A battle played out below, riot police versus protesters, maybe 100 versus 300, respectively, but one side with body armor, helmets, shields, clubs and guns for shooting gas, rubber bullets and pellets. A man with a tear-gas rifle took a rock square to the helmet and began shooting the burning-hot metal canisters straight at protesters’ heads and torsos. Elsewhere one officer broke chunks of concrete into smaller, easier-to-throw pieces, while another collected them in a basket so gently it seemed as if he were gathering eggs.

For all the stone-throwing and tear gas, it seemed more like a protest than a revolution until we heard the sound of muffled chanting and then strained to see, through the haze of gas, thousands of Egyptian civilians making their way to the fight. It is hard to put into context, coming from a country not governed by laws that allow the arrest of groups of more than three people, what it means to see this kind of crowd in Egypt. Two days before, we followed 80 or so protesters around a poor neighborhood, everyone scrambling at the first sign of police. But here, now, were thousands, in just one of several protests in Alexandria and dozens across Egypt.

The emergency room at the general hospital didn’t look like an emergency room. It looked like a squalid waiting area with rubber-covered mattresses. Two men had been shot through their thighs. Another man had been shot in the upper arm, and the blood was seeping through his bandage. But it was the finger I could not forget: a man’s finger had been hit by a bullet and was coated with congealed blood. It jutted at a crazy angle. Hands are said to be the most expressive part of the human body after the face, a notion I never really understood until I stared at this man’s finger, untreated and unbandaged because so many more serious wounds required treatment first.

The morgue was worse, not so much because of the dead but because of the living come to claim them. The relatives of a young man who had been shot dragged us in, saying: “You have to see. You have to tell people.” A man slumped against the wall — a tall man with a mustache who seemed as if he was probably a skittish joker under normal circumstances. He said: “They went out. They had no guns. They were peaceful protesters, and they killed them.” Then he began to shake and to sob. He cried more intensely than I have ever seen a grown man cry. Our interpreter, Alia Mossallam, 29, was normally a buoyant person — at the clashes Friday she cheerfully brought out vinegar to help with the tear gas the way someone surprises the group with a bottle of Prosecco at a picnic, but she came undone when a mother asked her opinion about her dead son, “Isn’t he beautiful, just like I said?” Then the woman began making requests of her son, as if he were still alive: “Speak to me in your beautiful voice again. Tell me you are happy to see me.”

This was a result of the protests. There were 13 dead demonstrators in that one room. There were at least two more such morgues in Alexandria. There were dead in Cairo and in Suez. Where else? Were there dead people we would never learn about in the desert? Was Sobhi Saleh — a grandfather and lawyer who spent five years in Parliament until the winds shifted and he was once again the kind of person who could simply be kidnapped — among them?

At the security base, Saleh and the other brothers overheard two of the guards talking about the violent turn the demonstrations had taken. It made them all the more concerned that they might be killed. One of their number had already suffered what he thought was a heart attack. They banged and kicked and raised a great clamor until a doctor was brought. He survived.