SAPTARI, Nepal (AFP) — For 10 days, Nepali hydropower worker Sanjay Sah survived in darkness inside a flooded tunnel, drinking muddy water and losing all sense of time as he desperately prayed for rescue.

When a disaster response team finally pulled him to safety on 4 September, Sah’s first question showed how deeply the ordeal had disoriented him.

“When I was rescued I first asked, how many days has it been?” Sah, 30, told Agence France-Presse in an interview, while on his way back home in Saptari district Sunday.

“He said that it has been 10 days. I thought it had been just a few days.”

Sah was among hundreds of workers at a series of hydropower projects hit by the catastrophic 26 August flood, triggered by a glacial mountain collapse on the China-Nepal border.