Paris.--I returned home from Turkey two days ago to find a cat trapped in a tree near the Russian Orthodox church here. Its gray fur matted from the rain, the terrified cat was hugging the top of the spindly tree.

When I called, the guardian at the church sounded near tears upon hearing my description of the cat, which had disappeared two days before. "God bless your soul," he gushed, and hurried out to rescue his cat.

A month before, a Kurdish medical student and his extended family of 19 from northern Iraq struggled to survive without water or food on the mountainous border between Iraq and Turkey. "If we were dogs, we would be treated better than this," the student, Yunis Aieman, said bitterly.

The contrast between here and now and then and there struck me with savage force. Suddenly I felt as if I had crossed centuries, indeed, entire worlds, though my flight home from southeastern Turkey could be measured in hours.

It had been little more than a month since I had first disguised myself as a Kurdish refugee to get past Turkish soldiers and glimpse what the Kurds were going through on the mountain border with Iraq.

That first day a baby dehydrated from advanced diarrhea tried to play with his mother as she wept over his impending death. The infant smiled faintly before losing his strength; he had big eyes and a drawn face, with the flesh hanging from his bones. He looked like a little, old man.

At the bottom of the mountain were truckloads of food, donated by Kurdish communities of the region, that the Turkish military would not let pass. The refugees said they had not eaten in two days.

They were apparently being starved and denied water to drive them to a second camp higher up the mountain, closer to the Iraqi border. From that second camp came the sound of gunfire throughout the morning and afternoon.

Before the day ended, a Turkish soldier caught and detained me for sneaking into the camp. "You're acting like a spy," said the commanding officer, as he considered what to do with me. The soldiers had already shot twice at my Kurdish interpreter, after he was caught trying to slip in to speak with the refugees at my insistence.

Finally, the chief officer sent me back into the camp with permission and a soldier-interpreter, perhaps because he figured had already seen the worst, perhaps because U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III was due in Turkey two days later.

After the charade, I spoke with a lieutenant colonel about conditions in the lower camp, the only one I saw that day. He said they were trying to move the refugees up the mountain, where medical care, food, water and tents would eventually be delivered.

But the Turkish military was not insensitive to the refugees' plight, he insisted. He pointed to two ambulances near the camp, and said they were for transporting urgent medical cases to the hospital in Sirnak.

I decided to take him at his word.

"When I was wandering alone in the camp, I saw a baby that without immediate medical care will surely die tomorrow. If I take you to that baby, will you put it in an ambulance and send it to the hospital?" I asked.

He declined, repeating only that there would be doctors at th camp up the mountain, if only the refugees would go. The baby, certainly, did not survive. My initial relief, even gratitude, at not being interrogated and arrested turned to revulsion.

I felt that day as if I were entering a thick forest, lacking the guideposts civilization had provided until then: compassion, justice, simple decency. The name of the nearest village, Isikveren, meant "that which gives light," but this camp seemed at first devoid of light.

In the following days, I would see that baby's wan smile and rolling head over and over in my mind, each time wondering if I had pressed harder with the lieutenant colonel whether he would have put the child in the ambulance. Could he have been saved?

Other images would run through my mind, too. The nine-year-old whose hands and face were burned crisp by napalm, the blind woman lost on the mountainside after dark, calling her daughter's name, the delirious girl crying, "Water," as she walked down the mountain the first day foreign relief supplies arrived. I would find myself weeping, for every reason and for no immediate reason.

Writing became a way of restoring balance, of expelling the images that crowded before the eyes, the smells so overpowering they made one gag. It was an answer to the grand question that presented itself every time one felt moved by a particular family or person: "What about all the others?"

The layer of suspicion and disdain among Turkish soldiers for the Kurds was palpable at times. The Turkish military, which has been fighting a low-level insurgency among separatists of the Kurdish Worker's Party in the region for ten years, appeared to make no distinction between the Kurdish refugees from Iraq and the separatists from its own country.

While the rest of the world saw in the homeless, stateless Iraq Kurds a vast human tragedy, the Turkish military saw a looming security threat.

One day, a Turkish newspaper ran a front-page photo of m wrapping a refugee woman's bleeding hand, with an erroneous caption saying I was of Kurdish ancestry -- as if only another Kurd could feel moved to help.

A few days later, senior officers at Isikveren called me and my translator over. "What foreign languages do you speak?" one asked me. "Do you speak Kurdish?"

The other officer, my skimpy knowledge of Turkish allowed me to understand, asked my interpreter how much money I carried, and then advised him to "Take her money and f--- her." As we left, he looked over bruises we'd gotten from an accident on the mountain and warned: "Be careful. Next time you could die here."

In the mirror, red scars from the accident mark my left eye. It wa a rainy day, when a tractor took a turn too quickly coming down the mountain. The wagon disengaged from the cab and flipped over, breaking my unlucky interpreter's ribs and scraping us both badly. A family in Sirnak took us in. They fed us, washed our clothes, gave us a place to sleep for the night.

The next day, we returned to the camp, mostly to overcome any fear of the mountain the accident could have produced. Neither of us was strong enough to work.

The refugees came over to check our faces, shaking their heads.

"It should have happened to one of us. Now, you're going to feel impatient and you'll stop writing about this camp," one man said.

"You came here feeling sorry for us, and now it's we who feel

sorry for you," another remarked.

When we came back to Isikveren a few days later, the emotion were less raw, the tears less ready. Perhaps the refugee was right, that smoldering anger at our accident burned up any sympathy we had. But I don't think it was that.

More likely the arrival of the American soldiers and foreign relie bTC workers, who had put an end to the Turkish military's gunfire and some of the extortion, made the Kurds feel less desperate themselves. They saw, in the foreign support, some sign that they were not alone.

Now the wire reports say that Isikveren has been cleared out and the Kurds have gone home to rebuild their lives in Zakho.

And I have returned home, not particularly eager to ring up ol friends, to share a bottle of wine or pick up the threads of half-finished conversations. Can you plunge into a forest, lose all your bearings and possibly come out in the same place you entered?

Diana Jean Schemo ,a correspondent for The Sun, reported from the Kurdish refugee camps in Turkey.