Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton would have allowed himself a wry smile in Jeddah on the Nov. 25, 2009, a night that mirrored the first line of his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” and which has become the symbol of all that is trite and melodramatic in novel writing.

Nothing trite or melodramatic revealed itself in Jeddah on Nov. 26 as the glaucous morning light oozed through the pouring rain and low sodden gray clouds hung over Jeddah. As the gloom lightened, the full extent of what was to prove a major human catastrophe sharpened as the dawn drew back the concealing blanket of a Haj night.

The 11 wadis (valleys) that feed into the Jeddah water basin had been inundated with a cloudburst that deposited between three and five years rain overnight, according to varying estimates. The numbers were academic, the devastation all too real.

Eight a.m. on Thursday Nov. 26, the rains stopped as suddenly as they had begun and there was an eerie and stunned silence smothering the city. It lasted a full hour but then curiosity overcame residents and they emerged onto the streets to find much of their city underwater and a significant portion wiped out.

The southern end of Madinah Road as it neared King Fahd Road resembled a slipway as the gradual downward slope disappeared under water. Water a full meter deep in places, filling car parks and side streets, while brown liquid lapped the walls of private houses, and the serious effect of the storm gradually became clearer.

The new underpasses on King Fahd Road were brimming with opaque brown fluid a full six meters deep. Trees had been felled, uprooted by streaming water that tore at their loose grip on the sandy soil.

In the side streets of the Al-Hamra districts, low fountains of water erupted from the roads. The filthy brown ones were raw sewage forced from underground tanks and the clear sparkling ones fed by freshwater tanks filling with denser murk.

Further east on the Haramain Expressway, entire sections of road had been swept away as the wall of water roared westward from the eastern suburbs toward the coast. As it entered the urban areas, houses collapsed, thousands of cars were picked up like toys and carried westward, smashing into each other and any structure in their path.

As the water levels dropped, the vehicles were deposited. Some were still occupied. Others lay on top of bodies half buried by the mud they lay in. A bus tipped into a gulley, having been smashed off the highway. The scattered paraphernalia of family life lay strewn in the oozing mud. A doll here, a telephone there, entire houses and cars gutted by the weight and rush of water. And shoes everywhere; single, lonely very empty shoes.

Gradually the population emerged to face the reality of the disaster. A frantic European consultant engineer summoned to empty the underpass of water, where it was rumored that an entire bus with passengers lay submerged, stabbed desperately at an unresponsive mobile phone.

“I told them the pumps they installed couldn’t cope with this when it happened,” he cried. “It was just a matter of time. Now look!” He rushed off to supervise temporary mobile pumps.

Young Saudis and many expatriates gathered to stand and stare, helpless but fascinated by the effects of nature. Many had a camera or mobile phone to record the scene.

Heavy trucks forged through the deeper sections of passable roads pushing a bow wave before them. Flanking them, like signets after a swan, came echelons of four-wheel drive cars and saloons.

Over the ensuing hours, reports of the casualties trickled in. Officially, only 122 or so people died and more than 350 were “missing.” Few, very few indeed, believe those numbers. A journey through the devastation, eyewitness accounts and the thousands of destroyed vehicles testify to a much greater number. In a one-kilometer stretch of the Haramain Expressway, I counted over 700 cars smashed to scrap. The floods affected hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers, of Jeddah’s roads.

A young Saudi who admitted he was lucky to be alive described a “tsunami that leapt across the road in front of me and pushed me into the wall of a bridge. It held me there as it passed.” He was fortunate. He described cars immediately in front and behind him rolling into the torrent and disappearing down the wadi at the side of the road.

Mobile crane companies were one source of news. Forty-eight hours after the flood, one company said it alone had removed double the official total of 3,000 cars.

One year on, the visible scars are few. Roads resurfaced, the central reservation of the highway replaced and white with new concrete, roadside ditches emptied and deepened. It is almost as if it never happened, only almost.

A quiet walk through some of the less fashionable suburbs or in the undergrowth of what was a small lake just a year ago, which has now returned to being a simple depression, reveals a poignant, decaying intimation of mortality and lives lost and families destroyed.

The shoes.