Emerging from Hell

With bodies found in front of houses and in streets, it appeared that many of the villagers died from the searing gas while trying to escape, said Col. Tjiptono, a deputy police chief.

More than 150 injured people - most with burns and some with respiratory problems, broken bones and cuts - waited to be treated at the tiny Sardjito hospital, where the bodies piled up in the morgue, and two other hospitals.

'We're totally overwhelmed here,' said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at Sardjito. A total of 1,765 million cubic feet of volcanic material has been released.

More than 100,000 people living along Merapi's fertile slopes have been evacuated to crowded emergency shelters, many by force, in the last week. Some return to their villages during lulls in activity, however, to tend to their livestock. They were told to stay away on Friday.

Even scientists from Merapi's monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain. They were scrambling to repair four of their five seismographs destroyed by the heavy soot showers.

Before Friday, the death toll from Merapi stood at 44, with most dying in the first blast on October 26. With the new deaths around the village of Bronggang it climbed to 122, the National Disaster Management Agency said.

In 1994, 60 people were killed by Merapi, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.