Col Slobodan Stojanovic of the Yugoslav army was holding an improvised press conference by the side of the road outside Velika Krusa, 15 km north-west of Prizren. We had just passed another burned-out Albanian village with a dynamited mosque, and the colonel stood among the wreckage of one of four ethnic Albanian convoys which were destroyed - the Serbs claim by NATO - on Wednesday.
There was a bomb crater, a rusty wagon spilling clothes and bedding on to the asphalt, a blood-stained flour sack, a second wagon and the tractor that had pulled it 30 metres off the road. For some reason, there were also dozens of sun-bleached animal skulls in the grass nearby.
NATO had systematically attacked these convoys, Col Stojanovic was saying. Serb and foreign journalists, photographers and television cameramen crowded around him, and only a few of us turned to see what happened next.
Two large coaches caked in mud and dust came towards us from the north-west, heading towards Prizren. The dark brown blinds were pulled down, but through the front and back windows, peering through the cracks below and between the sun-shade curtains, we glimpsed the faces of Albanian women and children.
It was a haunting image of dispossession and forced expulsion, of women separated from their men, of an entire people chased from their comfortable, middle-class, European homes into the hardship of refugee camps. I suspect the bus turned right at Prizren and headed for Vbrnica, the border post with Albania, where its sad human cargo would be dumped.
In a two-day journey through the war zone of southern Kosovo, I saw four such buses, all packed with Albanians. In Urosevac, two empty buses passed us, driving in the direction of Pozeranje, where I had just witnessed a crowd of some 200 Albanians, mostly women and children, standing in the town square with their belongings.
Across the width of southern Kosovo, from Bujanovac to within a few kilometres of the Albanian and Macedonian borders, I saw thousands of torched Albanian houses, some of them still burning. We also passed several Serb villages around the Brezovica ski resort where every house had been burned by the Kosovo Liberation Army since the war started.
I was to hear within hours that 10,000 more Albanians crossed the borders yesterday in what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called the Serbs' "resumed expulsion with full force" of ethnic Albanians.
One of the mysteries of our trip was why the Belgrade authorities allowed us to witness this new surge in "ethnic cleansing". I concluded that they believed they had more to gain by showing us the results of a bombardment which even NATO still cannot explain.
In one surreal moment, an official was telling us that although the Nazis had made Belgrade the first "Juden-frei" capital in Europe, no Serb ever collaborated in the Jews' second World War deportation. At that very moment, we passed an Albanian village with yet another burning house. All eyes - including the official's - were on the burning house, yet no one mentioned it.
In the course of our 33-hour journey, not one Serb journalist asked about the burning houses and buses packed with Albanians. I thought they had deliberately blinded themselves to their government's wicked policy, or that they accepted it with equanimity.
But after we left the first bomb site at Velika Krusa, we passed more burning Albanian houses. Tears flooded down the cheeks of the Serb woman journalist sitting next to me in the bus. We shared no common language, so she scribbled a note.
"You'll find someone to translate this for you," she wrote at the top of the piece of paper. "Dear Lara, There are a large number of us who do not accept that the Kosovo/Metohija (the Serb name for Kosovo) problem should be solved this way. Where are the people? Why are their houses and cattle abandoned? Why are they being punished? All the children in the world are the same, they should be allowed to play and laugh. God, when will the innocent stop suffering, regardless of which nation, which religious confession and which race they belong to?"
The innocent were suffering in Prizen Hospital, where we saw the remains of six Albanians who were killed in one of the convoy air attacks on Wednesday and 11 wounded men and women.
The wounded lay between rough blankets in airless rooms, without sheets or pillowcases. Four frightened little girls with fair hair and big eyes sat on one bed in the room with their mothers. A dark-haired young woman with blood-stained bandages on her left arm stared at the wall, then pulled a blanket over her arm to hide it from the journalists.
One woman with leg wounds spoke angrily in Albanian, but it was a measure of the abyss between Serbs and Albanians that we could find no one among the doctors, police or officials travelling with us to translate her words.
A wounded man named Esmet Sulija, a 46 year-old father of three, spoke enough Serbian to say that his family had been "advised" to leave their home in Molitce three weeks earlier, when the war started. They had sheltered in a place called Dubros, but were told to move again on Wednesday.
According to Mr Sulija, the Serb police merely showed him the way from Prizen to Djakovica, but did not accompany his convoy of five tractors. With five policemen with assault rifles standing in the hall outside, it would have been surprising if he had said anything different.
"I was driving a tractor pulling a wagon with 35 members of my family," Mr Sulija said. "The airplanes came over and bombed three times. My sister-in-law and daughter-in-law and two others were killed. Eleven other people were wounded."
After being expelled from their homes, after dying in terror under air attack on Wednesday, the dead of the Djakovica convoys suffered a final indignity. In the Prizen hospital morgue, three women, two men - one of them headless - and a seven year-old girl were loosely wrapped in blood-stained sheets and left on the concrete floor of a room with cobwebs and peeling plaster. Two of the corpses had numbers stuck on them. I could not help thinking that the dead would have been treated with more respect had they been Serbs.
The Prizren dead and wounded were taken from Velika Krusa, the first bombed convoy site. At Gradis, a few kilometres further north-west on the road to Djacovika, we found a man's leg, still wearing a sock and shoe, and an old, white-haired man with a blood-stained face slumped dead against a tree.
The roof of a cream-coloured mini-van was pierced by bomb shrapnel, its front truncated like the passenger train we passed at Grdelica, destroyed in a NATO air raid on Monday.
NATO bombs were exploding over the hill with a loud "pop, pop, pop" and wisps of greybrown smoke rose as I wrote the details in my notebook: clothes, a box of disposable razors, family photographs, the battered remains of a red tractor, a crashed white Mercedes. . . In addition to the two bomb craters, there were holes in the earth over a wide area immediately west of the road, the sort of strafing splash-pattern left by the cannon of the heavily-armoured US A-10 "tank-buster" aircraft.
Several trees had been felled by the explosions at Gradis, in the area where we found strafing patterns on the ground.
The Serbs claim that NATO used A-10s to attack the convoys. NATO claims that an F-16 pilot accidentally struck a "possible" lead tractor of a convoy at Mija, north of Djacovica. But we saw five bomb craters amid destroyed convoys in three locations south of Djacovica.
When pressed to release the pilot's video of the bombing, the NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, yesterday said he would like a "rain-check" while the matter is clarified. Survivors of the attacks give conflicting versions of what happened, depending on whether they are in refugee camps under the influence of the KLA or in Serb-controlled Kosovo.
Some of the refugees in Albania claim they were fired on by Yugoslav aircraft. But would fleeing refugees under attack be able to recognise the difference between Yugoslav and NATO jets? And how could a Yugoslav jet even get off the ground in Kosovo, whose airspace is controlled by NATO?
The Prizren to Djacovica road, where we saw three separate destroyed convoys, runs parallel to the Albanian border, 15 km to the west. This is the most active front line of the war, where NATO has accused the Serbs of shelling and of incursions into Albania. Our bus, under Serb military escort, stopped several times for long periods because of what Serb officials called "KLA problems" on the road ahead. Earlier in the week, Belgrade claimed it killed 150 guerrillas at Morina, 18 km from Djacovica.
Weapons experts may make something of the fragments we found at the bomb sites, which appeared to be of western manufacture. At Velika Krusa, what looked like a detonator bore the markings: Ter Co Inc 13520. The letters NJ or NY followed another nine figures.
A piece of a circuit board pulled out of the mud at Gradis said: SCHEM 872110. . . MSN 63341 INC. And a piece of bomb or missile casing at the same site said: For Use On Mk 82 Wing Assembly. . . Date Mfg 3/78.
At Tereziski Most, a place of horror reminiscent of the infamous "Highway of Death" where US forces fired on the fleeing Iraqi army in Kuwait, we found a fuse with the word BENDIX engraved on it.
Amid the carbonised corpses, amputated limbs, severed head and a row of less damaged bodies laid out on blankets, there were no answers, only questions. As dusk fell, contrails of NATO bombers criss-crossed the sky to the northwest, and we walked among these Albanian victims accompanied by the steady drumming of a NATO aerial bombardment just a few miles away.
Could NATO have killed 74 of the very refugees it was meant to protect, as the Serbs claim? And if so, what possible error of judgment or technical failure could explain such a bloodbath? With Serbs setting fire to Albanian villages while NATO continues its bombing, the Metohija plain may keep its dark secret for a long time.