the silt of the seabed."Like any other mother, I at least want to take her home," Eom said. "I just want to take my baby out of there."In the first few days after the ferry sank, many passengers' relatives held out hope that their family members were alive, and they pressed the government to redouble its efforts to search for passengers who might have somehow found an air pocket in the sunken ship and survived.Increasingly, however, most have started to acknowledge that the possibility of survivors has likely vanished, and many are preparing for the possibility that the government will soon begin the salvage phase, which could take weeks if not months."They're coming to the realization of the limits of the search," said Moon Hyong-il, the pastor of a church in Ansan, a city southwest of Seoul where many of the students aboard the ferry attended high school. On Wednesday morning, Moon met with relatives at the port."Now they want to recover the bodies to be able, at least, to give them a funeral," he said.The decision to move from search to salvage, by law, rests with the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, the authorities said, although it may unofficially fall to President Park Geun-hye.Government officials have insisted that they will not move forward without consensus among the passengers' relatives.Eom said that she did not oppose the shift to a salvage operation in the next few days. She was worried about the dangers the divers were facing, yet she could not let go of the hope that her daughter's body would be recovered before salvage operations began."So, I hope they can bear with us," she said of officials.

© 2014, The New York Times News Service

Shortly after midnight Thursday, the tent city had fallen still. A man wearing a track suit and the bewildered look of someone who had just woken up hurried into the tent with the white boards. Four new descriptions had been added.The man stared, reading intently. He turned and walked out, only to stop, whirl around and peer at a board one more time. Then he disappeared into the darkness of the tent city.