The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow.

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building... In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously admistered states in history.

The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual – always an annoyance to totality – ceases to exist.

I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again”... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated.

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.

I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city – and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

Writing the forenames and family names of the victims down, with no other detail of age, or place, would fill twenty books. To begin to study the individual deaths would consume a hundred lifetimes. Which is why one of our deepest instincts can be simply to record names – individual lives, equally specific, equally valuable – never emphasizing one for fear of disrespecting another: listing them, as it were on a single stone wall – and steering away from blame or analysis.

Cycling is an excruciating sport – a rider’s power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain – and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.