The photojournalist did not open his camera case. Suman Nepali of Nepali Times sat on a slope above the river and looked at two children. Kirti Tamang is five years old. She saw the flood carry away her mother and her sister, and then she was thrown onto the hillside. Later she was found in the forest with two other children. Since that day she has not been able to speak. Next to her sat a boy from her school, Biswas Tamang, who was hurt more badly. His school ID card was still hanging around his neck, and it was the card that helped his teachers find his mother, who lives in a neighbouring district and had sent him to a school in Betrawati. Taking a picture felt disrespectful, the photographer wrote. All he could do was watch and remember.
Thirteen days after ice, rock and mud came down at the China-Nepal border on 26 August, Nepal lowered its flags. Monday was the last day of mourning in Hindu tradition, when close family stay at home, relatives visit, and rituals are held for the dead. Some families whose relatives are still missing held symbolic funerals, because the cremation is the most important final rite and doing it without a body brings some peace. The official numbers were at least 1,398 dead and more than 5,500 missing, about 800 of them foreigners.
There was no state ceremony. Phanindra Paudel of the National Emergency Operation Centre told Reuters that there were no organised government programmes because the search and rescue work was still going on. President Ram Chandra Paudel travelled to the affected districts to see the damage himself.
What made the day more than a funeral was what had happened underground. On Friday, nine days after the flood, rescuers reached two men about 170 metres inside the Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel in Rasuwa district. They heard voices before they reached them. Home Minister Sudan Gurung gave their names: Sanjay Shah, 30, and Kabir Maharjan, 45. Both were stable and were flown to a hospital in Kathmandu. Local television showed the first man covered in mud, carried out on a rescuer’s shoulder.
Then came a third man. The Nepali army said that Lu Haitao was brought out of a 225-metre tunnel at the Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project, ten days after the glacier collapsed higher up the river. He had no visible injuries, but his body was slightly too cold. Army video showed doctors treating him inside a helicopter.
Nobody knows exactly how many people are still underground. The search is now focused on 12 hydropower projects, where about 900 workers are missing and around 500 are thought to be trapped in tunnels. Army teams believe about 121 of the 900 may be inside the tunnels, while the others were probably working outside. On Monday the teams were trying to reach four of six missing people at the Chilime project in Rasuwa, who could still be alive, according to Shri Ram Neupane, a member of parliament who is helping with the rescue. Rescuers still hope because many tunnels contain pockets of air.
“We are facing something I have never faced before,” the Australian tunnel rescue expert Arnold Dix wrote on social media on Monday. He said this was not one rescue but several at the same time, in different places. Specialist teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States are working through mud, broken buildings and tunnels. The army spokesman, Raja Ram Basnet, said the work was continuing at the same speed as on the first day.
The families are not satisfied. In Kathmandu they gathered near the prime minister’s office to demand a faster search for the hundreds of workers who were swept away by the Bhotekhoshi river or buried by mud and stones. “We have a lot of hope,” said Reena, whose brother is missing. “We need the result.” The mortuaries are full. Police say hundreds of bodies have been buried in mass graves after DNA samples were taken, and only about 100 have been identified and returned.
The danger was known. Below Nepal’s mountains there are more than 5,000 glacier lakes held back by walls of loose rock. Researchers found that such lakes burst 5.2 times a year in the 1980s and 15.2 times a year in the 2010s.
In Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong, hundreds of Nepalis lit candles and laid flowers in a community hall on Monday. Satish Gurung, the acting consul general, told them it was a very difficult time. He said the disaster was caused partly by global warming in the mountains, and he asked not only for aid and charity but for climate justice.