Books, movies and television have long provided a glamorous gloss for the image of the foreign correspondent. Heit has traditionally been a he-dashes from one cosmopolitan capital to another by first-class jetliner or Orient Express-style railway compartment; he puts up at such elegant hostelries as Claridge's in London or the Plaza Athenee in Paris, dining at Maxim's or its local equivalent; he hobnobs with celebrities and is on intimate terms with heads of government.

This stereotype of glamour and prestige never seems so unreal as when a correspondent is confronted by overwhelming, stomach-wrenching misery and death. New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis faced such a scene last week when he arrived in Bhopal, India, just 30 hours after a toxic gas leak had created the world's worst industrial disaster. "I have seen men killed in battle," Brelis reported after walking through streets littered with the corpses of people and animals. "But seeing ordinary people dying before your eyes, especially mute children falling dead in a transfixed silence, is appalling. I felt as if I were wandering through a landscape of the dead."

Journalists never forget their landscapes of the dead. Photographer David Burnett, on assignment for TIME, spent five days last month at two of the camps set up for Ethiopia's starving population. Says he: "It is not the millions who really batter at your emotions. It is each individual person, like the little naked girl I photographed sitting on a rock: she was not strong enough to stand, not strong enough even to eat. I still see her face." Burnett was also struck by individual images of compassion. "There were so many loving moments, a mother with her baby, a father protecting two children. We tend to think all human feelings die under such circumstances, but I felt a little less hopeless when I saw that it wasn't so."

Mexico City Correspondent Janice Simpson was similarly moved when she covered the gas-tank explosion three weeks ago that left more than 2,500 dead. "People who had suffered great losses were nonetheless eager to help me, to tell their stories," she says. "But I felt a great frustration at having so little to offer them in return." The day after the explosion, Simpson went to a center where names of the missing could be checked against computer lists. Some distraught people took her for an official and asked her to aid them. "I told the first one or two that I was a reporter and could not help," says Simpson. "But I soon found myself explaining how to make out a list and submit it. It was a very small thing, but it did make me feel a little better."