The king, the queen, the princesses and the heir apparent—only those in whose veins flowed the blood of the Sun—went up to the top of the pyramid, and then the king alone ascended the platform where the fire was burning.
People thronged in the seven courts of the temple down below, on the pylons, the staircases, the roofs of both temples; it was like a living mountain of people and the highest point of it was one man—the king.
"I come to glorify Thy rays, living Aton, one eternal God!" he said stretching out his arms to the Sun.
"Praise be to Thee, living Aton, who hast made the heavens and the mysteries thereof," answered the high priest Merira, who stood at the base of the pyramid. "Thou art in heaven and Thy beloved son Akhnaton is on earth!"
"I show the way of life to all of you, generations that have been and are to come," the king continued. "Give praise to the God Aton, the living God, and ye shall live! Gather together and come, all ye people of salvation; turn to the Lord, all ye ends of the earth, for Aton is God and there is none other God but He."
"The God Aton is the only God and there is none other God but He," answered the innumerable crowds down below, and the call of thousands was like the roar of the sea.
The moon had set, the stars were hardly visible. The wind dropped, the clouds cleared away, the sky was almost grey. And suddenly a giant ray, shaped like a pyramid with its base on the ground and its top in the zenith, appeared in the morning twilight and white opalescent lights, like sheet lightning, flickered across it—the Light of the Zodiac, the forerunner of the Sun.
The king, with his wife, daughters and the heir apparent, descended from the pyramid altar and went into a painted and gilded tent that stood at the eastern side of it.
There was a sound of flutes and a ringing of citherns, then came subdued singing and a slow procession of priestesses, carrying a coffin on their shoulders, mounted the flat roof of the temple by an outer staircase. A dead body wrapped up in a white winding sheet lay in the coffin. The priestesses placed the coffin on the dark purple carpet before the king's tent.
Two mourners came forward, one stood at the head and the other at the feet of the corpse, weeping and calling to each other like the two sister goddesses Isis and Neftis at the tomb of Osiris, their brother. Meanwhile the others, naked but for a narrow black belt below the navel and a black 'bandage of shame' between the legs, were dancing the wild, ancient, magical dance of Osiris-Bata, the rising god, the vegetating ear of corn: standing in a row on one leg they raised the other leg all at once, lowered it and then raised it again, higher and higher each time, so that at last the toes went up higher than the heads.