"I know you love me, dear boy," Merira said, kissing him on the head. "There, that's enough talking, let us go. Where is the place of the fire?"
Walking a few steps they came to a sandy open space—the big pond. Beside it, Maki's birch tree, buried in the sand, showed a bit of the broken white stem.
As he passed it, Merira for some reason recalled Dio, and he suddenly wanted to kiss the white slender stem, rosy in the light of the setting sun. But he felt shy of Horus: the young man might again imagine something. He merely slowed his pace and touched the stem as though it were a living hand stretched out to him from the earth, and for the first time after many days he smiled a real and not a jeering smile.
Passing the pond they came to a small sandy hillock, with charred planks and beams sticking out here and there. These were the ruins of the burnt palace—the tomb of Akhnaton and Dio.
"Was it here he perished?" Merira asked.
"Yes," Horus replied. "This is a holy place to them: they come here to worship the Criminal."
On the top of the hill two charred cross-beams, with a brass hoop at the top—probably a bolt that had been curled in the fire—stood out clearly against the red evening sky, like the hieroglyphic of life, the looped cross Ankh.
"What is this? Did it happen of itself in the fire?" Merira asked, pointing to it.
"No, the Criminal's worshippers must have made it," Horus answered, and calling one of the soldiers of the bodyguard, who were standing by the hillock, he told him to take away the cross.
The man climbed up, drew the poles out of the sand, broke them and flinging them on the ground, trampled upon them.