New Delhi, Aug. 27 -- As flash floods tore through Nepal on Wednesday, water, mud and rock came roaring down, and a mango tree became the unlikely saviour of a Nepali man digging a toilet pit outside a newly built house.

Bibek Kumal, 24, was working in Bidur near Nepal's border with Tibet when a massive "wall of water" swept him away.

His four co-workers shouted at him to get out and run, but fled before he scrambled out of the five-foot-deep (1.5-metre) pit, Reuters reported.

"I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it were an earthquake," Kumal said from his bed at Kathmandu's National Trauma Centre, where his brother Dinesh sat beside him.

Clinging to the mango tree, Kumal watched the house vanish.

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