Back in Australia, Arnold Dix is a flower farmer from Monbulk, a Victoria town 40 km east of Melbourne’s key business district. “I am surely the worst flower farmer… this season, I haven’t even planted yet. So yeah, very bad!” 

Dix is speaking to us on video call from Saundhgaon, on his way out after a 17 day-rescue mission to dig out 41 miners from the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel, where they were trapped following an avalanche. These are the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarkashi; the rocks are slate, limestone and other weak sedimentary formations. When a television crew stopped Dix, 59, in his tracks at the disaster site last fortnight, he dragged his fingers along the nearest rock surface; the soil shockingly crumbling into his palm. It was his way of demonstrating the geological severity of the mission.