The road to Ngingir was gone. The mud had taken it, a long stretch, past the fourth bridge. So we went on foot.

Ten kilometres in the dark. There were twelve of us from the barangay, with shovels and a chainsaw and the torches on our phones. It was still raining, not hard, that fine rain that never ends. The monsoon, they say. Typhoon Inday pushing from far off. We weren't thinking about the typhoon. We were thinking about our steps.

Walking in mud at night is something you learn only by doing it. You set your foot down flat. You wait for it to hold. Then the other. One of us, young Solaiman, fell three times, and three times we lifted him up, and he said nothing because there was no breath left to say it.

We got there as the sky was barely lightening. Six, maybe. And I saw what had happened in the grey light, slowly, the way you see a thing you don't want to see.

The hillside had come down. All of it. Where there had been five houses, six, now there was a hump of mud and broken trees and sheet metal, high as a house, still. The silence over it. You know, I know the silence after a landslide. It isn't that the sounds are missing. It's that the sounds are there, the rain, the mud still settling, and under those sounds there is a thing that makes no noise and that you hear all the same.

We began to dig with our hands. The shovels were good where the mud was clean, but not near the houses, near the houses there were the things inside, the roofs, the boards, and with a shovel you could wound whoever might still be underneath. So, our hands.

We dug and we called out. Every so often one of us raised a hand and we all stopped and stayed quiet, and one of us called a name into the mud. Norhata. Abdul. The name of the little one from Cabugatan, who was seven. We called and put an ear to the wet earth and waited. Sometimes the mud answers, a knock, a moan. That morning the mud did not answer.

And I knew those houses. All of them. The first was Cabugatan's, who sold diesel by the bottle along the road. The second was the teacher's, who had taught my son to read. When you dig with your hands in a place you know, you are not digging earth. You are digging someone's house. You find a pot and you know whose pot it is. You find a sheet of metal and you know which roof you slept under as a boy. It is another thing. It is another thing entirely.

We pulled out three, before noon. None alive. We laid them on the blue tarp at the start of the path, covered, with their feet towards the mountain as is proper. The women who had come up behind us washed them and prayed. Bismillah. The rain washed too, in its way.

Of the little one, nothing. The mother knelt at the edge of the dig and did not weep loudly, she only said his name, softly, the way you say it to a child who is sleeping and you don't want to wake all at once. She said the name and watched our hands.

Around one o'clock the rain came back hard. And the head of the rescue, a man come from Marawi in an orange jacket, looked at the hill above us and told us to stop. That the earth was still loaded. That it could come down again. That we all had to move away, at once.

And he was right, you understand. He was right. The hill above was a threat, you could see the new crack up there, and a man who knows this work tells you to go down and you go down, because the dead are dead and the living keep themselves alive, and sending more men under the mud brings no one back.

The others drew back. Not me. Just a little more, I said. Only there, that patch, where the mother was looking.

I stayed with my hands in the mud while the others called me from behind. I dug at that one spot and nothing else, one fistful after another, the water filling the hole faster than I emptied it. I wasn't reasoning anymore. My hands moved on their own. Just a little more. One more fistful. One more underneath.

And under that fistful of mud there was a slipper. A rubber tsinelas, small, blue, the twenty-peso kind you buy in bunches at the market. Empty. I pulled it up and found it in my hand, light, with the mud still inside it in the shape of the foot that wasn't there.

I stopped. Not because they had ordered me to. I just stopped, with the slipper in my hand, and I understood that the mud was not going to give me that foot, not that day, maybe never.

I wiped my hands on my trousers, slowly, first one then the other, though it did no good because the trousers were mud like my hands. I set the slipper down beside the blue tarp, near the three, where the mother could find it. And I sat down in the mud, my back to the mountain that could still come down, and I said nothing more.