Funerals: The young woman with long dark hair and a black leather jacket stands alone by three plain wooden grave markers that mark where three members of the same family are buried writes Chris Stephen in Beslan.
In front of her, under three neat piles of earth and covered with bouquets of flowers are the Kozirevas - Vutalev (9), Elona (11) and Daria (35), presumably their mother. The young woman is inconsolable.
The wooden markers are each the size of a plank of wood, and the woman moves from one to the other in turn, putting her arms around them and sobbing. After the last one she staggers, nearly loses her footing, steadies herself and walks away, tears falling down her cheeks.
Scenes like this take place all around as you stand in the muddy field outside Beslan watching the third day of mass funerals.
So many thousands of mourners turn up that traffic jams delay the start of the services. Three days of funerals have made the muddy fields like treacle. As mourners stagger across it they hold onto each other, not just out of grief but to hold each other up. The services are brief, some with priests and some without. And the wailing of the womenfolk who stand in groups separately from the men comes at you from all sides as the little coffins are lowered into the long lines of graves, each of which is lined with brick.
These funerals have become an extensive operation, with flowers - mostly plastic made up in elaborate bouquets - sent from towns across the region. Trucks sit in a nearby field, stacked with bricks ready to line the next set of graves. Big grunting excavators begin digging fresh plots at one end of the field even as the coffins are being lowered at the other.
Saddest of all is the stack of fresh wooden grave markers, still piled alarmingly high, at the entrance to the graveyard, each bearing the printed name of the victim due to be buried.