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On a narrow street in the Balkhu neighborhood of Katmandu on Monday, police officers were swarming over what was once the house of Dhan Bahadur Karmachaya, picking at the rubble with axes, power drills, power saws, pickaxes and even a garden hoe.

Occasionally, they would toss shovelfuls of broken glass that made a tinkling sound, like tiny bells, when the shards hit the ground.

The officers were looking for the body of Mr. Karmachaya, who had been taking his midday nap when the earthquake hit on Saturday. The search was in its second day and proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace; Superintendent Ganesh Thada Majar, who was overseeing the operation, freely acknowledged this.

The search for Mr. Karmachaya was only the first of 20 searches lined up for his officers. The heat was blazing, and they were already sweaty and exhausted.

Mr. Majar wanted – desperately wanted – sniffer dogs. He wanted cranes and excavators.

Much of the neighborhood was gathered around, watching his officers dig: teenage boys in skinny jeans and goth T-shirts, women holding umbrellas against the sun, middle-aged men in button-down shirts caked with dust. Prabin Sharma, like many of the spectators, had clambered up onto the pile of broken concrete so he could watch the officers use a crowbar to pry up a heavy beam, under which, everyone hoped, they would find Mr. Karmachaya.

As the officers strained, a large chunk of brick wall fell off the nearest building with a crash, but nobody seemed to notice.

“Until now, people are panicking more than angry,” said Mr. Sharma, 37, a sportswriter. “Even now, everybody is in fear. There is a rumor that at 4 o’clock there will be a 9 Richter again. If I think scientifically, I think, ‘No, it can’t be predicted.’ But if you have seen thousands of people dying, it’s human nature, this internal fear.”

When the earthquake hit Saturday, Mr. Sharma had been eating lunch at a family gathering. His first instinct was to grab his wife and pull her into a doorway, where solid beams can serve as protection in an earthquake.

“It was shaking like. … I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “I was feeling, me and my wife, we are together, we are alive. Forget everyone else.”

As he was recalling this, over his shoulder, the heavy beam came loose, revealing the shell-pink ceiling of one of the rooms where Mr. Karmachaya had lived. One of the officers reached in and pulled out a cardboard trunk, flattened and dusty, and a small bag filled with what appeared to be rags. There was nothing else; as it turned out, the search would go on until nightfall, but there was nothing else.

Hovering behind the searchers, peering into the dust, was Prabin Karmachaya, a heavyset man in a blue jacket, who wanted to say how proud he was of the Nepal Army and the police, whose lack of heavy equipment was, after all, not their fault. They were trying, he said.

The sadness he knew he would feel, he said, would have to wait: “First I have to bring out the dead body of my father.”