Khnumhotep was an honest and god-fearing man.
He welcomed Dio in his house as though she had been a member of his own family, not because she was under the patronage of Tutankhaton, who had power and influence at court, but because exiles were under the protection of the immortal gods. While he was the chief superintendent of Amon's granaries he might have taken bribes like everyone else; but he did not. When Amon's sanctuary was closed and Khnumhotep lost his post, he might have received another and a better one, had he been false to the faith of his fathers; but he remained true to it. At the time of famine he might have sold at an exorbitant price the corn from his estates in the Lake country, Miuer, which had not suffered from drought, but he sold it cheaper than usual and gave away one granary-full to the starving.
He lived in this way because he remembered the wisdom of his fathers: "a man lives after death and all his works with him"; he remembered the scales with the heart of the dead man upon one of them, and the lightest feather of the goddess Maat, Truth, upon the other,—the sharp eye of the god Tot, the Measurer, watching the pointer of the scales.
In his youth he doubted whether the short day of life was not worth more than the dark eternity and whether those who said "a man dying is like a bubble bursting on the water—nothing is left" were not right. But as he grew older he felt more and more clearly—grasped it, as it were, as a hand grasps a wrapped-up object—that there was something beyond the grave, and that since no one knew anything about it for certain, the simplest and wisest thing to do was to believe as his fathers had done.
Khnumhotep, or Khnum, was over sixty, but he did not consider himself old, hoping to live the full measure of man's life—a hundred and ten years.
Some forty years before he began building for himself 'an eternal house,' a tomb in the Hills of the West, Amenti, also according to the ancient commandment 'prepare a fine tomb for thyself and remember it every day of thy life, for thou knowest not the hour of thy death.' For forty years he had been digging in the rock a deep cave with subterranean halls and passages, adorning it like a wedding chamber and collecting in it a dowry for his soul, the bride. He did it all cheerfully according to the saying, 'coffin, thou hast been made for a feast; grave, thou hast been dug for merriment.'
On the afternoon when Dio and Pentaur were talking on the flat roof of Khnum's summer house, Khnum was sitting in a light wooden shelter, supported by four pillars, near the winter house at the other end of the pond. He sat in a carved ebony chair that had a leather cushion and a footstool; his wife Nibituia sat beside him on a small folding chair.
Both were dressed in robes of finely pleated white flaxen material, not too transparent, as became elderly people; hers was narrow and reached to the ankles and his was wider and shorter; their feet were bare. The brick floor of the shelter was covered with mats for warmth and a servant boy was holding in readiness papyrus slippers.
Khnum took the wig off his closely cropped grey hair and hung it on a wooden stand close by; men took off their wigs like caps; but Nibituia's huge black wig, shiny as though it had been lacquered, with two thick twisted cords at the sides, rose above her head, pushing the ears forward and making the old woman's wrinkled face look like a bat's.
Khnum was so tall that his wife, who was short, looked almost a dwarf beside him; straight, spare, bony, he had a face that seemed carved of hard brown wood and had a sullen, angry look; but when he smiled it grew very kind.