Every genocide is hideous, each in its own grotesque way. Searching for the origins and distinctiveness of the genocidal violence that has convulsed the Sudanese region of Darfur in the last year - leaving tens of thousands dead and perhaps a million people displaced and in danger - we must go to the remotest desert-edge settlements in Northern Darfur near the border with Chad, to the basalt stubs of mountains that march southward until they fuse in the 10,000-foot Jebel Marra massif in the center of Darfur, and to Sudan's capital in Khartoum, far to the east.