Scores of injured pro-Morsi protesters streamed into overwhelmed hospitals this weekend following clashes with government forces.
Scenes of chaos came to Cairo's Rabaa Square in the early hours of Saturday morning as the month-long sit in support of deposed president Mohammed Morsi became the backdrop to the worst violence seen in Egypt since the 2011 revolution.
Grief-stricken family members and friends pressed themselves against the barred gates at the central field hospital in Rabaa Square as a steady stream of injured people were brought for treatment well into the afternoon.
By half past one, volunteers used mops and buckets to clean the fresh blood from the tiled floor of the hospital's makeshift morgue. 37 bodies wrapped in burial shrouds, most of them young men but also women and children, had passed out of the building earlier in the hour.
Doctors at the Rabaa Al Adawiyya Mosque field hospital have said 127 protesters were killed and some 4,500 injured in clashes with security forces. The Egyptian Ministry of Health reported a more conservative count of 65 dead and 269 wounded.
"The worst I have seen"
Directing proceedings with a loudspeaker in the centre of the main field hospital, where the volunteers and injured worked and lay exhausted and ashen-faced, Dr Asharaf el-Din explained, "We received maybe four or five hundred through this hospital in maybe three hours. In this place more than 50 have died. They were murdered.
"From five o'clock in the morning until eight thirty we were overwhelmed", continued el-Din. "We have many doctors here, but when many casualties came at one time we couldn't manage. We had to do just the best we could: administer first aid and then refer them to the hospitals.
"This is the worst I have seen", el-Din asserted. "The people here are innocent; they carry no weapons. The interior ministry are liars. We could not stop receiving casualties last night. Injuries came in the neck, in the head, in the chest and from the back." Jabbing his hand in the air emphatically to suggest the force he believes was used in the violence, he concluded, "They were shooting to kill".
Treating patients in the mosque
As the central field hospital was overwhelmed, a second overflow field hospital opened in the nearby Al Adawiyya Mosque which had previously acted as housing for female protesters.
The mosque still retains some of the hushed quiet of its normal function and prayers go on as the protesters supplicate themselves to the prayers of the Imam and the groans of the injured.
Here, amongst the dozens of bloodied casualties recovering and receiving treatment on the floor, Salahuddin Osman, a general and plastic surgeon from Mahala, who had been treating the worst of the casualties since one o'clock in the morning, was resting against a pillar.
"At six o'clock", he said, "we ran out of medical supplies. We had to block the entrance to the hospital and call for help at the central stage.
"When I arrived, the attack was very bad. I had never seen patients injured like this", he explained. "In the main field hospital we have only ten beds."
"I cried as I worked", he went on. "Mostly the casualties were young men between the ages of 20 and 30. One body was brought in with a bag. We opened it and inside we found a burial shroud. He had brought it with him."
A number of the doctors working at the mosque field hospital had arrived to attend to patients later in the morning when a call for volunteers was made.
One of them, Salam Mossi, a general practitioner also from Mahala was treating a fractured leg as he said: "Now we will stay here and treat our patients. We will try to reduce pain and suffering and we ask Allah to help us".
Similarly, Mahmoud Ahmed, a medical student from Al Azhar University, arrived in Rabaa to administer first aid after seeing reports of the shootings on his computer at 4am.
He was visibly shaken by his experience and said in a faltering voice, "I couldn't believe our army and our police would come at us like this. I returned at 8am which is when I saw the killings - just horrible things. I can't imagine why this happened."
When not if
At three o'clock in the afternoon, as those like Aatf Ishmael, who was receiving treatment for five puncture wounds, were still being seen to, 14-year-old Qassim Gamal Ahmed awoke.
Sitting with his sister Miriam, Qassim, from Sinai, explained how twelve hours earlier, at three o'clock in the morning, he had been caught up in the clashes as he went out to meet a returning march. Disorientated and vomiting from the inhalation of tear gas, the boy was rescued by a motorcyclist who took him to the central field hospital.
In front of him he kept the souvenirs of his ordeal, a tear gas canister and marbles, which were not, as they appeared, a child's toy, but had been used as shrapnel in the clashes.
As he recounted the events of the night before, he looked either at the ground or straight ahead, avoiding eye contact like many of the much older men in the hospital.
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Ibrahim Gemeah a teaching assistant from Al Azhar University who translated for him said: "I could not sleep because I thought as I tried to sleep what kind of creature would do what has happened? How can an Egyptian, a Muslim, do this to their own people? I will not sleep tonight either. I have to help my friends with whatever I can."
As dusk came, and the remaining protesters broke their Ramadan fast, many expected a repeat of the night before. In preparation, makeshift walls were built around the entrances to the square.
For many of those who remain in Rabaa, they do not wonder whether they will be cleared - for them it is just a question of when.
Egypt's Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim claimed on Saturday that "the interior ministry has never shot a bullet towards any Egyptian", alleging that clashes on the 6th October Bridge were instigated by the pro-Morsi demonstrators, who had critically wounded two police officers.
He added: "We hope that [the protesters] come to their senses and that they put an end to these protests in order to prevent bloodshed." Ibrahim explained that the sit in would be broken up soon although he did not intimate how.
