For 30 years, Hosni Mubarak was portrayed as the "Father of the Nation", a war hero, a man of peace and development – images shattered by a revolution, a historic trial and a hospital gurney.

Now, his fall from grace is being accentuated by ongoing news of his poor health - reports that have given fodder to the rumour mill.

But do Egyptians believe the news? Do they even care?

In Tahrir Square, where people gathered on Tuesday night to protest against recent moves by the ruling military council to expand its power, there was both celebration and scepticism.

I arrived at the headquarters of Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi shortly before 4am on Monday, when the campaign had said it would announce its final internal tally of the votes then being counted across Egypt.

The campaign’s headquarters sits in an impressive three-storey villa in the heart of central Cairo that faces, within a stone’s throw across the street, the imposing block-long edifice of the interior ministry, the institution perhaps most responsible for surveilling, arresting and abusing Brotherhood members throughout the movement’s 84-year history.

As I was crashing to make the deadline for my elections piece on the first day of voting, I trawled through the raw pictures the cameraman had collected from various polling stations looking for that classic woman-holding-up-purple-finger-and-smiling shot.

I didn't find it. There were lots of purple fingers (the ink stain you get showing you've voted) but nobody held theirs up to the cameraman with pride, the hallmark shot of previous election days.

There is a distinct lack of energy or enthusiasm surrounding this vote. It's safe to predict that most of those eligible to vote will not cast their ballots this time around - a mixture of apathy, confusion and active boycott.

Many pro-revolution Egyptians, particularly young people who have become disenchanted with the quickly derailing transition process, have refused to vote for either the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi or Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister.

Some have joined the apparently growing number of those who are not voting, either to boycott the process or because they have simply lost interest. Others, though, have taken the additional step of spoiling their ballots.

Maybe the heat had something to do with it: but as temperatures soared in Cairo there was little sense of the joy and excitement that had been evident in last years parliamentary elections, or even in the first round of the presidential vote.

There were again early morning queues of people before the polling stations opened.

But the talk among many of those waiting was not so much who was going to win but rather what sort of power the new president would have.

In just over a year Egyptians have cast votes in a referendum, parliamentary elections, and now two rounds over four days of presidential balloting.