The car jolted into a rut and stalled beside a line of scruffy tents. ‘It was beautiful here, once.’ The fixer gestured carelessly across the crowded refugee camp. ‘And now it is all gone for ever.’

Hessa and Casey stared across the miles and miles of tents, the scale of it still shocking. The car had stopped on a small rise, and from this point the camps spread as far as they could see, in every direction, every single inch used.

‘It’s crammed so tight,’ Hessa murmured. ‘All of these people.’

The Rohingya camps were especially chaotic. In her years of journalism, during her travels to Jordan, to Lebanon, to Turkey, Casey had spoken to dozens of Syrian refugees. In Syria, it had taken the refugees months to leave their country.

A barrel bomb hit my neighbour’s house. Then my brother disappeared . . . He was taken at a checkpoint, and we never saw him again . . . And then . . . And then . . . And then . . .

Until finally, finally, the Syrians packed up their most-loved possessions, and started the long walk to the border. That meant they crossed south into Jordan in threes and fours, fives and sixes. A big family group, now and again. Even at the peak of the crisis, the Syrian refugee camps grew slowly enough that there were rows of tents, blocks of latrines, some sort of a plan.

But the speed of the Rohingya crisis of 2017 took everyone by surprise. The Rohingya moved in whole villages, hundreds of people in hours. Blamed for everything for years, and attacked on all sides for decades, when the militia rolled in, the Rohingya rushed for the border. Thousands in a day.

The soldiers came with rockets. They burned our village, they burned our people. They burned everything, and we ran. We just ran.

As the crisis erupted, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, in a gesture that was part generosity, part panic, offered up great tracts of the reserve jungle, the beautiful forest that sprawled across the low hills of southern Bangladesh.

‘There were huge trees here, and it was all so green, once,’ the translator grumbled. ‘Now there is nothing. Nothing left at all.’

The translator had turned to Casey with a sigh, as they climbed out of the car. She was called Layla and had developed a tough half-smile after weeks of escorting journalists around the camps.

The Rohingyas cleared this land in days, Layla recited laconically. Like ants. Chopping down trees, hacking away at undergrowth. Total deforestation of whole hills, in an afternoon. She pulled a face.

And now it was April in the shadeless camps, and the sun punched down like a fist.