It is difficult to convey the scope of what was lost by those who had labored with ax and shovel to bring this land under cultivation. Fifty years ago, the area was all savanna, waving fields of reeds and elephant grass running for a thousand miles on both sides of the river. As a boy, I hunted there for partridge, walking among a line of beaters, the tall grasses so dense that I was invisible to the next man only 10 feet away. This was wild country.

But in the years since, these people tamed the land, leveling it by hand, expanding their plots acre by acre, until they had conquered it all. Last year, from where I stood on the levee, one would have seen orderly fields proceeding all the way to the river on the horizon. These lands had not been flooded in living memory, and so people built solid houses and granaries, planted trees, raised mosques. This was their life’s work.

Now all that has been swept away. In this area, the best-paying crop by far is sugar cane, which was to be cut in November but now stands submerged, except for the tips of the fronds, dead and rusty gray on the surface. When the water recedes, the people will, if they are lucky enough to have any, sell their cattle and their wives’ ornaments, their dowry gold, to rebuild the watercourses and to level the fields. Some will plant winter wheat, but it will be sown late and will not pay, not enough to cover the costs of reclaiming the land.

Others may plant another crop of cane, which will be sown in February and harvested the following October, 14 months away. Before that, they will have no income whatsoever. The generosity of these people’s relatives, their biraderi, cannot possibly carry them through. They are ruined, and there are millions of them.

This disaster is not like an earthquake or a tsunami. In the 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan, 80,000 people died more or less at one blow; whereas the immediate death toll from this flood is likely to be in the low thousands. The loss of property, however, is catastrophic. It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead, but instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive.

For months and even years, the people of the Indus Valley will not have sufficient income for food or clothing. They will rebuild, if they can afford it, by inches. The corrupt and impoverished Pakistani government cannot possibly make these people’s lives whole again. It’s not hard to imagine the potential for radicalization in a country already rapidly turning to extremist political views, to envision the anarchy that may be unleashed if wealthier nations do not find a way to provide sufficient relief. This is not a problem that will go away, and it is the entire world’s problem. It is said, the most violent revolutions are the revolutions of the stomach.