CAIRO — Feb. 2 actually started out as a pretty good day for the anti-government protesters still massed in Tahrir Square. The usual festive mood and sense of community reigned after another chilly night outdoors. When Internet service abruptly returned around noon, the good news spread throughout the crowd. It was taken as a sign that the government's grip was weakening and the tide was turning toward a resolution of the weeklong standoff with President Hosni Mubarak.

That turned out to be a gross miscalculation. By nightfall, the streets around Tahrir were littered with wounded protesters who were frightened, enraged, shell shocked, and desperately short of medical supplies.

The first sign that things were about to tip badly into darkness came shortly after the Internet returned. I was in a taxi with a group of journalists heading to opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei's home on the outskirts of Cairo to attempt an interview. From the other direction came what looked like a 1,000-person march of pro-Mubarak supporters chanting slogans like "We love the president" and "He's not going." Many of the protesters were riding horses and camels -- from the looks of them, many appeared to be tourist touts coming from the stables clustered around the Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo. At the time, my colleagues and I thought it made for a great journalistic visual; we snapped a few pictures and furiously started scribbling in our notebooks. Within hours, those horses and camels had been used in a bizarre, medieval mounted charge into the unarmed civilians occupying Tahrir.

The pro-Mubarak rallies that have turned the protests into a street war started late on Feb. 1, clustered around the Information Ministry, about a 10-minute walk from Tahrir. A group of roughly 500 had organized a rally there, in full view of the state and Western media outlets that have their offices on that block. It was a clever tactic, serving two main purposes: It allowed the state media to film the rally from upstairs and broadcast an endless loop of citizens declaring their love for the president; and it enabled the protesters to essentially hijack a number of prominent Western news broadcasts.

Around 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning, I watched as the pro-Mubarak crowd noted the studio lights of a live shot in progress from a balcony, and then gathered below to loudly chant pro-Mubarak slogans. I observed for a moment and then walked away with a sort of bemused respect for the enduring craftiness of the supporters of Mubarak's regime. But by the time I made it back to Tahrir around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, the scene there couldn't have been more different from the euphoria of the preceding days. The protesters in the square were being besieged, and I saw dozens of bloodied young men staggering or being carried away from the front lines.

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