The leader of the choir sat in front playing a high seven-stringed harp, while the others, clapping their hands in time, sang in nasal voices but with remarkable intensity of feeling. They looked straight at the sun with their blind eyes but, not seeing the god of light, Ra, they glorified the god of warmth, Shu:
"Shu our Father, Shu our Mother!
Weeping we have lost our sight.
We praise the sun out of the night.
Have mercy on us, poor blind men!"
And when they finished the melancholy song they began a joyous one:
Glorious is thy rising in the East,
Lord and giver of life, Aton
Thou sendest thy rays and darkness flees,
And the earth is filled with joy.
The roof of the temple was flooded with sunshine, but the seven courts below were still in the shadow and only the high tops of the pylons were gilded by the sun; the bright-coloured pennants on the masts above them fluttered gaily in the morning breeze, white doves flapped their wings joyfully and winter swallows, in their whistling flight, cleft the air singing to the sun, shouting and shrilly calling with joy: 'Ra!'
The king mounted the pyramidal altar once more and threw a handful of incense into the fire. The flame blazed up, turning pale in the sun, clouds of rosy-white smoke rose in the air and immediately similar clouds rose from the three hundred and sixty-five altars in the seven courts below: anyone seeing it from a distance would have thought the city was on fire.
Slowly raising his arms to the sky, as though offering an invisible sacrifice, the king proclaimed:
"All there is between the eastern hills and the western hills—fields, waters, villages, plants, animals, men—all is brought as sacrifice to thee, Aton, the living Sun, so that thy kingdom may be on earth as it is in heaven, O Father!"
The black harvest of human heads bent down like the harvest corn in the wind. Trumpets, flutes, citherns, harps, lyres, timbrels, cymbals, kinnors combined with the thousands of voices into one deafening chorus.
"Sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord, the earth and all that therein is! Give unto the Lord glory and honour, oh ye tribes of the earth! Let the heavens rejoice and the earth sing in triumph! Rejoice, Joy of the Sun, the only begotten Son of the Sun, Akhnaton Uaenra!"