Khnum went up to the pit, bent down to the window and heard quiet singing.
"Glory be to thee, Aton, the living and only God,
Who hast created the heavens and the secrets thereof!
Thou art in heaven and here upon earth is thy son
Akhnaton, the joy of the Sun!"
The man in the pit must have caught sight of Khnum, for he suddenly sang aloud and, it seemed to Khnum, with insolent defiance:
"When thou descendest beyond the sky
The dead come to life in thy life;
Thou givest their nostrils the breath of life,
And the air to their stifled throats,
Glorifying thee from their narrow tombs
The dead stretch forth their hands,
And they who are at rest rejoice."
Khnum walked away and, returning to the shelter by the big pond, sat down in his old place beside Nibituia who was still wrapping up her beetles. Inioteph began reading a new endless account of sacks of corn. Khnum felt dreary. He was conscious of the ominous weight in his right side, under the last rib; he suffered from his liver. His father had died of the same complaint at the age of eighty—"Perhaps I, too, will die before I have fulfilled my span of days," thought Khnum.
He liked to have something of his tomb dowry brought to him every day. To-day they brought him the sacred Beetle, Kheper, made of lapis-lazuli.
The great beetle of the Sun, Ra-Kheper, rolls along the sky its great ball as the dung beetle rolls its small ball along the earth. The Sun is the great heart of the world; the human heart is a small sun. This was why they put inside the mummy, in the place of the heart which was taken out, the Sun beetle Kheper with a hieroglyphic inscription—the prayer of the dead at the Last Judgment: "Heart of my birth, heart of my mother, my earthly heart, do not rise against me, do not bear witness against me!"
"I shouldn't wonder if mine did rise against me," thought Khnum, recalling Yubra, and he smiled: "Extraordinary! Fancy comparing the sun to a dung beetle!"
He recalled another prayer of the dead: "May my soul walk every day in the garden beside my pond; may it flutter like a bird among the branches of my trees; may it rest in the shade of my sycamore; may it rise up to heaven and come down to earth unhindered."
"And perhaps it is all nonsense," he thought as he used to think in his youth. "A man dies—like a water bubble bursting—and nothing is left of him. And, indeed, it may be as well, for what if one grew bored there also?"