A mountain road seems to be the only way out of Vogosca without having to go through Bosnian territory. Rumors are in the air. Passers-by drop in broken English fragments of sentences that drift by us at first incomprehensibly. "Mountain," "people on foot," "dead." We finally put it together: there's a mountain road. We find it. As we are driving over the first kilometers it all still seems low key. We see people on foot, hitchhiking, sparse on the landscape.

As we move on we inquire about the distance between Vogosca and Pale, the obvious final destination. At first we think that it is 15 kilometers, which seems bad enough on those muddy roads in that snowstorm, and by foot. We then realize as we are climbing higher that it is 50 kilometers that those people are planning to do in those conditions. And then because of the weather, the fury of the storm, the difficulty of even seeing straight, images come to us in accelerating fragments as we discover more and more people, massive traffic jams with cars stuck in ditches, trucks piled up head to head, and the enormity of the situation.

Flashes: a Serbian warrior complete with grenades, Kalashnikov, carrying his child on his shoulder, his wife obediently following; a pig with an uncertain future; horsecarts out of a 50's Russian movie; families abandoned by the roadside. It all seems that this was scripted by some Serbian movie-maker trying to retrace an epic saga of disaster in the tone of the medieval battle of Kosovo. Young and old are in the mud, in groups or alone. They stop to eat, they burn whatever they have to warm up, they seem to find it all perfectly normal. They are almost cheery, helping each other and us as well out of impossible ditches, lifting cars back onto the path.