It starts with a trickle: two cars appear, driving slowly over the only (potholed) road from the border through Tirana. Each car is missing its licence plate - the trademark of cars bearing refugees.

Inside each is a cluster of pale exhausted faces. They sit amid a clutch of bags and blankets. Further into the mountains it becomes a flood. More and more cars, again with no licence plates - they are taken away by the Serbs at the border - many with mattresses, suitcases, even wooden baby cradles strapped precariously to their roofs.

Every truck the Albanian Army can press into service comes lurching down through a mountain pass, packed to their green tailgates with unsmiling children in bright clothes. And behind these, a great mass of tractors with trailers, rusting buses, trucks and minibuses all crammed with people, mostly women and children.

All are heading the same way, for the sprawling "tent city" being built by aid workers and the Italian Army down on the coast. We pass little stone settlements, with people standing by the roadside, bemused by this continuing exodus.

A yellow truck lies in pieces, its cab badly mangled, having plunged down a ravine. It was carrying white bags, many of which have burst open to reveal hundreds of camouflage uniforms. Part of the attempt by the Kosovo Liberation Army to race military supplies to the border for a last push into Kosovo. A few rebel soldiers, helped by local police, load the uniforms onto another truck.

The border town of Kukes is now packed with people. They sit in the roads and in the gardens and several thousand, again mostly women, children and the elderly, are crammed into the main square waiting for space on transport to the coast. It seems as if the earth has tilted on its side and all of Kosovo is rolling westwards through one tiny bottleneck, the single border crossing point at Morine.

Here, in a gap between two huge mountains, people are crossing as fast as the Serbs can eject them. The short stretch of no man's land between the Albanian and the Serbian frontier is jammed with people, cars and tractors disappearing in a never-ending flow back into Kosovo.

Albania's district prefect estimates another 40,000 to 50,000 are still waiting to cross, adding to the 130,000 who have arrived through the Morine post in the past week.

As they pass into Albanian territory under a tattered national flag, the twin-headed black eagle on a scarlet background, some burst into tears and drop the bags they have hauled, sometimes for many miles. An Albanian border officer in badly fitting blue cap gives each an encouraging smile. His colleagues take down brief details of the people arriving in vehicles, but so many more are coming through on foot that they are simply waved through.

But Morine is no safe haven, with only the most basic care available. Volunteers from a white Red Cross jeep hand out small cardboard boxes of biscuits and plastic cups with drinks of lurid orange or lime arranged on a trestle table as if at a village fete.

One old man falls from the back of an exhausted younger relative who has carried him, piggy back, across no man's land. The relative also collapses and another young man comes and hauls the old man onto his back, and on they go.

Standing there, the flow of people is overwhelming - sometimes so many come pressing past you that you are carried along in this sad stream.

Some continue on their way, 20 miles to Kukes, a few stopping to beg journalists for diesel for their tractors. But most stagger a few metres to the grassy bank stretching behind the frontier post, find a place in the throng and sit in family groups, waiting for the next convoy of buses to take them wherever.

Among them, sitting by a single red hold-all that carries all she now possesses is 52-year-old Nurije, with her three daughters, Merita, Shukrije and Sahara. Her two sons left last year to study in Germany and her husband fled two weeks ago, heading for the hills with most of the able-bodied males of her village, Balinca.

Her experience highlights the Serbian method of "ethnic cleansing". Serb paramilitaries in black ski-masks arrived at six o'clock one morning at one end of her village.

A BIT of shooting, a few doors broken down, some shouting and the villagers got the message. As the Serbs moved in from end of the village, the women, children and old men of Balinca gathered what they could carry and ran out of the other side.

"They wore black ski-masks, I could not see their faces," says Nurije. "But they were not in uniform. They had guns, they wore normal clothes, you know, jeans."

Balinca's population was herded down the road to another village, and then to another, part of a Serb drive in the central Malesevo region that in three days collected thousands of villagers from around 50 settlements in a single village, Bellenica.

Ibrahim, a 67-year-old farmer with a ruddy face and bad teeth takes up the story: "The Serbs kept us there for three days. More and more people arrived, there was no food. People who arrived in tractors had them taken away. The Serbs there had three kinds of uniforms, I don't know where they were from."

"They took our jewellery, money, they tore necklaces from our throats," said Merita. "A girl had an earring pulled from her ear, the Serbs took anything they could find."

The women said they saw at least one man shot dead during the herding process. Younger men were separated from their womenfolk and taken away, their fate as yet unknown.

Then came the buses. Each had a Serb driver, and the soldiers told the women and the old folk to get on. As their bus was about to drive away towards the frontier, a soldier shouted at Merita. "Tell NATO to give you your money back."

Border officials confirm that the "ethnically cleansed" arrive at the border in great batches each sent from a different deportation operation as Serb forces empty Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians. The main restraining factors are the KLA, still holding several hilltop enclaves, and the sheer time it takes to round up and expel Kosovo's two million ethnic Albanians.

For the outside world, the problem is only just beginning. Albania, Europe's poorest country, has so far been generous with many ordinary people opening their homes and customs police and the military helping to keep the tide of refugees moving.

But this country has barely enough food for itself, and none left over for the tide of humanity now engulfing it. This campaign of ethnic cleansing is set to dwarf the half million Muslim and Croat refugees created by the Bosnian Serbs in 1992.

Nevertheless this campaign is being accelerated, with the Serbs now sending refugees across by night as well as by day, with 11,000 stumbling through Morine's gateway on Thursday night.

The buses and trucks were last night unable to keep up and thousands, including many children, were simply left to sleep in the streets of Kukes. The authorities have simply crossed their fingers hoping that the warm dry weather continues.