THERE NEVER WAS a man on the ferry to Pakokku, and he didn't say what he said. I didn't meet Western diplomats from three nations. Not for coffee. Not for drinks. Not in the official residence, with rain and palm fronds pelting down, just hours before the storm hit.

I didn't talk with the country's most distinguished astrologer or its worst comedians. Nobody from any NGOs helped me, either. If I had tea with a prominent intellectual or lunch with a noted businessman, nothing happened. I was just in Burma—sorry, I mean Myanmar—to play golf and look at the ruins.

The boy monks never cried and begged me to conceal their names. At the monastery in Pakokku, they never told me anything at all.

I wasn't there when the storm hit. There was no cyclone. I didn't see anything.

BUT OF COURSE it did hit. I flew out on the last plane out of Burma, on the evening of May 1. On May 2, at 6:30 p.m., Cyclone Nargis came ashore near Labutta, in the southwestern corner of this poor and unlucky country, at speeds of up to 121 miles per hour. Howling in from the Bay of Bengal, the winds shoved a 12-foot wall of storm surge up the delta of the Irrawaddy River. Perhaps 134,000 people died in this initial rampage up the low and braided coastal channels. By dawn, the storm center was in Rangoon, blowing 81 miles per hour, taking more roofs than lives. Then it dissipated inland, leaving some 2.4 million survivors in ruinous condition, without shelter or food or safe drinking water. In some areas, up to 95 percent of homes were destroyed.

In the weeks after the cyclone, as the waterways went putrid with the bodies of people and some 200,000 water buffalo and cattle, as flooded rice fields were poisoned by salt water, the paralytic failure of the Burmese military government to do anything for the victims of Nargis became an international scandal. For weeks the junta's generals turned away aid from U.S. and French ships waiting offshore, harassed journalists, stonewalled the UN, started and stopped relief efforts, confiscated food donations, finally admitted some international workers, and then denounced them, saying that the Burmese needed no "chocolate bars" from foreigners. Meanwhile, the 40 percent of children in the Irrawaddy Delta who were already malnourished faced months of starvation.

The Burmese were never warned that a cyclone was coming. I was. On the last afternoon of my trip, I waded through knee-deep storm floods to visit one of those Western diplomats you hear from, anonymously, in reports about Burma. We met in her official residence; she was barefoot, in shorts and a red Hawaiian shirt. As we talked, a windy new order was already rattling the patio doors. Palm fronds were spinning through the air like knives. It had been raining for two days. The water was above the grass.

My departure was in five hours. As I left, I asked the same question I'd been asking everybody: Why was there a monsoon in the dry season? I thought it never rained this early.

"This isn't the monsoon," the diplomat said, stopping me. "We're going to get hit by a cyclone. Didn't you hear?"

No. She'd been notified by her own government and CNN. I, like the vast majority in this country of 53 million, was totally clueless.

I put on my poncho and rolled up my pants, and another diplomat led me down the driveway to the security gate. The Burmese embassy guards pressed a button and then went back to eyeing the sky. Out front, the avenue was flooded, cars throwing up cascades.

"It's good you are leaving," this diplomat said as dirty water flushed over his Tevas.

So I got out. I didn't see the center of Nargis, which was closing in on the coast. But before the storm, I saw the center of something else: the bigger, slower, even deadlier disaster that long ago started washing over Burma. I saw how its rulers—through their fear, ignorance, and greed—would end up converting the natural disaster coming down on our heads into a shameful man-made catastrophe, an epic of incompetence and indifference. Let's call what I saw by its name: evil.