Guards were standing by the closed and sealed gates. People going past knelt down and kissed the dust of the holy flagstones, praying in a whisper; they would be thrown into prison for calling on the name of Amon aloud.
Dio showed the chief of the guards the ring with Tutankhaton's seal and he let her and Pentaur through the side door of the gates.
They entered the inner court that had rows of such gigantic columns, shaped like sheaves of papyrus, that it was hard to believe they were the work of human hands: it seemed as though the Great Spirit had piled up these everlasting stones as a mute praise to himself, the Unutterable.
From the yard they came into a covered antechamber, where the daylight came sparsely from narrow windows right under the ceiling. There was sunshine in the yard, but here it was half dark already and the thick forest of columns, saturated with the fragrance of incense like a real forest smelling of resin, seemed all the more huge in the twilight. And it was quiet as in a forest; only up at the top one could hear a faint tapping that sounded like woodpeckers. "Knock-Knock-Knock!"—and there was stillness, and then again: "Knock-knock-knock!"
Dio raised her eyes and saw masons hung up in hammocks on long strings, like spiders on cobwebs, hammering on the walls and the pillars up above.
"What are they doing?" she asked.
"Effacing Amon's name," Pentaur answered with a smile. Dio smiled, too; the knocking seemed to her absurd: how could one efface the name of the Unutterable?
As they went further into the temple the walls narrowed down, the ceilings grew lower, darker and more menacing, and at last an almost complete darkness enveloped them; only somewhere in the far distance a lamp was burning dimly. That was the Holy of Holies—Sehem, the tabernacle, cut out in a block of red granite, where in the old days a golden statuette of god Amon, a foot high, had been kept behind linen draperies—the sails of the holy boat. Now Sehem was empty.
A narrow passage led from it to another tabernacle where in the past Amon's great Ram, the sacred Animal—the living heart of the temple—lay on a couch of purple in clouds of the ever-burning incense. But now this tabernacle too was empty; people said that a dead dog's bones had been thrown into it to defile the holy place.
"He does not know God's darkness either?" Dio asked.