PORT BLAIR, India – A girl of 13 who was swept away by the tsunami was found alive and well after floating on a door for two days.

Meghna Rajshekhar, from the island of Car Nicobar in the Andaman Sea, survived by clinging onto the door, which was part of the flotsam gathered up by wave.

The teenager, the daughter of an Indian Air Force officer, was discovered walking along a beach in a daze after being washed back ashore on Car Nicobar by the same sea that claimed so many thousands of lives.

Her parents, however, were not spared by the 35-foot wave which destroyed the air base, killing more than 100 military personnel, and as many as 7,000 others.

Officials from the Andaman Island government said Meghna had been sent to Hyderabad in southern India to stay with an uncle who is now her closest living relative.

“She spent two days floating at sea, far out at sea,” Rear Admiral Rakesh Kala said.

“She told defense personnel that she had cried out 11 times when helicopters hovered over the ocean in search of survivors on Sunday,” an Indian flight lieutenant told the Hindustan Times. “But no one spotted her.”

Meghna, who suffered severe bruising, told her rescuers she had not lost hope because she knew which direction land lay and was aware that she was drifting towards the shore.

“In the end it was the waves that washed so many thousands of others away that washed her ashore,” the paper said.

The air base station commander V.V. Bandhopadhyay said the story of Meghna’s survival was “a miracle in the midst of the disaster the tsunami wrought.”

Car Nicobar, one of the flattest of the 572 islands of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago and situated just 150 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter off Sumatra, was the worst hit of all the islands when the tsunami struck.

Yesterday the first pictures of the destruction emerged. They showed that the air base’s air-traffic control building had been decapitated by the wave, severing the entire viewing deck from its base.

Islanders said the quake had struck with such force that the entire island had “sunk” by as much as three feet.

Visitors to Car Nicobar, and its larger cousin further south, Great Nicobar, reported that people were becoming increasingly desperate for food and supplies.

There was no water or electricity supply on Car Nicobar yesterday. The wave crashed on to the island with sufficient force to smash concrete buildings, not just the flimsy tin or palm frond shacks in which so many of the dead had been living.

One distraught mother asked reporters to take her children back to the Andaman capital, Port Blair, giving an address at which they could be delivered to friends. Devinder Kumar, 28, an airman who took reporters on a tour of the wreckage, said: “I was pulled into the sea. My wife threw in a rope, tied the other end to the car and drove to pull me into shore. I thought it was DDay for me.”

Another surviving serviceman described the scene as “paradise lost.” He added: “It’s the end of the best posting an air force man could ever get. I lost a hundred people, four out of my 20 brother officers.”

On Great Nicobar, the southern most of the islands, not a tree or bush was left standing at sea-level.

“From the air, everything was absolutely flat, it looked like a giant crop circle,” one observer said.

Relief flights have been working overtime all day. One reporter on an Indian Air Force plane with a seating capacity of 32 counted 147 people on board.

Aboriginal tribesmen who officials feared might have been wiped out when the tsunami swept through the Islands have almost certainly survived.

The five tribes, which total only 800 individuals, exist in designated reserves set up to protect social and cultural traditions that have persisted since Stone Age times.

Ram Kapse, the lieutenant governor of the islands who returned from a three-day boat tour of the worst-affected areas yesterday, said almost all the tribes had now been contacted.

Many, like the Great Andamanese, who live on Great Andaman Island and number only 49, took refuge in the dense rainforest that covers much of the archipelago, he said.

An Australian, Wayne Harrigan, 46, who was staying on Little Andaman, reported that the Onge, of whom 98 survive, had done similarly.

“Several people from our camp went to check on them and they had clearly survived, even though Dugan Creek, where most of them live, was devastated,” he said. “They must have taken shelter inland.” Of the other tribes, the Shompen, thought to number 13, have yet to be contacted, but they are known to live in hilly areas and officials said there was “no reason for apprehension” regarding their safety.

The Jarawa, a hunter-gatherer tribe who were nearly made extinct by an outbreak of measles in 1999, have also reported in through intermediaries known as “tribal captains.”

The tribe, whose lands were suffering encroachment from settlers and logging operations, were protected in 2002 by an Indian supreme court ruling that all roads to settlements should be blocked.

A ship is currently en route to the most hostile of the tribes, the 300-strong Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island and have a reputation for firing arrows at anyone who approaches.

This island is well north of the worst affected areas.