Cairo:
Hours before the president's speech, through dark, downtown streets, groups of young men and women stepped over the rocks of recent battles and walked toward the lights in Tahrir Square.
They wore their country's colors on headbands, lanyards and T-shirts and arrived to a celebration already begun. Popcorn was sold, dates were passed around and a voice of the uprising, the singer Abdel Halim Hafez, floated from a loudspeaker.
Two men scaled lampposts, risking death to hang a martyr's picture.
Other men hammered at a wooden roof, a semipermanent addition to a tent city. Lashed to light posts were loudspeakers, so that the crowds could hear the news. Surrounded by the architecture of their struggle, the protesters waited for their reward.
Dozens of men from Sinai, who had camped in the square for two weeks, smiled as they talked about finally going back home. Another man, with a cast on his arm from the battle of the stones, said he would finally tell his wife where he had disappeared to on Jan. 28, when he ran into a protest and never looked back.
"I cannot believe this day has already come," said Amr Gala, an accountant, about 8 p.m. "I cannot believe that the president will step down." Everyone shared his relief, and no one was worried about what came next.
"He leaves, and then we think," said Mina George, 31. "And then we choose," his brother Mario added.
It all seemed unbelievable and it turned out that it was. At first, there was serenity, as hundreds of thousands of people stopped chanting and talking and moving. At 10:45 p.m., President Hosni Mubarak started to speak, a tinny version of his voice leaking from speakers like the scratchy audio from a newsreel.
For many of the protesters his words were hard to hear. Near one stage in the square, people pulled out cellphones and banded in knots, as relatives on the other end of the phones piped in the speech from their televisions. At another stage, a young man in a black jacket held up a tiny radio to a microphone.
Soon, the protesters were shaking their heads. Then they started to groan or curse, calling Mr. Mubarak a donkey. Static filled the speakers at critical moments, as when the president tried to explain that he was transferring power to his vice president.
It was clear what had happened. Before the speech was over, chanting filled the square.
"Leave! Leave! Leave!"
With no reason to cheer, or even exhale, people shuffled around the square, frowning or arguing with one another. Many said Mr. Mubarak's speech had been a ploy to divide the protest movement by peeling off those who thought the president had offered his opponents enough. Other people said the coming days would be violent.
Young men, desperate for answers, surrounded Amr Hamzawy, who belongs to a group that was mediating between the protesters and the government. Were there any guarantees that the president would honor his pledges, one man asked?
Their only guarantee would come from sitting in the square, Mr. Hamzawy said.
"He is stubborn, and he doesn't want to be brought to account," said Yasmin Fawzi, 24, looking stunned. "If he doesn't step down, these people won't leave."
Some of the protest organizers wept after the speech. "Now more people are going to die," said Sally Moore, one of 14 leaders of the youth movements at Tahrir. "Mubarak wants to provoke us so that we march on the presidential palace and he can shoot us."
Anger turned to festivity much later in the night, as thousands poured past the concrete barriers to demonstrate -- and set up camp --in front of the Stalinist state television headquarters, an imposing tower on the Nile that looks like a fortress even when not protected by tanks.
"We must surround all the symbols of state power and choke them off," said Alaa Abdel Fattah, a blogger and activist.
A 20-year-old musician brought a drum to keep the chants in rhythm. Men and women made beds out of blankets and sheets on the Corniche overlooking the Nile.
Mr. Mubarak's speech had energized them.
"Yes, we are disappointed," said Ahmed Amesh, a veterinarian. "It's strange, now people are asking for more. Instead of asking for his resignation, they're asking for the president to be prosecuted and put to death."