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ON the morning of August 26, a wall of ice, rock and water tore down from Langtang-Lirung through the Bhotekoshi valley into Nepal and Tibet. Villages vanished. Bridges that had stood for generations were gone within minutes. Over 270 bodies have been recovered; more than a thousand people, many of them foreign trekkers on the Langtang route, remain missing. Ten hydropower projects along the river, including the 111-MW Rasuwagadhi plant, were damaged or swept away entirely. This is not a natural disaster in the simple sense of the phrase. It is the arrival, in real time, of a bill the Himalaya did not run up.