The survivors sat patiently, waiting for their turn to be transported to safety. Some wept. Mothers clutched their babies. Husbands grieved for the wives whose hands they could no longer hold. And some onlookers expressed guilt that they had little to grieve for.
But mostly, on Thursday, a day after a huge chunk of a glacier fell and triggered a devastating flood and mud slide in Nepal, leaving more than 300 dead and more than 1,400 others missing, people along the border with Tibet were still in disbelief at the bewildering speed with which a river’s fury had upended their lives.
In a matter of minutes, a grayish brown sludge of sand and pulverized rock had appeared out of nowhere and erased the bearings of their lives: Homes, shops, schools, fields, roads and bridges were mostly gone. Even the wreckage seemed to have disappeared, dragged downstream.
“They all died, and I lived,” said Dawa Lama, 45, starting to weep as he recounted how, just before 9 a.m. on Wednesday, he had heard a thunderclap, and then felt a breeze. Before he knew it, an enormous wave of muddy water had slammed into his home of 12 years in the border village of Timure, carrying away not just his belongings but also his wife and their two daughters, 7 and 8.
“How long can I remain in hope, I don’t know,” Mr. Lama said. His neighbor, who had also lost family members, placed a hand on Mr. Lama’s shoulder to comfort him.
Hundreds of people like Mr. Lama who were rescued from the region in northern Nepal — one of the world’s poorest countries — have landed in Dhunche, a town about 17 miles from the Tibetan border where the Nepal Army has a search-and-rescue base.
Accompanied by a New York Times photographer, I flew with local journalists on a military helicopter to this remote area to see what was left of life. As we traveled over the Bhotekoshi River, which runs from Tibet to Nepal, the waters had return to a semblance of calm. The sky was azure, the hills verdant. And the river that had raged just a day earlier burbled along.
But signs of the miles of devastation left behind were visible even from on high. A major highway that ran alongside the river and connected Nepal and Tibet, facilitating the movement of goods like cars and apples, had almost entirely disappeared into the flash flood’s maw. Only its edges were left behind like bread crusts.
Few houses were standing, mostly on the hillsides where the water couldn’t reach. In many places, the river had left a mud line more than 650 feet high. Army officials pointed to areas where hydropower dams once stood. In one area where we touched down, I saw a lone dog with black fur walking around with a wound by its right hip.
The Nepal Army’s base at Dhunche was packed with hundreds of army personnel and the survivors they had rescued. The area had no electricity or phone networks after the flash flood, so personnel were using military radio sets to communicate.
The helicopters taking off or landing about every 15 minutes from two helipads ferried injured people rescued from villages and towns nearby or rations of dried food like instant noodles. They also transported people from Dhunche to temporary shelters in bigger cities like Trishuli and Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.
A senior officer told me that the search would go on as long as rescuers continued to find people, most likely for another three or four days. By midafternoon, the army had managed to find about 500 survivors; it had rescued 200 the day before. Some sat alone in a stupor, while others took comfort in groups.
In the worst-hit areas, some survived because they had outrun the Bhotekoshi River as it climbed tens of meters up the sides of the rugged Himalayan valley through which it flows.
Among the survivors was Bhushan Thakur, a hairdresser who said he had fled from his salon as soon as he saw the huge wall of sludge making its way toward him. Mr. Thakur, 38, said he and two others had run for their lives, leaping up the hillside.
“We jumped, and jumped,” he said, “otherwise, we would have died.”
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.