THE WHOLE WAY BACK down to Bagan, the wind was blowing so hard that the boatman wrapped his head in a checked longyi, a kind of sarong, against the stinging sand. The Irrawaddy was enormous even in the dry season, light brown and dotted with overloaded sailing canoes. We sputtered through back channels lined with reeds, eroding sandbanks, and impoverished hamlets on stilts. These shacks were mostly made of bamboo and woven grass and stood only a couple of feet off the ground. The cyclone would only brush through this area, but downriver it would hit with full force on more than a million people living like this—fishing with nets or lines, crabbing, and cutting down the mangroves that would normally protect them from a storm surge. Nargis would smash their houses and boats to pulp, like Hurricane Katrina hitting a New Orleans made of cardboard. The storm surge flooded about 30 percent of Burma's best rice paddies with salt water and rotting bodies. In a disaster, the timeless qualities of Burma turned out to have 16th-century consequences.

It started to rain hard on the approach to Rangoon, my Yangon Airways flight pitching violently up and down. The Burmese being fatalists, the pilot skidded us right in. Before I reached the hotel, the rain had doubled in weight. It was April 30.

That afternoon, in a crushing and continuous downpour, the downtown business district was the first to go. Indian and Chinese shops backfilled with water. Intersections became lakes, sewers spilled over, trash spun in the wakes of cars. Then the side streets began to back up. The huge generators on the sidewalks snuffed out, one by one.

The next morning, May 1, a taxi took me to an interview with a final Western diplomat. She'd just returned from Mandalay and had a patch of sunburn on her nose. Over coffee in an old colonial hotel, she confessed to being in love with the country, the desperate strength of the people, the dignity of an ancient culture undiluted by mass tourism, unbroken by repression. But the frightened and clumsy regime was getting more brutal by the month. The most recent development, she said, was the appearance of organized pro-government mobs, called Swan Arr Shin, or "Capable Strongmen," who had attacked followers of the Lady. People had been arrested for blogging about politics, forwarding e-mail attachments of antigovernment posters, and even writing a Valentine's Day poem that included the words "crazy with power."

She hadn't heard anything about the baffling weather—it used to rain this way "in the old days," her Burmese staff had told her.

Leaving the hotel, I made the mistake of heading for the post office. Moving north as the rain came pelting down, I hitched up my trousers and joined a ragged column of wet Burmese wading along. At General Aung San Road, there was only a river. Rolling up my pants was useless—even with a poncho I was streaming wet. Out in the avenue, poked by umbrellas, dodging pushed rickshaws and the SUVs of the rich, feeling my way knee-deep in rushing brown water for the broken asphalt underneath, I gave up and turned around. I went back, to a drier part of town, hunted for a taxi, and began leaving Burma.

When I asked the driver why it was raining so hard, he said the Thingyan water festival must have been "auspicious." We were getting our forecasts from the wrong sources. We passed the forlorn zoo, many of its animals deported to Naypyidaw, and the empty ministry buildings whose people had gone the same way. There was a tree blown down in Pyay Road and cars stalled in the floods. On the balcony of my hotel, I watched the rain bucket down, harder than ever, and the wind smash a thousand palm trees together on the fringes of Inya Lake.

Aung San Suu Kyi's house-prison was over there, hidden. I'd studied Google Earth views, to see if there was a way to get around the lakeshore to see the Lady; I'd walked the edges of the frozen area around her house, staring up at high walls, topped with both barbed wire and razor wire. Jumping the wall here was the dangerous thing the astrologer had green-lighted for May 1. But the Lady remained out of reach.

There were reports later that she'd lost part of her roof in the cyclone but, without a choice, had simply ridden Nargis out. Sometimes there is nothing to do but survive.