A plot of freshly-dug graves - most of which are small, those of children - has appeared outside the western Afghan city of Herat, grim evidence of the toll taken by bitter weather which recently claimed at least 170 lives.
The victims were among 80,000 internally displaced people who had fled their homes to escape the worst drought Afghanistan has experienced in at least 30 years. It took the news of their deaths at the end of January to bring a response from the West.
At the weekend, an aircraft with aid from the US landed at Herat's run-down airport. While Taliban officials looked on, a consignment of much-needed tents and blankets was unloaded for distribution by the UN.
Canada announced last week that it was donating $860,000 to help ease the Afghan crisis.
"It's strange how things start arriving just after the moment you needed them," said Mr Hans-Christian Poulsen, Regional Humanitarian Co-ordinator for the UN.
Despite the newly-arrived aid there are still many cases of two families sharing a tent, Mr Poulsen said. While unacceptable for maintaining health standards, he added, the overcrowding probably helped prevent an even greater number of deaths when temperatures recently plummeted to 25C.
The UN has confirmed 170 deaths from cold, although other reports put the figure as high as 504. What is not in doubt is that most of the victims were very young.
"Ninety per cent of the dead were children," said Mr Poulsen. "When you look at the graves you can see the size of the person . . . Many of these are very small. It's a very sad sight."
Whole communities have been leaving their villages in remote areas of Afghanistan's rugged interior since their crops failed last autumn. Until the recent cold snap, when access to Herat became blocked by snow, 100 families - or about 600 people - were arriving each day at the six camps set up by the UN.
The new population of displaced Afghans in Herat is only part of a wider picture of massive displacement in the country as a whole. An estimated 154,000 have fled to neighbouring Pakistan since the autumn. Others have moved to Iran, and a group of 10,000 is currently marooned on an island in the Amu Darya river, refused entry into Tajikistan.
As soon as the snow melts sufficiently to allow mountain passes to reopen, the number of new arrivals in Herat will pick up again, officials predict. "I don't see the number of displaced people diminishing," said Mr Poulsen. "I am confident it will peak somewhere above 100,000."
Prospects for a successful spring harvest are bleak, as people were forced to eat their seeds when food started becoming scarce last autumn. Aid agencies are faced with the dilemma that if they deliver seeds to remote villages for spring planting, the people will eat the seeds in desperation.
Relief workers foresee having to continue providing shelter and food for the displaced until next November, when they hope the drought will have eased and seeds can be sown again.
In the meantime they are anxious about whether supplies of wheat will be sufficient to provide each displaced person with 7 kg of wheat per month, as well as a special blend with soya beans added for children. According to the head of the World Food Programme office in Herat, Mr Henning Scharpff, current wheat supplies will only last until the end of March if more donations are not forthcoming.
At Shaidahi refugee camp, one of six set up by the UN for displaced Afghans outside Herat, refugees were eager to show a rare group of visiting journalists their primitive living conditions.
Inside their shelters which consist of mud walls, with canvas tent-style roofs, the women kept pointing at the mud floors covered only by blankets on which they and their children must sleep. One family said they relied on bringing pieces of glowing charcoal inside their shelter for warmth.
Although the bitter cold has somewhat abated, night-time temperatures are still a frigid minus 10 degrees or so below freezing.
All told stories of how they had left their homes because they had no food, had sold their livestock and arrived in Herat with nothing.
A family who had travelled from a remote part of Ghor province, east of Herat, said out of the group of 35 from their village, four children had died. "I lost my three-month-old grand-daughter," said Sayed Qadad, shaking his head sadly.