To see the condition to which Kawhmu has been reduced you would think that its people had enough to worry about. But among all the devastation that has rained down on the village one thing preoccupies them above all.

It is not the toppling of the trees and the inundation of the fields, or even the destruction of their simple houses, which lie like broken crates along the road through the Irrawaddy delta.

The object at which everyone points is the gleaming Buddhist pagoda which towers 80ft (25m) above the village. The top ten feet, the spire and vane and gilt umbrellas that symbolise the attainment of nirvana, have been lopped clean off.

During a four-hour drive through the Irrawaddy delta yesterday, that was the most striking among many remarkable sights: towering above the wreckage of Cyclone Nargis, dozens and dozens of decapitated golden pagodas.

Last night the top United States diplomat in Burma gave warning that more than 100,000 may have perished in the delta area alone in the aftermath of the disaster.

As the crow flies, Kawhmu is only 25 miles (40km) south of the former capital, Rangoon, but in the level of destruction and the absence of significant aid, it is another world.

The cyclone smashed windows and tore up roofs in the city, but the brick and concrete houses survived. In those poor townships where homes were destroyed, foreign aid is being distributed. But in the houses in the delta, the sturdiest part was the bamboo posts which supported walls and roofs of palm leaf and flimsy corrugated iron.

Most were stripped to their skeletons in last Saturday’s storm; none has escaped intact. The storm surge which drowned tens of thousands closer to the coast caused less human damage here. But the rain and wind have turned what used to be a bustling village into a sodden shantytown.

“We need rice and we need meat,” said a man named Phone Dint, in the grounds of a Buddhist temple where monks in orange robes were hauling pieces of rusty metal sheeting to cover the exposed roof of their monastery. “Most of all we need money, to buy the iron to cover the roofs.”

Burma’s wet season begins in a fortnight, when rains less lashing than the cyclone but still overwhelmingly heavy pour down over this lowland area. Without roofs villages like this will be uninhabitable.

That is apart from the other damage. Fallen telephone lines lie along the road for miles on end, or dangle across it from toppled poles. There is no electricity apart from that supplied by a handful of private generators. And, just as alarming in a devoutly Buddhist and very superstitious country, there are the pagodas, their tops blown off, their jewels and orbs scattered to the winds.

There is some aid coming in, but it is barely enough for survival, and all of it supplied by the agencies of the military Government. Foreign aid workers have still not been allowed into Burma in large numbers, and the Government’s suspicious xenophobia is in evidence. Yesterday aid agencies accused Burma’s “closed and stubborn” regime of risking millions of lives by refusing to allow entry to foreign aid workers, most of whom are still waiting to obtain permits.

France called on the United Nations to intervene. Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General spoke of a “critical moment for the people” of Burma. The UN’s humanitarian chief, John Holmes, urged the junta to facilitate the arrival of disaster relief teams and the distribution of badly-needed emergency supplies.

The motorcycle drivers who taxied us into the delta hurried anxiously past any soldiers or police. The boatmen who ferry passengers across the river between Rangoon and the dock town of Dala have been ordered not to carry foreigners.

“If I take you the police will arrest me,” one man said, miming the gesture of being handcuffed. On the road from Dala to Kungyangon, close to the Andaman Sea, I saw about a dozen army trucks, carrying broken trees out, and bags of food and cartons of petrol and diesel in.

But people here desperately need building materials, and medical supplies to guard against the malarial mosquitoes and bacteria that, even now, must be breeding in the pools of flood water that serve by necessity as baths, drinking water and toilets.

In the absence of such comprehensive help, people do what poor villagers have always done: they get on with it, using the few resources at their disposal. Opposite the monastery with the steeplejack monks, men with tattooed torsos hauled timber out of a swamp where their home had been, to build the frame of a new house.

All along the road people are carrying things — planks, bags of rice, jugs of water, hammers and saws, balanced precariously on bicycles, motorbikes and on their own heads, backs and shoulders.

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