RUSUMO, Rwanda -- The waters of the Kagera River gush loud and swift under a narrow bridge between Rwanda and Tanzania.
A rainbow rises from the mist, but disappears into a swirling brown eddy, fouled even more by a stream of floating, bloated bodies.
Those are the unlucky ones - men and women, boys and girls - who didn't reach this narrow bridge to freedom in refugee camps popping up along the border.
The bodies in the mist are a small fraction of what has become a death toll beyond comprehension: As many as half a million people may have died in Rwanda's national genocide since April 6, dwarfing even the ethnic horrors of Bosnia-Herzegovenia.
The slaughter has become impossible to ignore, even for a world worn down by images of war and starvation, and preoccupied for the last month by the ascension of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, 2,000 miles away.
Today, in a move hastened by the continuing carnage, the United Nations is expected to vote to send 5,500 peacekeepers to Rwanda to impose a truce between its blood-feuding Hutu and Tutsi peoples.
Here along the border, and in the refugee camps, the tales of the nightmare differ only in the grisly details.
"We had many friends. But when we heard the guns crying, we (left) without knowing who was still behind. We had to go then," says Anicet Bahanibanje, 26, of Muvumba in Rwanda. He fled 70 miles to cross the bridge.
"I've seen people who died, and people who did not have arms. And those who did not have heads," says Bahanibanje. "When we walk down the road, all we saw was massacres."
No one is spared.
School teachers are shot. Men are hacked, arms then legs, and left to bleed to death. Girls as young as eight are raped and left to die. Wounded are pulled from ambulances and bayonetted. Babies are sliced in half, hanging in carriers on their dead mothers' backs. Priests are buried alive.
Daniel Bellamy of the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees says he - like the world at large - cannot comprehend such killers. "If you looked in their eyes there is something there that is not in the eyes of normal people."
That something is a war rooted deeply in blood and history.
The Hutu people are 86% of Rwanda's population. They dominate the government and control most of the countryside.
The rival Tutsi, 13% of the population, are the closest thing the impoverished nation has to an upper class. Hundreds of thousands from both groups now fill the refugee camps.
The slaughter began April 6 after a plane carrying Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down near the Rwanda's capital, Kigali. Habayimana, a Hutu who gained power in a coup in 1973, was returning from a conference in Tanzania designed to solidify a budding peace with Tutsi rebels.
Minutes after the crash - initially blamed on the Tutsi-dominated Patriotic Front - Hutu soldiers and drunken mobs began killing Tutsis in reprisal. But U.N. officials and others now suspect Hutus, including the presidential guard, may have downed the plane to target the Tutsi.
When the fighting began, the United Nations pulled out most of its 2,500 troops. The remaining 270 are helpless.
At the forefront of the violence are Hutu militias called the Interahamwe, meaning "those who attack together."
Their weapons are crude: machetes and sharpened screwdrivers, rocks and clubs, spears and knives - and an occasional AK-47 bullet or grenade.
The reality here now is a free-for-all bloodfest, a collection of massacre after massacre, that has sent at least 1.7 million of the 8.2 million Rwandans on the move to safety.
When the fighting began, the Rusomo bridge here was controlled by government troops. But government soldiers fled as rebels advanced, leaving the border open - an opportunity for terrified civilians to flee into Tanzania.
The gate was open only for a few days. Soon, the rebels captured the bridge. Now, those looking to the acacia-covered hills of freedom in Tanzania must cross the river in makeshift boats, facing danger from swift currents and rapids.
Still, it's the best option for the terrified.
"When the soldiers came into our house, they showed us the machine gun and then my parents were dead," says Neza Dudace, 30. "We saw what they are doing. We had to leave."
Dudace remembers hearing a whistle as he fled. He did not know it was the signal to others in the murdering bands that a potential victim had escaped. Dudace won the death race.
Guarding the Rusumo Bridge again this day is a Tutsi, Patriotic Front Lt. Emmanuel Gasimba. He flashes a broad smile as he insists all is fine, all is calm.
"We do not oppose the Hutu or anyone wanting to leave. We just want those who are participating in the massacres," Gasimba says.
Why then are civilians risking the river's currents and thieves instead of crossing on the bridge?
"Perhaps they are afraid of us," Gasimba says. "When they see us they try to hide."
But why are they afraid?
Gasimba only smiles again.
The answer can be found less than 10 miles from the bridge inside Rwanda, where the remains of the dead are everywhere. In ghost towns, a few frightened elderly cower in shadows of their huts.
Cattle and sheep wander unherded. Corpses are picked clean by dogs and crows.
All this in what was one of the world's most untouched natural areas. Water from Rwanda's hills feeds hundreds of tiny lakes and papyrus-choked marshes, a home for white-headed storks, the tsetse fly, impala, zebras, vervet monkeys, baboons and the occasional buffalo. But now the animals, too, are in hiding.
