"Rejoice, Akhnaton, Joy of the Sun!"
Besides beggars and petitioners there were, in the crowd, many sick, blind, halt and lame, because people believed that everyone who touched the king's clothes or upon whom his shadow fell was healed.
"Defend us, save us, have mercy, O Lord!" they called to him, like the souls in hell to the god who came down to them.
The king ascended the steps to the tabernacle and sat on his throne. Dio stood behind him with the fan.
The guards admitted the petitioners through a narrow passage between two low walls of stone along the foot of the stairs. Two Nubian soldiers with naked swords guarded the door in the middle of the wall adjoining the staircase. Approaching this door every petitioner prostrated himself, sniffed the ground, placed a wooden or a clay tablet with his petition on the bottom step of the stairs, where there was a heap of them already, and passed on.
Everyone was admitted into the Court, but a special permit was required for entering the passage leading to the king's tabernacle. Mahu, the chief of the guards, watched over everything.
Suddenly there was a disturbance. A petitioner tried to get through the little door. The soldiers crossed their swords in front of him but he went straight ahead, stretching his arm towards the king and screaming as though he were being cut to pieces:
"Defend, save, have mercy, Joy of the Sun!"
Not daring to kill a man before the king, the soldiers lifted their swords and the man, flattening himself on the ground and wriggling like an eel, crept between them and began crawling up the stairs. Mahu rushed at him and seized him by the collar, but the man wriggled out and went on screaming and crawling towards the king.
Mahu made a sign to the lancers of the bodyguard who stood two in a row, along the stairs. They closed their ranks and lowered their spears. But the man crawled on.