As he spoke, a rebel approached him, saying he was not authorized to speak.

In a sign of the intensity of the fighting this week in the capital, 40 bodies, many in advanced states of decomposition, were piled up in an abandoned hospital in the Abu Salim neighborhood, until Friday the preserve of the Qaddafi forces. Most of the fighters were darker skinned than most Libyans, a sign, rebels there said, that they may have been recruited from sub-Saharan Africa. The rebels have frequently accused the Qaddafi government of using mercenaries but have not offered convincing proof.

The halls of the hospital were a chaos of beds and unplugged machines, and its floors were painted with blood. A medical technician said that three doctors had been on duty during the fighting in recent days, and that they had been unable to cope.

It was difficult to ascertain the fates of the dead men, who were lying on gurneys nested by maggots in a hospital room and the morgue. The relatives of one victim, Abdul Raouf Al Rashdi, a 33-year-old police officer, said he had been killed by a sniper several days earlier in the Hay Andalus neighborhood.

Across the jittery capital, residents running short of electricity and supplies but seeming quieter than in past days began pulling back the cloak of secrecy imposed by Colonel Qaddafi’s mercurial rule. Scores of pickups and cars carrying rebel fighters and the curious careened into Bab al-Aziziya.

Bombed in 1986 by the United States military, the house had become a shrine of sorts to Colonel Qaddafi’s leadership. Walls were covered with graffiti, scrawled over the years by visitors and delegations from Ghana, Kenya, Russia and elsewhere.

Days after rebels from Misurata and other Libyan towns stormed the compounds, new slogans had gone up.

“Libya is free,” one read. “Misurata is steadfast,” said another.

“This is our history, ” said Rida Said, 28, a resident of Tripoli, as he walked through the house. “Every tyrant has his end.”