The school which was the centre of such carnage is now the scene of impromptu shrines, writes Chris Stephen in Beslan.
Different things bring out tears for visitors to the battered blackened ruin that is Beslan High School No 1.
For some it is a sight of all those pairs of shoes, too small and too pretty for adults, lined up amid broken glass on window sills of the gym. For others it is the sight of the neat stack of little wooden chairs outside the front door, ready and waiting for the new intake of pupils who will now never need them.
Others break down in tears at the sight of the bouquets of flowers which make a bright counterpoint to the blackened rain-soaked floor of the gym. The gym where so many hundreds died is much smaller than it looks on TV, barely large enough for the basket ball court whose bent metal hoops stand at either end. Hanging from them are the torn wires that held the mines which were strung across the gym, one of which reportedly went off by accident, triggering the carnage.
This is where reality leaves you.
It is impossible to imagine sane men cramming so many children into this hall, then stringing mines about their heads, primed to explode. You see it, you stand amid the burned clothing and rubble and pieces of white bone and you know it happened here.
But you still cannot believe it.
Nor can the people of Beslan: They come, singly or more often in groups, their dark clothing blending in with the smoke-blackened walls, to wonder through the building.
The women cry and the men look solemn and few words are spoken. The disturbing thing is that this school, so smashed and broken, is also immediately recognisable with a layout that we all recognise.
There are the familiar corridors with windows now smashed on one side and classrooms with blackboards and teachers' desks on the other. Doubtless these corridors saw children lingering, perhaps sent out of class as a punishment, perhaps surreptitiously sneaking a few puffs on a cigarette as secondary school children do around the world.
The floor underfoot is thick with rubble and dust now churned into a muddy paste by the rain water pouring through the great holes in the roof. In the classrooms desks, chairs and great piles of books sit where the hostage takers put them barricading the windows. The floors of some classrooms are inexplicably covered in hundreds of pages from children's exercise books.
Everywhere there is smashed and broken glass and here and there are holes in the blue wall paper from bullet and shrapnel strikes. Pretty children's drawings remain cellotaped to the walls and on a desk is a child's replica of a Kalashnikov machine gun.
And in each classroom and in many other parts of the school little impromptu shrines have begun to appear. On one desk a child's pink sports shoe is placed with a pair of glasses, a book, and a pen with a red rose laid on top. By the school entrance someone has placed a football next to an unopened bottle of champagne, presumably to commemorate a graduation that there will never be. The smell of burning lingers in the corridors, mixed with the stench of excrement.
The school theatre is a jarring mix of the normal and the bizarre. A neat red curtain hangs by the stage where the head teacher had been due to address the children and welcome the new boys and girls for the first day of their school year. But the theatre's wooden floor is smashed, with splintered wooden planks showing where it took direct hits from rocket-propelled grenades. Two Russian soldiers died here fighting a group of rebels making a desperate last stand. The soldiers and police have gone and the school building is left open to anyone wanting to visit it.
Around the school the whole town seems to be crying. The families of the dead children hold wakes called parmita in the hours before a body is taken away for burial. But most people know many of the dead which means that the hundreds of parmitas have to be co-ordinated so that waves of mourners can move from one to the next. The strain of this is enormous. "I have been to four parmitas today," said Fatima, landlady of the room where I am staying. "My eyes are hurting from all the tears."
The sound of wailing is everywhere. You meet it first at the small rundown airport a 20-minute drive from town. As the daily flight from Moscow disgorges groups of relatives who are met by mourners on the tarmac, you hear the wailing coming from apartments and houses in the streets. As I write this the sound of crying comes from an apartment building across the street where three families have each lost children. The streets of this little town are full of groups of mourners criss-crossing each other.
The concentrated misery is on the edge of town where a field has been set aside as a mass cemetery. A total of 170 people, mostly children, were buried yesterday in rows of freshly-dug graves. A group of sharp-suited officials, some local, some flown in from Moscow, stood with umbrellas watching the scene on a patch of grass. In front of them groups of mourners struggled across the broken muddy field trying not to drop the little coffins held on their shoulders. Groups of women followed each coffin, crying and holding each other up, with some losing their high heeled shoes in the thick mud.
When the last of yesterday's funerals finished the mourners trudged away through the pouring rain, resembling a defeated army. They helped each other into a fleet of tiny Lada cars which laboured away across the field and onto the main highway for the short drive back to town.
A group of unsmiling workmen then appeared, and pulled themselves into the cabs of three big yellow excavators. The engines were started with great belches of grey smoke and the machines got to work, excavating dozens of fresh graves for today's round of mass burials.