In Nepal, once-busy towns are turned to wastelands of mud

It wasn’t a mere flood that dumped these metres of mud and carved new riverbanks through homes and shops; that swept away a pair of bridges on a sunny morning, and the people standing on them.

It was a beast, arriving with the roar of a jet engine on a runway , says KP Bharaisain, a 68-year-old resident of Dhunge, a small town in Nepal’s devastated Nuwakot district.

He ran up the nearest hill, watching helplessly. “It was a giant wave of water, bouncing up and down like a football,” he says.

The river kept rising for about 15 minutes after the initial surge, before quickly receding. Within half an hour, he says, the new wasteland of Dhunge was revealed.

“I never expected something this big to happen,” he says, gesticulating to the main street and the rushing Trishuli River, which, at about 9.30am on Wednesday morning, were one and same.

A glacial lake, about 50 kilometres north, had collapsed not an hour earlier, unleashing a rapid surge of water that has left thousands dead or missing along the river system, 41 Australians among them .

It has been days since the disaster, and while it may be cool at altitudes, the valleys bake.

Dhunge, busy with passing Hindu pilgrims this time of year, is now the last town before the roads become impassable.

Every aid agency is here, even the Scientologists. Police blow piercing whistles at people moving too close or seeking scant shade in areas that may be unstable.

Everywhere is mud, and though it has the appearance of being compact, it is quicksand capable of swallowing a person two times over in some parts. Straying and sinking onlookers need help back to solid ground.

What must be greeting the choppered-in crews upstream, where people had no warning or time to react? Australian tourists like Sreedharan Iyer and his family , who had just checked out of their hotel near the source of the floods at 8.45am and were making their way to sacred Mount Kalaish – what must they have seen?

No human in Dhunge has been pulled from the debris alive since rescue workers have been on the scene.

Some joy on Saturday morning, though, when they helped retrieve a dog from the ruins in which it had been hiding. “Last night we were close to getting it, but it was trying to bite us,” says one.

And neither have they recovered bodies. Any remains have been washed downstream, buried in mud or wedged under broken concrete walls. Police say they can see body parts on the sparsely populated opposite bank, but it’s impossible to cross the river now because the bridges are gone.