Nepal, Aug. 28 -- The news arrived the way water does: quietly at first, then in a roaring torrent.

It was 9AM, and I had just woken up, still groggy and reaching for my phone, when the first video appeared on my feed. Brown water where a street used to be. A bridge folding like paper. A bus swept sideways, its passengers' hands visible through windows that were frames of a nightmare.

And then, beneath the videos, the questions. Friends asking: Is this real? Is this AI? Our minds now un-believe the real.

Just weeks ago, I wrote about ice in this paper about the frozen, vertical world of Mt Everest, the Khumbu Icefall creaking blue and ancient in the thin air, the silence of snowfields stretching toward a sky that seemed to have forgot...