He boasted that he had saved her from death: but it was not he who saved her. When she killed the god-Bull in the Knossos arena to avenge her friend Eoia who had been sacrificed to the Beast, she was sentenced to be burned at the stake. But Tammuzadad, a Babylonian who loved Dio, went to the stake in her place and Tutankhaton merely hid her in his ship and brought her to Egypt.
Before bringing Dio to the king in the new capital, Akhetaton, the City of the Sun, he settled her near Thebes, or Nut-Amon, in the country house of his distant relative Khnumhotep, formerly the chief superintendent of the granaries of Amon's temple.
Khnumhotep's estate was enclosed by high brick walls that formed an oblong quadrangle making it look like a fortress. Within it were granaries, cattle-yards, wine-presses, hay-lofts, barns and other buildings, vineyards and gardens divided into regular squares: kitchen garden, orchard, flower garden, woods of pine and other trees and a palm plantation with three ponds, one large and two small ones. Two high three-storied houses, a brick one for winter and a wooden one with a brick bottom storey for the summer, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the big pond.
Dio spent a couple of months in this quiet country place resting from all that had happened to her in Crete and learning Egyptian dances.
One afternoon, in the middle of winter, she was lying on carpets and cushions on the flat roof of the summer house, in a light trellised shelter supported by a row of cedar pillars, carved, gilded and brightly painted. She was looking at the sun in the dark, almost black-blue sky, so abysmally clear that it seemed there never had been, nor ever could be, a cloud in it. The sun of southern winter—of winter's summer—bright but not dazzling, warm but not scorching, was like the smile of a child asleep. Half closing her eyes, she looked straight at it and the light broke into a diamond rainbow like a tear on the eyelashes.
"Ra the Sun, the Sun Ra—no better name than Ra could be invented for the sun: Ra cleaves the darkness with a sword," thought Dio.
The winter swallows cleaved the radiant darkness of the blue with the sword of their whirring flight: they sang to the sun, crying and shrilling with joy: 'Ra'!
Everything was good and joyous. There was goodness and joy in the air, pure and dry as nowhere else in the world, giving long life to the living and making the dead incorruptible, air so divinely light that one breathing it for the first time felt as though a stone which had lain on his breast all his life had suddenly been lifted and he understood for the first time what a joy it was to breathe.
Close by stood a monstrous tree, covered with thorns and prickles, with dull leaden-coloured thick joints that seemed full of poison, and a huge blood-red flower like the open mouth of a snake. But the tree, too, was good: the fragrant flowers breathed of the sweetness of paradise—the joy of Ra.
Beyond the talc-like streak of the shallow, wintry Nile the hills of Amenti, the Eternal West, yellow as lion's hair and honeycombed with innumerable tombs, lay drowsy in the rosy haze of sunshine. But even death here was good: the souls of the departed, like bees, collect the honey of death—the eternal life.