Cairo:
In a test of wills that seemed to be approaching a critical juncture, hundreds of thousands of people crammed into Cairo's vast Tahrir Square on Tuesday, seeking to muster a million protesters demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
Their mood was jubilant, as though they had achieved their goals, even though Mr. Mubarak remained in power a day after the Egyptian military emboldened the protesters by saying they would not use force against them and the president's most trusted adviser offered to negotiate with his adversaries.
There were reports that the government was seeking to choke off access to the capital to thwart the demonstrators' ambitions for the most decisive show of strength so far. But the scale of the protest was far bigger and more tumultuous than in the previous week, suggesting that the authorities had been unable to prevent the uprising from reaching what had been seen by all sides as a potential turning point.
Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets of Alexandria, Egypt's second city north of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast.
Events around the region have taken unpredictable turns in recent weeks. On Tuesday afternoon, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a small and generally stable nation, made the surprise announcement that he had dismissed the government in response to protesters' demands for greater freedoms.
The crowd in Cairo offered a remarkable tapestry of Egypt's society, from the most westernized to the most traditional, from young women with babies to old men with canes.
"Look at the faces of the old men -- they are young again," said Ahmed Zemhom, 37, a former math teacher who makes a living as a cab driver.
Seeking to impose some kind of order, the military set up checkpoints to search people entering the square, presumably for hidden weapons, separating them by gender so that women could be patted down only by other females. But there were no immediate reports of clashes, and little sign of any security police.
The fast-moving developments appeared to weaken Mr. Mubarak's grip on power just two weeks after a group of young political organizers called on Facebook for a day of protest inspired by the ouster of another Arab strongman, in Tunisia.
A Western diplomat, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said Monday night's moves by the military were believed to be part of choreographed maneuvers by the most senior people around Mr. Mubarak to set the stage for his eventual exit.
If that belief is borne out by events, however, it remained to be seen whether protesters would be satisfied by Mr. Mubarak's departure or would demand more far-reaching change, as demonstrators in Tunisia did after its strongman president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in mid-January.
In Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, the chants of the huge crowd suggested that the demonstrators would not stop at Mr. Mubarak's departure. "The people of Egypt want the president on trial," some chanted for the first time, while others chorused: "The people of Egypt want the government to fall."
"Nobody wants him, nobody," said El-Mahdy Mohamed, one of the demonstrators. "Can't he see on the TV what's happening?"
As opposition groups sought to stake out positions, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel laureate who has emerged as a potential rallying point for opposition, said on Tuesday that Mr. Mubarak must leave the country before any dialogue can start between the opposition and the government, Reuters reported.
"There can be dialogue but it has to come after the demands of the people are met and the first of those is that President Mubarak leaves," he told Al Arabiya television. "I hope to see Egypt peaceful and that's going to require as a first step the departure of President Mubarak. If President Mubarak leaves, then everything will progress correctly."
His words were apparently a first response to an offer of talks on Monday night by Omar Suleiman, Mr. Mubarak's right-hand man and newly appointed vice president.
By Tuesday morning, as a formal curfew that many have ignored was lifted, vast crowds flooded into Tahrir Square -- a plaza that for some has assumed some of the symbolic importance of Tiananmen Square in Beijing during pro-democracy demonstrations there in 1989.
But, in marked contrast to those events, the military's promise not to use force has emboldened demonstrators sensing that the political landscape of the country has shifted as decisively as at any moment in Mr. Mubarak's three decades in power. The military seemed to aggressively assert itself as an arbiter between two irreconcilable forces: a popular uprising demanding Mr. Mubarak's fall and his tenacious refusal to relinquish power.
And even as the square itself filled up, rivers of protesters flowed from side streets.
Overnight, soldiers boosted their presence around the square, with tanks and armored personnel carriers guarding some of its entrances and stringing concertina wire to block off some streets. The black-clad police -- reviled by many protesters as a tool of the regime -- also seemed to have been deployed in larger numbers, though not on the same scale as when the protests started a week ago.
News reports said the authorities had sought to isolate Cairo from the rest of the country, throwing up roadblocks on main highways and canceling train and bus services to prevent demonstrators from reaching the city. There was no official confirmation of the report but witnesses said many people who had been stopped at roadblocks simply walked into the center of Cairo.
In a further token of the paralysis of normal business, news reports said, the Cairo stock exchange announced that it would remain closed for a fourth successive day on Wednesday.
Thousands of foreigners have fled the capital, around 1,200 of them on evacuation flights arranged by the American Embassy that began on Monday. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, two more flights chartered by the State Department had left Cairo for Istanbul, while passengers were boarding other planes for Athens and Larnaca, Cyprus, officials said. Many more flights were likely on Wednesday.
How far Mr. Mubarak is offering to bend in negotiations remains to be seen, and it appeared to be too soon to write off the survival of his government. In Washington, the State Department on Monday dispatched a veteran diplomatic troubleshooter, Frank Wisner, a former ambassador in Cairo and elsewhere, to meet Mr. Mubarak and other officials.
In a further diplomatic twist, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey -- whose country is often held up as a model of Western-style democracy within a predominantly Islamic nation -- canceled a visit to Egypt planned for next week, urging Mr. Mubarak to "listen to people's outcries and extremely humanistic demands" and to "meet the freedom demands of people without a doubt," Reuters reported.
The week-old uprising here entered a new stage about 9 p.m. on Monday when a uniformed military spokesman declared on state television that "the armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people." Addressing the throngs who took to the streets, he declared that the military understood "the legitimacy of your demands" and "affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody."
A roar of celebration rose up immediately from the crowd of thousands of protesters still lingering in Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, where a television displayed the news. Opposition leaders argued that the phrase "the legitimacy of your demands" could only refer to the protests' central request -- Mr. Mubarak's departure to make way for free elections.
About an hour later, Mr. Suleiman, the vice president, delivered another address, lasting just two minutes.
"I was assigned by the president today to contact all the political forces to start a dialogue about all the raised issues concerning constitutional and legislative reform," he said, "and to find a way to clearly identify the proposed amendments and specific timings for implementing them."
The protesters in the streets took Mr. Suleiman's speech as a capitulation to the army's refusal to use force against them. "The army and the people want the collapse of the government," they chanted in celebration. Even some supporters of Mr. Mubarak acknowledged that events may have turned decisively against him after the military indicated its refusal to confront the protesters.
There were some faint dissident voices, however. In Alexandria on Tuesday, young women handed out leaflets to motorists in Alexandria urging people not to attend Tuesday's demonstrations. "Do not turn yourselves over to outside forces trying to create chaos in our country," the leaflets said. The argument seemed unlikely to dissuade protesters who had set up tents in front of the Misr train station in central Alexandria.
Mr. Mubarak's previously unquestioned authority had already eroded deeply over the preceding three days. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilian protesters routed his government's heavily armed security police in a day of street battles, burning his ruling party's headquarters to the ground as the police fled the capital. On Saturday, Mr. Mubarak deployed the military in their place, only to find the rank-and-file soldiers fraternizing with the protesters and revolutionary slogans being scrawled on their tanks.
And on Sunday, leaders of various opposition groups met to select Mr. ElBaradei to negotiate for them in anticipation of talks with Mr. Mubarak about forming a transitional unity government -- an idea Mr. Mubarak's surrogate embraced Monday.
Mr. Mubarak's government came under pressure from another front as well: the swift deterioration of the economy. The protests, and the specter of looting that followed the police withdrawal, have devastated tourism, the source of half of Egypt's foreign income, and shut down transportation.
On Monday foreign embassies scrambled to book charter flights to evacuate their citizens as thousands of people jammed the Cairo airport trying to flee the country. International companies, including those in the vital oil and natural gas industries, shuttered their operations.
As late as midday, however, Mr. Mubarak seemed to be trying to wait out the protesters. He appeared on television soberly shaking the hands of a new roster of cabinet ministers in a public demonstration that even though protesters may control the streets, he remained head of state.