During King Akhnaton's reign the place fell into decay: the holy enclosures had been destroyed, the treasuries robbed, the sanctuaries closed, the priests driven away and the gods desecrated.
Having reached by boat the holy Road of the Rams, Dio and her nurse Zenra, stepped into a litter and Pentaur walked by their side.
Turning to the right into a by-road to the sanctuary of Mut, they entered it through the northern gates.
The sacred lake of the god Khonsu, Osiris the Moon, shone, crescent-shaped, with a silvery brilliance. The rosy granite of the obelisks, the black basalt of the colossi, the yellow sandstone of the pylons, the green tops of the palms, bathed in the molten gold of the afternoon sun, were mirrored in the water with such clearness that one could see every feather in the rainbow-coloured Falcons of the sun at the top of the pylons and every hieroglyphic in the multi-coloured inscriptions on the yellow sandstone; it was as though there were another world down there, the reverse of this one, exactly like it and yet quite different.
By the shores of the lake some sandpits had been dug, probably in order to defile the holy waters, and bricklayers were getting clay from them. The lake in those places was shallow, its slimy bottom could be seen and the stagnant water in the pools had a dull rainbow glitter on the surface. A huge statue of the god Amon, of dark-red sandstone, had been thrown near by, face downwards, and an ox, standing knee-deep in water, was scratching its mud-coated side against the sharp end of one of the two feathers in the god's tiara; the smell of the pig-sty came from the animal.
Next to the pits was a sanctuary of immemorial antiquity consecrated to two goddess-mothers, Hekit the Frog, and Tuart the Hippopotamus.
At the beginning of the world the divine Frog, the midwife, crawled out of the primaeval slime and at once began to help all women labouring of child; she helped the birth of Khonsu-Osiris, the son of God; she helped every dead man to rise again and be born into eternal life. Tuart, the Hippopotamus, was as efficient a help in labour.
The copper doors of the sanctuary were locked and sealed, but in the entry the two goddesses were hidden from the king's spies in two vaulted niches in the wall, behind torn curtains. The huge frog made of green jade with kind and intelligent round eyes of yellow glass, was sitting on its cubical throne. The pig-faced Hippopotamus, in a woman's wig, was ferociously showing its teeth; made of grey obsidian, with hanging breasts and monstrous belly, it was standing on its hind legs, holding in its forepaws the sign of eternal life—the looped cross Ankh.
A little girl of twelve, an Ethiopian, in the last stage of pregnancy, had placed a wreath of lotus flowers round the neck of the goddess and, kneeling before her, was ardently praying with childish tears for easy travail.
Zenra wanted to sacrifice to the mother-goddesses two turtle doves for Dio, that the virgin might at last become a mother.