PISCO, Peru — Carlos Ayo was given a single day to hope.

Perhaps, he told himself, his 16-year-old daughter, Carla, wasn't inside her dance academy when Peru's largest quake in almost four decades began shaking this coastal community. Maybe the girl had escaped the broken building and was looking for her parents, knowing they'd be desperate. Searching for her.

Then Carla's body was found and another name was added to a death list that numbers more than 540 throughout this quake-fractured region.

"My daughter was practicing a folkloric dance when the earthquake happened," Ayo told a reporter in a whisper. Then the father shook his inquisitor's hand, turned away and sat beside a group of others who had lost much.

More than a week has passed since the magnitude-8 tremor shook much of Peru. But communities located south of Lima such as Pisco, Ica and Chincha have been forever changed. Even sections of the famed Pan American Highway that runs along South America's west coast now carry deep, dangerous scars.

Indeed, a walk through seismic-weary Pisco today is to encounter a lunar ghost town. Few of the surviving structures are occupied, and the dust that was created when most of this fishing town's buildings were destroyed has now settled, leaving several inches of fine powder on roads and puffing up like moon dust when disturbed. Many residents wander about in surgical masks to protect themselves from the grimy air.

Looting was a problem in the hours following the Aug. 15 temblor, so Peruvian soldiers were dispatched to patrol Pisco's streets and corners with automatic weapons. Now the town seems silent and uneasily still beyond the perpetual, mechanical rumble and scrape of heavy equipment cleaning up the rubble.

The town's central plaza still remains a gathering place. But the familiar vendors hawking glass-bottled Cokes and lottery tickets can't be found. Instead, people line up in front of government tents where the names and identifying traits of "desaparecidos" — the missing — are recorded. A banner with the words "Pisco — Solo Hay Uno" (There's Only One Pisco) is stretched between treetops at one corner of the plaza, suggesting a town with grit. But below on ground level, a large grease board announces grim municipal statistics: 357 cadavers identified; one unidentified cadaver; 44 missing.

Several miles north in the small community of Grocio Prado, Eleazar Audencio invites visitors into his damaged adobe home with red-rimmed eyes and a smile. Audencio and many of his neighboring relatives are among the thousands of Peru's recent homeless. "We can't sleep in our houses, so we sleep outside in tents, " he said.