The bus did not go into the water.
This was the fact she returned to, in the first sixty seconds after the movement stopped, while the children were still screaming and the bus was still shuddering and her ears were still processing the enormous sound that had replaced every other sound in the world. The bus had not gone into the water. The bus had gone sideways — pushed by the surge that had come off the slope above the road, not the main flood channel but a tributary rush that had taken the road's edge and the shoulder and everything beyond it — and had slid down an embankment and stopped. Not in the gorge. On a ledge above the gorge.
The gorge was to her right and below her. She could see it through the right-side windows — the valley floor, which was not the valley floor anymore but a moving surface of brown water at a level that was wrong, that was much too high, that was the level of a river that had consumed its banks and was consuming everything adjacent to its banks with the indifferent appetite of water that has nowhere else to go. The river that should have been forty metres below the road and twenty metres wide was now perhaps fifteen metres below the bus and God knew how wide — it was hard to measure something that was moving that fast and that brown.
