It used to happen in the autumn when she was hunting on Mount Ida in Crete that on a bright, sunny day mist suddenly crept up from the mountain gorges, and the molten gold of the forest, the blue sky, the blue sea grew dim and grey and the sun itself looked out of the fog like a dead fish's eye. "What if the Joy of the Sun, Akhnaton, also looks at me with the eyes of a dead fish?" she thought.
She danced for him every day, and he admired her. "Only a dancer—I will never be anything more for him," she said to herself, with a grey fog of boredom in her mind.
She stood for hours behind the king's throne, raising and lowering with a slow, measured movement, in accordance with the ancient ritual, the big ostrich-feather fan on a long pole. Sometimes when left alone with her he turned suddenly and smiled at her with such appealing tenderness that her heart stood still at the thought that he would speak and the barrier would fall. But he said nothing or spoke about trifles: asked whether she was tired and would like to sit down; or wondered at the quickness with which she had learned to wave the fan—an art more difficult than it appeared; or, with jesting courtesy, blessed the stupid old custom of keeping cool in winter and fanning away the non-existent flies because it gave him a chance of being with her.
One day Dio was reluctantly—she did not like talking about it—telling the queen who questioned her how she had killed the god Bull on the Knossos arena to avenge a human victim, her best friend, Eoia; how she had been sentenced to be burned and was saved by Tammuzadad, the Babylonian, who went to the stake in her place.
The king was present, too, and seemed to listen attentively. When Dio finished there were tears in the queen's eyes, but the king, as though coming to himself suddenly, glanced at them both with a strange quiet smile, and muttered hurriedly and excitedly, repeating the same words, as he often did:
"You mustn't shave it off! You mustn't shave it off!"
It was so inappropriate that Dio was alarmed and wondered if he were ill. But the queen smiled calmly and said, laying her hand on Dio's head:
"No, certainly not: it would be a pity to shave such beautiful hair!"
It was only then that Dio remembered that she had asked the queen a day or two ago whether she ought to shave her head and wear a wig, as the custom in Egypt was.
After saying these sudden words the king went out and the queen, as though apologizing for him, said that he had not been very well lately.