Relief workers have yet to reach many remote villages and officials said the final death toll was likely to climb far above the 19,400 already known to have died in Pakistan.

Politicians in the worst-affected areas, Pakistan-held Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, said they expected a far higher tally -- as many as 38,000.

Across the border in Indian-held Kashmir almost 700 people are known to have been killed.

It is the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's turbulent history since its formation in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims, and the quake, measured at 7.6 magnitude, was the strongest in South Asia for a century.

With Pakistan's resources stretched beyond their limits, President Pervez Musharraf appealed for foreign aid to supply tents, blankets, transport helicopters and medicines.

"We're trying to cope with these difficulties, there should not be any blame game," Musharraf said on state-run television, wearing his army fatigues.

Rescue teams and ordinary citizens laboured with cranes and excavators or used their bare hands to shift masonry burying the victims, some angered by the central authorities' inability to reach them sooner.

The keening cries of mothers hysterical with grief over lost children could be heard throughout the death zone in Pakistan, and the faith of devout Muslim fathers was tested.

"It is God's will that my daughter has been taken, but my heart cannot accept the way she went," Mohammad Ramazan said after burying his 8-year-old daughter in Frontier province's Balakot town.

"I can't get her wounded face out of my mind."

Many worked through the night in the search for survivors, including hundreds of children trapped in collapsed schools.

SURVIVOR'S STORY

Another 150 people, including foreigners, were buried under two flattened apartment blocks in the capital Islamabad, where Chinese, Turkish, and British teams, helped by sniffer dogs, joined the rescue effort.

Decorator Ikhalaq Ahmed was one of the lucky few to be dragged alive from the collapsed Margala Towers. Ahmed recounted how he called relatives on a mobile telephone after being trapped in the rubble for more than 24 hours.

"I was just praying to God. I was fasting so I wasn't feeling thirsty and I never lost hope," Ahmed told journalists an hour after his rescue late on Sunday night.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, requiring Muslims to fast through the day, began late last week.

Militant groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir suffered casualties. An Islamic charity linked to one of the most feared outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba, said scores of its workers were killed when its mosques, hospitals, schools and seminaries were obliterated by the quake.

The United States sent eight helicopters from a military base in Afghanistan to help the relief effort led by General Musharraf, Washington's ally in the war on terror.

The first US planeload of relief supplies landed at Rawalpindi's military airfield early on Monday morning.

"We're moving eight choppers over," President George W. Bush said. "One of the biggest concerns for the government of Pakistan is not enough airlift capacity to get in some of the rural areas where people are suffering."

The communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll in that region alone could reach 30,000, as the fatalities in many villages were still unknown.

North West Frontier Province's Chief Minister Mohammad Akram Durrani said more than 1,800 bodies had been counted in his province so far, but anticipated a final tally of around 8,000.

"We are in desperate need of assistance. The situation is very, very bad. We need tents, food and everything."