Early on a summer morning in the Jordanian desert, driving along an empty road toward the Syrian border. A skeletal hound limps by the roadside. An old man selling melons and coffee slumps on a crate and watches the dog. It’s in the nineties already, and dust is everywhere. A gust picks up, and your lips are filmed with a gritty scum. After a few miles, signs start appearing for the crossings into Syria. In the villages here at night, you can sometimes hear the sounds of artillery fire thudding across the frontier; occasionally, a shell lands in Jordan. On the side of the road, in a shallow, sandy ravine, there’s a small Bedouin encampment. You can see a tent bearing the blue, sun-faded letters U.N.H.C.R.—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A five-hundred-dollar tent goes for around a hundred dollars on the black market.

We arrive in Za’atari, a village six miles east of the city of Mafraq. Until a year ago, there was nothing much in the vicinity: some modest brick mosques and schools, a Royal Jordanian Air Force base. Za’atari, one aid worker told me, had been little more than “sand, snakes, and scorpions.” The uprising in Syria, which began twenty-five miles away, in Dara’a, changed all that. The flow of refugees from Syria into Jordan reached such a point of emergency—thousands every night, evading sniper fire, crossing the frontier on foot—that Mafraq, to take just one city, doubled in size. Jordan, with a population of six million, many of them displaced Iraqis and Palestinians, could not go on absorbing limitless refugees. It became necessary to build a camp. During Ramadan last summer, the U.N.H.C.R., the Jordanians, and a laundry list of international aid organizations built and opened the Za’atari refugee camp in two weeks. One of the first things to be done was to overlay the sand with gravel, an expensive project intended to prevent sandstorms in summer and rivers of mud in the rainy winter. It didn’t really work. There were sandstorms. There was mud. The snakes and the scorpions remained.

We pull up to the camp gate. There’s a bustle of Royal Jordanian Army and police officers, honking cars, belching motorbikes, young boys pushing wheelbarrows and hawking cigarettes and vegetables, and even younger kids looking for something to do. An armored personnel carrier keeps watch at the gate. A soldier raps on our window. He leans in to check our documents and, after a hard, suspicious glance, waves us through.

When Za’atari opened, in July of 2012, its population numbered in the hundreds. By late August, it had fifteen thousand residents. Now that number is a hundred and twenty thousand—the population of Hartford, Connecticut, or Santa Clara, California. The main drag is on the western side of the camp, a boulevard of ramshackle shops, makeshift clinics, schools. The smells are city smells: sewage, sweat, cigarette smoke, eau de cologne, meat roasting on spits. The boulevard is known to the Syrians and the aid workers as the Champs-Élysées.

Since the revolt began in Syria, more than two years ago, the death count has passed a hundred thousand. In Za’atari, the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a close friend to the war. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will. “This place is a graveyard for camels,” a refugee in his thirties named Ahmed Bakar told me one morning. “Camels can’t even live here. But Syrians can.”

In every tent and trailer, there are stories of personal horror. On the eastern edge of the camp, in District 8, I called on a family of women. Fatima, a solidly built farmer in her fifties, asked me not to publish her real name or the name of her village. If I did, she said, the moment she returned home the Syrian Army would hunt her down and kill her—“and everyone I know.” She glared and pulled back her hijab just enough for me to see her gray hair. She told me how terrible it would be to “betray” a woman of her age. “So you promise, then?”

We sat on the floor of her broiling caravan, as the mobile-home trailers are called. She introduced her two daughters. Iman, who is twelve, sat by her side; she had lost most of her right leg. The elder daughter, Inas, is twenty-five; on her left leg, she wore a cast up to her knee. She had just had surgery for shrapnel wounds. For the first year of the war, the family had lived as before. Fatima and her husband and their children owned a small house in a village and tended their olive trees. They had food, electricity, running water. They were able to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. “We had a beautiful life,” Fatima said. The family’s relation to the politics of Damascus and the world beyond consisted precisely of what was expected of them: They had pledged allegiance to Hafez al-Assad, as they had been taught on television and in the schools, and, after the old man died, in 2000, they had high hopes for his son, Bashar. When Hezbollah engaged Israel in battle, in 2006, the family again followed the lead of Syrian television and pledged allegiance to Hezbollah. They had, she said, “no reason in the world” to expect that Bashar’s Army would turn his artillery on their village, or that Hezbollah, fighting the rebels in support of Bashar’s regime, would cross the border from Lebanon and threaten their lives.

One day this May, shells began falling on their fields, on the houses of the village. Fatima said, “My husband called me and told me to leave and go with my sons. They were in the eighth and fourth grade. They ran out fast, and I grabbed their shoes and ran after them. While I was running, a rocket came from behind and whistled over my head. Just like that!” She made a motion with her hand. “And then the rocket came in and hit! It exploded out ahead of me.”

After the explosion, Fatima realized that the rocket had struck her two sons and one of her neighbors. Fatima got up and saw the pile of bodies. “My neighbor’s body lay over my son. I lifted him off and there was my son with shrapnel sticking out of his back. And the other.”

Fatima wandered through the fields. Finally, she found her husband.

“Where are the boys?” he said.

“Your sons are dead,” she said.

The fierce, flat way that Fatima recounted her words to her husband left the sense that she was punishing him with the news and, now, punishing herself in the recollection.

Fatima’s husband and a third daughter are in Syria now, living in a neighboring village. He watches over their farmland and sheep. Fatima took her wounded daughters to Jordan mainly for the medical help. Like most other refugees, she depended on rebel fighters to get her across the border. The girls were treated at the Moroccan-Italian medical clinic in the camp. Fatima talks to her husband daily. He tells her that the shelling has grown worse. The war is more desperate. Still, she has every intention of returning. “Living in a tent in Syria is better than a mansion in Jordan,” she says.