The earth is a carpet of bones. Corpses three weeks dead have been pulled apart by the dogs. The sun has turned some skin to leather. The dried-out sockets of a severed head stare blindly into the sun. Kolya stumbles. His boots drag. It seems like sacrilege to walk upon the dead. The accumulation of horrors begins to turn him numb. Chemises of violated girls. Dried blood. The tiny bones of dead children.

Bashi-bazouks – Turkish irregular soldiers – have burned or smashed every structure in the village. The women who followed MacGahan and Kolya into the mountains begin to ululate with grief. As they approach the churchyard, it seems prurient to dwell on the stench; it seems oddly fastidious not to mention it all. MacGahan passes Kolya a handful of tobacco. He holds it to his nose and breathes.

The churchyard is three feet deep in putrid bones. A desultory attempt has been made to cover some with gravel. The church is crammed with more dead bodies.

Kolya sits on a rock. He feels wretched and strange. He keeps seeing the leathery faces, piles of heads, embroidered ankle socks around what’s left of feet. He hears the ghastly buzz of sated insects. He closes his eyes and wishes he were home. This isn’t the world he left for. What he cannot know, what he cannot guess, is how scenes of cruelty like this will come to seem typical of the approaching century, and how they will be woven into tales of war. But looking back, he will recognise this as the first moment that he felt a dizzying sense of living in history, and that the world that had once seemed so new to him was being pressed upon by blind and ancient forces.

There will be many massacres in the decades ahead. Some will seem to merit the coining of new words: holocaust, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Historians will weigh relative amounts of suffering in the scales of professional dispassion. The significance of each act will never be absolute, but will be determined by a large number of other concerns, like the number and credibility of its witnesses. Some dreadful deeds will take place in a kind of historical silence. Others will be memorialised in images, photographs, cine film, video. Some vast acts of murder will be reconceived as regrettable necessities.

Here, MacGahan has her pen. Kolya watches her counting, making notes, oddly detached from the horror. In the churchyard alone, she estimates a toll of three thousand corpses. Two hundred women and children were burned alive in the schoolhouse. She is shown children’s skulls bearing sabre cuts. She will match the numbers of the dead to estimates of the population from the taxation rolls. She will bear witness to the murder of five thousand villagers. And around this slaughter, she will weave a tale of Muslim terror that is both apocryphal and eerily familiar: ‘When a Mohammedan has killed a certain number of infidels, he is sure of paradise, no matter what his sins may be.’ From this devastated mountain valley, the tale of the massacre will go out to the world. Amplified by print, her words will reach powerful ears in every capital.