A Day of Tear Gas, Fire and Shattered Glass

At midday on Friday, Jan. 28, I headed toward the Mukaram Mosque, just off Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the focal point of the demonstrations of the previous three days. Plainclothes police, supported by antiriot cops in full gear, were turning away a handful of worshipers.

“The mosque is closed for construction,” said a mustachioed policeman in a beige jacket.

“It was opened yesterday!” screamed a visibly angry gentleman with graying hair. “So now you are closing the house of God too?”

(Follow along with TIME’s latest updates on the crisis in Cairo.)

On another side of the square, some 500 plainclothesmen huddled in a corner, seemingly listening to directives from somebody I couldn’t see. I stopped for a moment, pretending to catch my breath in the hope of hearing what was going on. Half a dozen of the men came up to me immediately and forcefully told me I was not allowed to stand anywhere near them. There were no civilians near the square.

To find the civilians, I headed to Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, in the Mohandaseen neighborhood of the capital, an upper-middle-class area bordered by poorer sections. Many orange ambulances and fire trucks stood at the ready along the main road, Batal Ahmad Abdel Azia Street. Several thousand people had gathered at the mosque, mostly young men but also many young women in hijabs as well as few older folks. I joined them as they marched down the main street toward Tahrir Square. “The people want the regime to fall,” they chanted. “Let Hosni Mubarak fall!” “Freedom! Freedom!”

(See TIME’s photos of the protests plaguing Egypt.)

The atmosphere was peaceful despite the shouting, with several protesters scolding a handful of others who picked up stones in anticipation of tossing them at the police lines. “We don’t want to cause any destruction,” one young man said as he took the stones from the hand of another.

Some of the protesters were prepared with surgical masks. People living in the high-rise apartments lining the street watched from their balconies. Many clapped and chanted along with the protesters. An elderly lady punched her fist in the air in time with the chants. “Come down, Egyptians, come down!” the demonstrators intoned to the residents.

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“They are scared,” said Sharif al-Rubaie, 31, referring to the government. “They are really scared of us.” Gesturing toward the crowd surging onto the street, al-Rubaie continued, “These people aren’t political or members of political parties. They’ve had enough of the lack of dignity — the way they are harassed by the police.”

I turned to a young man walking beside me. “Where are you from? What’s your area like?” I asked. “My area is called worries, unemployment and poverty,” he replied. “And you’ll find many just like it here.” Mohammed, 25, is a business-school graduate increasingly frustrated by his inability to find work. “I just sit on the Internet all day. That’s not what I want my life to be. Today is the first time I’ve ever participated in a demonstration. I felt like maybe it might make a difference. Look at these people in the buildings,” he said, gesturing toward the apartments. “They are with us, but they are scared. We can’t all be scared.”

“Ya Gamal, tell your father that the Egyptian people hate you,” the crowd chanted, a reference to the son and presumed heir of President Hosni Mubarak.

Tear gas came from seemingly out of nowhere, quite a distance away from Tahrir Square. One canister landed very close to me, rapidly followed by a second and a third. The crowd panicked and started fleeing down a side street, but there was no respite from the stinging fumes that immediately blanketed the area. I closed my eyes and pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth.

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“See this, my sister?” asked a protester. “Write it down. Is this any way to live? Look how Mubarak treats his people. And why? Because we want a better life?” The man screamed out to me as he ran past.

A young man with a bottle of cola urged others to dab some of the liquid in their eyes. Some were prepared with onions and vinegar-soaked scarves to lessen the effects of the gas. They were shared all around. People offered one another water.

“This is the beginning of the end for him,” a young man shouted to the crowd. The people were regrouping and trying to find another way to the square. They headed down an alternative route. A burly bearded man, also named Mohammed but older (35), wearing black plastic sandals, offered me some water. “Don’t wash your face with it. It won’t help,” he said. “But have a drink.” He said he was a taxi driver and also a veteran protester, and he offered advice to those overcome by the fumes: “Here, put Pepsi on your eyes — it won’t burn as badly.”

Desperate to stop the stinging, I tried it. It calmed my eyes somewhat. But they were still burning. A young man in a kaffiyeh saw my discomfort and poured some vinegar on my scarf. “Here, breathe this in,” he said. “It will help.” It did.

How did Egypt manage to cut off the Internet?

See TIME’s photo-essay “A Brief History of People Power.”

“Tunis heated us up,” Mohammed the taxi driver told me as we walked along to the next confrontation with the police. “We were asleep before, but if a country of 10 million can do it, so can we.” He said he didn’t belong to any particular political group. Meanwhile, people from apartments lining the streets threw bottles of water down to protesters heading down the Corniche, the large avenue along the Nile. “Vinegar, please, if you have vinegar,” some of the protesters shouted back. Within minutes, several bottles plonked onto the sidewalk.

I met two sisters — Hala, 25, a final-year university student who didn’t want to give her major, and her 27-year-old sister Salma, a pharmacist. They had traveled for two hours by taxi to participate in the protest. “Before, the opposition was fractured, but now we just have one demand: we don’t want Hosni Mubarak. We want a strong economy. We don’t want to be humiliated,” said Hala, clad in an orange hijab and sweater. A 22-year-old engineering student who didn’t want to give his name said, “I’m here because I’ve only known one leader in my lifetime.” Mubarak has been President of Egypt for 30 years.

“Bread, freedom, social justice,” the crowd chanted as it turned down Al-Agouza Street.

(See a video explaining the ideology behind the protests.)

“We’re just tired of the oppression. We’re tired of the unemployment,” Salma said. Then she was interrupted by the thuds of yet more tear-gas canisters. This time the police opted to overwhelm. They fired eight canisters into the crowd in quick succession, blanketing the area in a thick haze. People coughed and sputtered as they tried to escape via side streets and alleyways. Some vomited as they ran. And still the thud, thud, thud of more canisters.

“Mubarak has no feelings,” one man screamed to the retreating crowd. “But what are we supposed to do? Nothing?”

A teenage boy offered a man with a white mustache his surgical mask. Some men carried their prayer mats from the mosque. As the demonstrators passed a local hospital, personnel in white lab coats distributed boxes of surgical masks to them, an act met with hearty applause.

Despite the strong blanket of tear gas still hanging in the air, the protesters headed back toward the police line. “We must have change,” one young man told me en route to what was certainly going to be a melee.

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After the crowd tried several times unsuccessfully to break through the same police cordon, only to be turned away by tear gas, I decided to make my way back to my hotel along the Nile. But the police choked off most of the roads around the city. A group of eight young men offered to escort me to the hotel. We walked for several hours — in pairs rather than as a group, lest the antiriot police consider us a threat and fire on us.

As we walked around Cairo, we could hear the rumble of protesters from several different quarters of the city. I didn’t want to get the young men into trouble. They had traveled from Alexandria to protest. And I could see they were getting nervous. I thanked them for getting me as far as they did and told them I could find my own way.

As I headed down along the Corniche, a swank area that is home to several five-star hotels, the police tried to turn me back. Tired, I argued with the baton-bearing man in plainclothes refusing me entry. “Where do you want me to go? To sleep on the streets?” I said. “My hotel is down there.”

Another man, alerted by my yelling, overruled the thug, and I passed through. I saw about 20 men in plainclothes, all carrying big sticks, coughing and sputtering along a side street, affected by their own tear gas.

The road was littered with debris. Billboards burned. I managed to get past another checkpoint, of 40 police in full riot gear. And then I ran into hundreds and hundreds of protesters heading toward me.

(See TIME’s 10 questions for Mohamed ElBaradei.)

These young men were not like those I had encountered earlier in the day. They were a more destructive crowd. Many carried metal pipes, others sticks; some dragged metal barricades and burned garbage in the middle of the street.

As I was about to pass one hotel, the protesters turned on the building, hurling stones at its ceiling-to-floor windows, sending shattering glass to the floor. I crossed the street, retreating from the hotel.

My hotel was another 10 minutes away on foot. But the crowd was angry and still all around me. As I reached my building, I heard shards of glass breaking. It was my hotel’s turn. The demonstrators succeeded in breaking several windows and then made a push to storm the hotel.

“Everybody downstairs,” a hotel staff member screamed out, as men in white chef’s uniforms and others in bellboy outfits rushed to physically barricade the doors. The staff placed tables and cabinets in the middle of the marble corridors: obstacles in case the protesters got into the hotel.

I walked up 12 flights of stairs. The hotel staff seemed to have kept the rioters at bay. That night the management decided to leave the hotel in darkness to make it appear to be abandoned and closed. Though Egypt was under curfew, it was very much on fire.

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