Several buses packed with masked, flag-waving students on the roof careered towards a squat PT76 tank on which 15 armed soldiers were standing at a junction beside Jakarta's stock exchange yesterday evening.
As they came alongside, the students cheered wildly and waved the Indonesian colours of red and white. The soldiers smiled, gave thumbs-up signs and waved them on.
Such scenes were repeated many times on the roads around the Indonesian parliament yesterday as hundreds of coaches ferried students to and from the legislative buildings.
It was the only part of the city centre which had not been sealed off by the army to prevent a mass demonstration at the National Monument, a phallic golden flame atop a pillar, in a park which is bordered by the presidential palace and government ministries.
High coils of silvery new barbed wire had been drawn across all the surrounding avenues before first light. They were backed by rows of tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
An officer told me in fluent English: "Sorry, sir, my orders are that no one gets through." The students' enthusiasm was undiminished, however, as they left their campuses for the parliament.
They still believed that the military could be won over to their side in the campaign to topple President Suharto, despite the generals' decision on Monday to back the 76-year-old leader's bid to stay in office for a few more months. Why else would they be allowed to occupy the rarely-used parliament building and its lawns and ornamental bushes?
Tens of thousands of students converged on the "liberated" parliament grounds in jubilant mood. Stewards at the gate formed a narrow corridor to keep out anyone without student cards or special identification.
The precautions were prudent. Among a big crowd of onlookers who spilled across the highway during the day were thieves who snatched a wallet and a mobile telephone from two separate journalists.
But their greatest fear was that spies and provocateurs might infiltrate their ranks. Late last night I saw two men, one in a blue striped shirt and the other in Hawaiian attire, being escorted away by parliament police after they were caught in a room burning papers and could not identify themselves.
"Spies!" shouted the students as they passed through the main lobby. The students are highly organised, despite apparently chaotic scenes. As each university contingent arrived yesterday, they lined up inside the gates in distinguishing blazers, stretched out their banner calling for Gen Suharto to resign, and marched past the ornamental fountains to the cheers of students milling around or sitting in front of the nine-storey building.
Inside, where crude banners and slogans hang everywhere, students held mock debates in the legislative chamber, set up sleeping quarters in spacious offices, or sat around singing to the beat of empty plastic bottles.
Teenaged students in head-bands jammed the lifts. Lawyers in black cloaks and white collars, and contingents of doctors, nurses and businessmen, came to mingle and lend support. The main floors were last night filthy, and mounds of cardboard and plastic were becoming fire hazards.
But the building has not been trashed. A photographic display behind glass in the lobby featuring President Suharto has been left intact.
Important new arrivals were mobbed as conquering heroes. When opposition leaders Dr Amien Rais and Mr Elim Salim turned up yesterday morning it took them half an hour to reach the third-floor press room, where they almost disappeared under a mass of microphones, tape recorders and sweating bodies.
Dr Rais, a diminutive figure with sad, brown eyes, looked shattered after his long night, when he had first called on his millions of Islamic followers to protest at the National Memorial, then appealed to them on national television at dawn to stay at home as the army had taken control of the city centre.
"We will flex our muscles again," he said. He had lost the day on tactics but "the big difference between strategy and tactics is that strategy is how the war is won, and tactics is only how to win a battle." At that point it seemed Mr Suharto had won the day by preventing the big demonstration. Neither Dr Rais nor the student leaders appeared sure what future strategy should be.
The groundswell against Mr Suharto on Monday, when the parliament speaker, Mr Harmoko, called for him to step down, seemed to have lost momentum. The mood changed dramatically last night when an excited student came from the upper storeys and told everyone in the crowded foyer through a loud hailer that Mr Harmoko had renewed his demand and had been joined by the parliamentary faction of Indonesia's ruling Golkar party, which had supported Gen Suharto for 32 years.
Cheers echoed from outside, where lightning flashes illuminated groups of students sitting in a sea of discarded plastic bottles. News spread that Mr Harmoko and leaders of the four parliament factions had agreed to issue a call on Monday for a special session to depose the President if he did not step down by tomorrow.
Mr Salim, a former minister and respected scholar who is tipped as a future president, had told the students earlier that Mr Suharto's proposal to resign could drag on for two years. He supported a continued sit-in by the students, he said.
"Might this lead to a Tiananmen Square situation, where troops remove students by force?" I asked him.
"We already had our shooting of students last Tuesday," he replied, referring to the killing of four students at Trisakti University, which was followed by mass rioting and arson and 500 deaths on what is now called "grey Thursday".
But the crushing of the Chinese student movement in Beijing in 1989 was on everyone's mind. Dr Rais told us that a general who had warned him the night before to call off the big demonstration said he did not care "if an accident like Tiananmen will take place".
The secretary of the Indonesian National Student Movement, Mr Achmad Baskara, said the students would stay in the parliament complex as long as it took for Gen Suharto to quit. And he added: "If there is repressive action [by the military], we think the riots will happen again and we will have a Tiananmen Square in Indonesia."