"It was horrifying. I have never seen such a dark cloud in my life. Had there been a delay of even two hours, we would have been one of the victims of this accident," said Nitin Sharma, a businessman of Jaipur who was there at Amarnath with his family on the day of the cloudburst.
Nitin said, "We reached the Amarnath Cave Shrine on the morning of July 8th and after darshan, left from there at around 11 am, because the weather was getting worse. It took us around 3 hours to reach the Kali Mata temple which is just around 2.5-3 Km away from the holy cave as around 5-7 thousand people were on the way and the bad weather was making things worse. When we were just 1 Km away from the Baltal base camp we saw that the water of the river got black and the water level started rising. This seemed a bit strange. The time was around 6 in the evening. When we asked about this to the locals they told us there is a cloudburst near the holy cove. It shocked me. I looked back and saw the dark black clouds on the mountains and a rainbow. I clicked a picture and thanked god."
Nitin said that after reaching the base camp, people told us horrifying stories so we left the base camp immediately and returned to Srinagar. Nitin said, "There was a man with us in tents from Bathinda. He had stayed in the tent near the cave as he was not feeling well. I don’t know what would have happened to him."
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