"Well, how did you like our crocodile mother?" Pentaur asked Dio with a smile when they came out of the portico, leaving Zenra behind and telling the litter to go on.
"I liked her very much," Dio answered, smiling also.
"Does it make you laugh?"
"No. Your Mut and our Ma is the same Heavenly Mother who blesses all the creatures of the earth."
"How then could you...." he began and broke off. But she understood 'how then could you have killed the god Beast?'
"Our secret wisdom teaches," he said hurriedly, in order to hide her confusion and his own, "that animals are nearer to God than men, plants are nearer to God than animals and the dust of the ground—Mother Earth—is nearer to God than plants; a mass of flaming dust, the sun, is the heart of the world—God."
"Doesn't he know this?" Dio asked.
"No," Pentaur answered, guessing that she was speaking of King Akhnaton, "if he knew he would not desecrate the Mother."
"Perhaps there is something that I, a childless virgin, don't know either," Dio thought.
From the sanctuary of Mut they walked towards the Temple of Amon, along the sacred road of the Rams, huge creatures of black granite placed in a row on either side of the pathway. On the top of the head between the horns that curled downwards, each ram had the sun disc of Amon Ra, and between the doubled up front legs a tiny mummy of King Amenhotep, Akhnaton's father: the god-beast was embracing the dead king, carrying him, as it were, into eternal life.