There was no sign, from the first bedraggled refugees emerging out of the Kosovo night in the early hours of yesterday morning crammed into tractor trailers, that the worst single massacre of this war had taken place a few hours before.
More than a thousand refugees arrived at Albania's Morina border post, telling tales familiar to the guards who have seen more than quarter of a million Kosovans pass in the past month.
They were from villages around the western town of Jakovo (or Djakovica), and had been separated from their men-folk who were marched into a field at the village of Mej.
They were worried about their men, but also relieved to be safe after weeks of anxiety. A group of girls even joked with me as I tried, knowing almost no Albanian, to direct them to the back of an aid truck handing out cold drinks.
This first wave had gone off down the road to the waiting tented camps around the town of Kukes before the next wave of refugees arrived. Yes, they said, they had seen men in the field at Mej - but they were dead.
The few journalists and aid workers still hanging around the border post swarmed around them. "All dead, maybe a hundred, on top of each other," said one man, in good German, peering from under a plastic sheet over his wagon. We went to the next trailer, and the next, and the next, and the story was the same.
"All dead," said an old man on one tractor, crammed with people and blankets and bags. "They were lying in the field, more than one hundred I would say, all piled up." As he spoke, a middle-aged woman began to cry.
On another trailer, a woman cut my translator's question short with one word. "Mej."
More and more came over, in worse and worse condition. Children, old people, women - anyone except for men-folk - were piled into trailers amid baggage and blankets like so much junk.
At two in the morning the senior UN official, Ray Wilkinson, had seen enough, saying it was likely that at least one hundred Kosovans, and maybe as many as 200, had been massacred.
"We have heard from a lot of people coming over that there are a lot of dead bodies," he said. "We've had the same stories over and over. All the people we have spoken to have said they personally saw it."
The border was by now a scene of chaos, with knots of volunteers from relief agencies rushing around the arriving tractors, giving their exhausted occupants blankets, plastic sheets, and cups of tea from a giant urn. Tears were flowing.
Piece by piece, the story unfolded. At dawn on Tuesday Serb police and irregular units arrived in the villages, shouting for the people to leave. Some remembered seeing houses on fire, having Serbs shouting that "either you leave your house or we burn you inside it."
But the real horror began when they reached the main road to Prizren, at the Mej junction, when Serb police, some in black balaclavas, dragged the young and middle-aged men from the trailers.
A lucky handful survived by being hidden under the coats, or bodies, of their womenfolk. But most tractors lost their men. "We lost three of our men" said a woman in one. "They took four," said a grandfather in another.
Their ordeal did not end at the border. A few miles inside Albania, they were then robbed at gunpoint by local Albanians. "There's been some looting down the road, some trucks ran out of petrol down the road and they've been looted," said Mr Wilkinson.
Even at the border, the women were not safe: an old woman, a mother and two teenaged daughters stared blankly at a group of Albanian soldiers, as their drunk commander lurched over to them, shouting. "Stop crying, stop moaning, you shouldn't have left your men behind." He saw me, grabbed my lapels, and gave me a mouthful of alcohol-soaked abuse.
Dawn stopped the robbery, but brought mini-vans from the town demanding cash to take the frightened women, children and elderly, into Kukes, while money-changers wandered around asking for German marks.
To the north, from somewhere beyond the looming dark outline of Mount Pashtrik, came a series of flashes and booms, as five NATO missiles slammed into Serb artillery positions around the village of Batusa, a reminder of how unsafe this border zone is becoming.
With daybreak came more refugees - not just from Jakovo but from pockets overlooked or ignored by the Serb cleansers in previous weeks. Fifteen bus loads from Oblic, outside Pristina, came, saying they had been driven through one town, Gniljane, to find it utterly deserted, the houses broken open and clothes, furniture and anything left over from looting scattered over the streets.
"The worst was the smell, a smell of dead things," said one woman. "It was all over the town, it filled the bus, some of us were sick."
Refugees from Mej itself arrived, oddly having escaped the carnage in the fields outside their houses. "We don't know what happened, we stayed in our houses all day yesterday, we were too frightened to come out. We heard a lot of shooting," said one woman. "We were told to leave this morning."
By three in the morning, one man of 73, Hasan Shabane, remained alone at the Morina frontier point. He said he was waiting for his wife. They had fled their home on foot, then people with a horse-and-cart had offered to take his wife. He had continued on foot, but then a tractor-trailer passed and offered him a place. Now he had no idea where his wife was.
That afternoon, he too had passed the field at Mej. "They lined the men up on the field, they were being pushed and beaten and kicked," he said. "There were police by the edge of the field, and some of the people in our column were trying to get past them, women were trying to get to their sons. They were screaming and crying and the police were firing shots into the air with pistols to make them go back."
He said he had no idea what had happened to the men later. "I will stay here until my wife comes," he said, refusing an aid worker's offer to spend the night on a cot in a nearby medical tent.
"If I do that, perhaps she will pass in the night and I won't see her again."