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The lines, steeped in loyalty and grief, started on Wednesday and stretched through the night at a military academy Mr. Chávez once attended, where he will lie in state until his funeral on Friday.

Many saluted the president's remains. Others crossed themselves. Government television broadcast the endless passage of mourners. One elderly woman beat her breast and nearly fainted. Parents and guards in dark suits picked up small children to give them a look.

"He had his beret on, his red beret, and he looked as if he were sleeping," said Luis Cabrera Aguirre, a retired rear admiral who served as an adviser to Mr. Chávez and was among the first group of officials permitted access.

He said that Mr. Chávez's head and torso were visible through a panel of glass at the coffin's upper half. The closed lower half was draped with the Venezuelan flag. Admiral Cabrera Aguirre said that Mr. Chávez's face and especially his neck appeared a little swollen or puffy, but that otherwise, "he looked just like he did in life."

Mr. Chávez, who was nearly omnipresent here in his 14-year rule, was not seen in Venezuela since leaving for Cuba for his fourth and last cancer surgery on Dec. 11. Even after the announcement of his return, in a pre-dawn flight on Feb. 18, he remained out of sight, while officials said he continued treatment at a Caracas military hospital. His death was announced Tuesday afternoon. He was 58 years old.

Conflicting accounts of his final days were beginning to emerge.

On Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported that a government source said that Mr. Chávez's health deteriorated rapidly after he held a bedside meeting with government ministers over the weekend. The source said that, with the cancer having spread to his lungs, Mr. Chávez had fallen into a coma on Monday, and that he died the next day of respiratory failure.

However, the head of Venezuela's presidential guard, Gen. José Ornella, told The Associated Press late Wednesday that Mr. Chávez died of a major heart attack.

General Ornella said that he was with Mr. Chávez at the moment of his death, and that among his final words were, "I don't want to die. Please don't let me die," the general said, adding, "because he loved his country, he sacrificed himself for his country."

"He couldn't speak, but he said it with his lips," General Ornella said.

Over his final weeks of seclusion, the opposition clamored for Mr. Chávez to make an appearance, and even some of his supporters began to question why he was unable to show himself.

On Thursday, lying in state, Mr. Chávez was finally reunited with his people once more.

Despite a rocky economic record and strings of broken or half-filled promises during his 14 years in office, the fundamental legacy of Mr. Chávez was intangible: he has changed the way Venezuelans think about themselves and their country.

Just as they did on Thursday, when people lined up for one last glimpse of their leader, enormous crowds thronged the streets on Wednesday to watch Mr. Chávez's modest brown wood coffin, covered in a Venezuelan flag, being carried through the capital, Caracas.

As it wound its way from the hospital where he died to the military academy where he studied as a young, unheralded cadet, hundreds of thousands of mourners — many dressed in his movement's characteristic red shirt — chanted, cried, tossed flowers or held up cellphones to photograph the coffin as it passed.

The procession on Wednesday stretched for miles, a river of red with drivers and motorcyclists trailing behind in an impromptu cortege.

"Chávez opened our eyes," said Carlos Pérez, 58, a cookie salesman who drove into town with his wife and took part in the caravan. "We used to be stepped on. We felt humiliated."

Conditions for the poor have certainly improved over the last decade and a half, and the ranks of the poor have shrunk. Government programs have given poor people access to low-cost food and free health care and have knocked down barriers to higher education, though many of those programs are plagued by inefficiencies and long waits.

Mr. Chávez mined and deepened the divide between the masses of Venezuela's poor and the middle and upper classes, presiding over a bitterly divided country. He mercilessly taunted and insulted those who disagreed with him, calling them fascists, good-for-nothings, traitors, oligarchs, reactionaries and puppets of the United States.

And he warned ceaselessly of enemies, inside and outside the country, who he said were poised to take away from the poor the benefits they had received under his government.

According to the Constitution, a new presidential vote must be called within 30 days. The vice president, Nicolás Maduro, 50, became the acting president, and already he appears likely to face a Chávez rival who had put in a strong performance in previous polls.

Reuters quoted opposition sources as saying on Wednesday that they have agreed to back Henrique Capriles, 40, the centrist governor of Miranda State who garnered 44 percent of the vote but lost to Mr. Chávez in last year's election.