Three days after a violent earthquake ripped through Nepal, the clock tower in downtown Kathmandu remains stuck at 11:53, the moment the ground started shaking. In many ways, a country devastated by loss and grief is locked into that time as well, tormented by a moment that upended lives and destroyed homes.

It lives in survivors’ bodies, cheating them into thinking that every moment is a prelude to more tremors. “When I walk, I still think the earth is vibrating,” said Balram Khatri, a 22-year-old, who lost a cousin in the quake. It’s a phantom sensation he can’t stop.

“I pray for tomorrow: ‘Don’t come, don’t come,’” he says, of fears of another earthquake – fears stoked by dozens of powerful aftershocks that have kept Nepal on edge and stoked rumours that more are on the way. People are saying that “a magnitude 10 one is coming. People are crying. People are trying to be safe,” Mr. Khatri said.

“You don’t want to move around. You feel afraid. It’s psychological – you think something could happen at any time,” said Nirab Gyawali, a 25-year-old lawyer, who watched as locals pillaged bricks from the clock tower’s wreckage Monday.

Globe in Nepal: Nathan VanderKlippe reports, fear is still palpable in Kathmandu even as aftershocks subside

The anguish is underscored by the damage the earthquake did to some of the country’s foundations. It destroyed the Kasthamandap temple, leaving its centuries-old square timbers in a pile of rubble. Kathmandu was named after the temple, and its destruction has laid the symbolic heart of the city to waste.

Steps away, Sita Nepali sits on the rubble-strewn steps of another temple that looks out on Kasthamandap. Her family once sold flowers here. But the quake levelled their house, trapping not only their supplies, but their savings. Consumed by worry, they can think of nothing else but to sit in the destruction: two parents and three children reading newspapers as the sun rises early Monday. “We have nothing to sell and no money for more flowers,” said Sita, who is 11.

At the local children’s hospital, dozens of young faces are spread across the cold tile of the ground floor, spread across mats and blankets. They are here because the hospital is scared of another earthquake and has emptied out the second and third floors, where the shaking cracked walls.

“It’s safe here,” a doctor said.

But a safer space can’t erase memories. Sanskrit Adhikari, 18, was in the hospital with his younger brother when the first aftershock hit. He watched two women abandon their children in their panic to run outside. “They just left their own babies. I saw it with my own eyes,” he said, still horrified.

Fears of more shaking have played out on a much wider scale as people flee even safe homes, turning Kathmandu into a city under plastic, with seas of tents spread across public spaces, wedged into road islands and stuffed onto narrow sidewalks. Even Nepal’s President Ram Baran Yadav has slept outside since the Saturday quake. All but a few shops and restaurants stand shuttered behind metal rolling gates, many of their owners either dead or fleeing the city.

At the city’s main bus nexus in Kalanki Chowk, thousands crowd onto sidewalks waiting to leave town. Operators have raised fares six-fold and begun charging the same rates for perilous seats on the roof. They are still selling out, leaving nothing for Ishwor Chalise, a 26-year-old English student looking to go to his home nearly 400 kilometres away, where the earthquake caused no damage. “To be safe, I want to go there,” he said.

But many could not flee. They were, instead, tending to their dead. On the banks of the Bagmati River, Nepal’s holiest, incense mixed with thick clouds of smoke from a long line of funerary pyres that made the air shimmer with heat. Normally, the stone pedestals built for burning the dead are used 15 to 20 times a day. Within two days of the earthquake, 297 bodies had been brought here.

Their Hindu funerary rites formed Kathmandu’s most heart-wrenching display of the earthquake’s lingering horrors.

On Monday, the family of Usha Threstha, a 45-year-old widow buried in her house, conducted an elaborate final ritual. They dusted her body with bright red powder, sprinkled it with holy water from the Bagmati and slowly spun it four times above a bed of sal tree logs, before lowering it into place.

They placed a coin inside Ms. Threstha’s lips and dropped cotton balls dipped in ghee on her mouth. Then one of her sons carried a burning stick in slow circles around her body, wiping his eyes as he walked. He set fire to the cotton balls before making one last round, stopping to kiss his mother’s toes before stumbling off the pedestal with a soft cry of grief.

Flames licked out from the body, and Khadka Kadhikari, a full-time body burner, set to work, placing atop the body a blanket of straw and, finally, flowers.

For Mr. Kadhikari, 55, these three days have been his busiest in 28 years. So many bodies arrived that the pedestals were overrun, forcing families to light dozens of pyres instead on shallow islands in the river.

Flecks of soot dusted Mr. Kadhikari’s hair as he nursed the flames into a roaring blaze. Ms. Threstha’s clothes lay on the banks of the river, bloodied and swarmed by a cloud of buzzing flies.

Across the river, an open-backed cube van arrived packed with kindling to fire the next round of bodies. On its side railing someone had used red paint to write in English: “I miss you.”