I KNEW it was truly over when I came home to find a neighbour in a panic. He had smelled a fire nearby. We traced its source soon enough, after climbing to the roof of my building. Smoke drifted from the garden of the villa next door, where workers had recently been digging a peculiarly deep hole, as if for a swimming pool. In a far corner of the garden stood rows of cardboard boxes spilling over with freshly shredded paper, and next to them a smouldering fire.

More intriguingly, a group of ordinary looking young men sat on the lawn, next to the hole. More boxes surrounded them, and from these the men extracted, one by one, what looked like cassette tapes and compact discs. After carefully smashing each of these with hammers, they tossed them into the pit. Down at its bottom another man shovelled wet cement onto the broken bits of plastic. More boxes kept appearing, and their labours continued all afternoon.

The villa, surrounded by high walls, is always silent. Cars, mostly unobtrusive Fiats and Ladas, slip in and out of its automatic security gates at odd hours, and fluorescent light peeps through shuttered windows late in the night. This happens to be an unmarked branch office of one of the Mubarak regime's top security agencies. It seems that someone had given the order to destroy their records. Whatever secrets were on those tapes and in those papers are now gone forever.

Perhaps it is because Mr Mubarak has been in power for so long, and because his government has for so long defied the mounting loathing felt for it by so many of its citizens, that I had hesitated to conclude, until witnessing that little episode of house cleaning, that Mr Mubarak's reign was finished. But in fact there was already plenty of evidence that the end had come. The day before, dubbed by protest organisers the Friday of Fury, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Egyptians had pretty much stripped what remained of any aura of power or legitimacy from Mr Mubarak's government.

Almost instantly after the final prostration of the weekly noon prayer huge demonstrations broke out in nearly every one of Egypt's big cities. Everywhere the same scenarios unfolded, as peaceful marchers collided with ranks of riot police and, in a rising wave of anger and determination, eventually overcame them. Mr Mubarak's men, it must be said, put up a good fight. Central Security, the black-clad, padded and helmeted crowd control corps, is one of the biggest and best equipped forces of its kind anywhere. Its estimated 150,000 men, mostly military conscripts, come under the command of the Ministry of Interior, whose total manpower is thought to be more than a million. They proved disciplined and ruthless in the face of crowds that, in several different parts of Cairo, numbered thousands and even tens of thousands of people.

On the Qasr al Nil bridge, which spans the Nile between Cairo's opera house and the headquarters of the Arab League, Central Security police clashed for four continuous hours with a column of protesters that stretched for two miles, blocking it from joining other columns converging on Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the city's heart. Their ferocious pop-popping deluges of teargas flooded the oncoming crowds in an almost continuously blinding, choking cloud. Volleys of plastic bullets and grapeshot scattered the front lines of protesters again and again, and the security forces charged in repeatedly, batons crashing, accompanied by armoured vehicles shooting their water cannons.

In the past, the sheer scale, power and ferocity of the riot police had easily overcome any challenge. This time, such tactics did thin the ranks of protesters, chasing off the elderly, or families who had cheerfully, even joyously marched to that point with their children. But a remaining hard core of unarmed youths not only endured the repeated onslaughts. Again and again they countercharged, hurling rocks, screaming in rage and seemingly oblivious to danger. In the course of the afternoon these protesters overran the bridge three times, only to be beaten back by Central Security's immensely superior firepower.

Hundreds were injured in this oddly Medieval-looking battle, many critically. In the end the police simply withdrew in silence, hungry, exhausted and unquestionably beaten. The equally exhausted protesters tramped across the bridge and into Tahrir Square, overturning and torching abandoned police vehicles. Into the night swarms of youths filled its rubble-strewn space, erecting barricades and shouting in savage pride through the lingering shroud of teargas.

The full toll of that afternoon's multiple battles is not yet known, and perhaps never will be. The number killed, many by gunshots, is certainly in the scores, the number injured in the thousands. It was through blood, bravery and self-sacrifice that Egypt's youth won their victory, a victory so complete that by nightfall Friday, uniformed police vanished entirely from streets all across Egypt. Some, such as traffic police, simply slipped out of uniforms and stayed at home. Others, such as guards at embassies and museums, appear to have received orders to vacate their posts.

In a police state such as Egypt, the sudden evaporation of security is a serious matter, particularly when accompanied by a mood of exultation mixed with raging fury. In some poorer districts of Cairo and on the more thinly populated outskirts of the vast city of 16m, mayhem ensued. Along with it came a rash of rumours that the looting, vandalism and banditry were at least in part staged, in a suspected bid to frighten citizens into staying at home, and into accepting whatever new order the remnants of the regime attempt to impose.

It is true that when army units first moved into the city centre they were mobbed by cheering crowds. Yet it remains unclear whether the army, which Mr Mubarak emerged from, and from whose ranks he packed every level of his administration, is acting as a truly neutral force. Will it seek simply to secure a political space for a new civilian government to emerge, which is what the vast majority of Egyptians demand? Will its top officers attempt to take power for themselves? Or does the army remain loyal to Mr Mubarak, and is it complicit in the hasty plan that the president and his henchmen have devised, through his appointment of his intelligence chief, General Omar Suleiman, as vice president and the former air force chief of staff, General Ahmed Shafik, as prime minister?

To many Egyptians Mr Mubarak's manoeuvre looks suspiciously like a smokescreen, designed to keep the levers of power "in the family" and allow him a graceful exit. General Suleiman, on taking oath before Mr Mubarak as the only vice president he has named after 30 years in power, conspicuously saluted to his boss before shaking his hand. But on the tanks rolling into Tahrir Square in a show of securing order, demonstrators still defiantly sprayed graffiti restating their demand: "Down With Mubarak".

Undistinguished in other ways, and clearly out of touch with his people, Mr Mubarak does have remaining qualities. He is tough, thick-skinned and stubborn. Perhaps I am still wrong, and it is not completely over. Maybe another battle will be needed, soon, before he falls for good.

(Photo credit: AFP)