Slender white wading birds stalked the still waters of the Kreung Aceh, the river which runs through this devastated city, yesterday. They looked like fastidious little ghosts.
It was an oddly tranquil scene for a city which has acquired so many ghosts so quickly, but there was a sense that if not tranquillity, the beginning of order was stirring among the chaos and destruction.
Bulldozers, dump trucks and corpse collection squads were out in force in Banda Aceh, starting the task of clearing streets and levelling ground for the real rebuilding to begin.
For other communities, the towns on Aceh's north-western coast which took the brunt of the tsunami and have been virtually wiped off the map, it will be a harsh and pragmatic kind of reality. While Banda Aceh and Meulaboh will be reconstructed, the survivors of the towns in between will be evacuated.
"This is going to be an abandoned city," said Mr Alwi Shihab, Indonesia's welfare minister, after visiting Calang, a town half way between Banda Aceh and Meulaboh. About 70 per cent of its 9,000 inhabitants are dead or missing and only a few have been able to get out by boat since. Half-ruined Banda Aceh will have to bear the greatest burden of the tens of thousands of homeless.
The scale of the task is terrifying. Nightly aftershocks, earth tremors which suddenly make the ground turn into a wobbly table, do not help confidence.
Fresh Indonesian troops are arriving all the time, many destined for the task of clearing out the thousands of corpses which still lie in the rubble.
Mr Shihad promised that by today the most hideous sight of all, the blackened and swollen dead human beings which had floated under a bridge for more than a week, would be dealt with.
At another bridge, the Pante Pirak bridge over the Kreung Aceh, Australian military engineers were setting up a machine to purify thousands of litres of water a day from the town's reservoir. All they needed was for someone to turn the pump on.
Outside the Pante Pirak apartment store, which had collapsed, the owner, Abu Bakar, stood with a bleak expression on his face.
"The loss comes to about 50 billion rupiah [ about €4.2 million]," he said. He was organising the distribution of noodles and cooking oil donated by friends in the Indonesian/Chinese business community, to a long queue of homeless people. Each one had lost family members: the survivors live in refugee camps scattered among the lush rice fields, palm and banana trees of the countryside.
The aid effort is not yet big enough for all the food required to be delivered to all the camps.
Nurlaila (35) said she had been queuing for two hours. She lost her parents, her husband and her home. All she had were three children and the clothes she had fled in. Not even that. "Somebody gave me these clothes," she said. It began to rain, big tropical drops. Those queuing had no choice but to wait in the downpour.
Out at the airport, the arrival of a fleet of helicopters from the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln meant that for the first time, the aid operation had the capacity to start feeding survivors in small cut-off coastal communities.