The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was feeling the heat. So was everyone else. When Mrs Mary Robinson dabbed her face with a tissue some people thought she was wiping away tears. She appeared to falter just once yesterday as she referred to the chronicle of great pain narrated by Kosovo refugees in Macedonia. That was when she recalled for reporters a young woman with three small children whose husband had been taken from her a short time earlier, just as they crossed from Kosovo. The woman's face was a study in anguish.
Mrs Robinson was answering questions while crossing back to the Macedonian side of no man's land and remembered aloud the litany of misery she had just heard. Then, as she spoke of the young woman she just stopped abruptly. It was left at that. Questions ceased for them.
At the Brazda camp she was asked how she responded as a woman to what she had seen and heard there. She remembered a woman she had spoken to who was trying to boil water in a plastic container using wood and damp cardboard for fuel, and had "a terrible sense of how awful it must be to have to heat water like that just to keep children clean and free of disease".
She reminded reporters that the people in the camp did not even have a mental picture of home anymore as their houses had been burned before their eyes in so many cases.
That she should have described Brazda as appalling was hardly surprising. Her tour was not stage-managed so she ended up walking at will where no VIP would be taken. She crossed channels of water with a thick green scum, avoiding other channels of stagnant grey and some mud, to talk to a man cutting a little girl's hair. The child delighted in the attention while he explained it was the best way to keep her hair clean. There had been reports of fleas in the camp. Women wept as they told Mrs Robinson of their dead and missing ones, and a man who had been tortured by Serb paramilitaries was intent on giving her every minute detail of his nightmare. She listened silent and attentive throughout, while some of her officials seemed tortured themselves as they remembered her schedule.
At a kindergarten run by the agency Save the Children Fund, Mrs Robinson heard about 50 small children sing Kosovo patriotic songs in Albanian, the content of which it was probably best she may not have understood.
She sat on a blanket on the ground in a tent she picked out in passing. An old woman surrounded by many grandchildren explained that 17 of them slept in the tent and how badly they wanted to go anywhere else until they could return home. And everywhere in Brazda yesterday there continued the silent witness of the latrines.
The former President made no secret of her disappointment at Ireland's lack of a real response to the refugee crisis so far.
But she said she had found consolation that among the first people to meet her when she arrived at Blace yesterday was one of her own former pupils.
Ms Grainne O'Hara is from Dublin and was brought by the UNHCR from Mexico to work with the UN refugee agency in Macedonia. Ms O'Hara showed Mrs Robinson around the Blace border crossing area yesterday.