Thapra, Nepal ? The rains had stopped by the time help came, more than a day after the earth tore loose from itself, thundered down the steep Himalayan foothills and obliterated this farming village of slate-roofed, whitewashed houses.

“The land was boiling, it was melting away,” Indra Basnet said Friday, two days after the landslide clawed out his home and his fields, leaving his family for reasons he still cannot explain uninjured.

Nepalese villagers look at a house half buried in mud after a landslide hit their village, Thapra. The community saw the single most deadly monsoon-caused incident this year in South Asia. At least 41 people remain missing and are presumed dead.

In Thapra, this is what the monsoon rains, and the landslide they caused, have wrought: 41 people dead, 33 homes destroyed, and the annihilation of a village that endured for 11 or more generations along a hillside so steep that the only roads are narrow mountain trails, and the only way to travel them is by foot.

It took nearly a day for word to reach the outside world that a landslide had even happened, and almost another for the weather to clear so a military helicopter could fly from Katmandu, Nepal’s capital, some 125 miles away, with help. By that time, there was nothing to be done for the dozens of people buried in the mud, or swept away by the viciously roiling river at the base of the hill. Only 13 bodies have been found.

If a few houses are left in Thapra, no one will live in them anymore.

“We’ve given up hope,” Basnet said. “We’re afraid to come back.”

The aftermath in the ruggedly beautiful Thapra is just one tiny piece of what was left behind by the monsoon, which sweeps across Asia every year from June to September.

While farmers need the rains for their crops, all too often the downpours come with a terrible force. Across a large swath of the continent, from India to China, Nepal to Bangladesh, villagers have been drowned in submerged villages, crushed under collapsing houses, bitten by deadly snakes or washed away by rivers. Some 25 million people have been forced from their homes, and more than 2,000 have died.

It is, in many ways, an old story. The flood’s victims are largely ignored by their governments, by the local press and by the international media, victims of the savage sameness of the annual flooding.

It is hard to comprehend the sheer suffering caused by the monsoon.

Recent floods in Europe killed some 113 people. In Asia, by some estimates, more than 25 million people have been displaced by flooding. In India, some 16 million people have fled their homes; in Bangladesh it’s 7 million, in China, 250,000 evacuated, and hundreds of thousands of Nepal.