"No," Pentaur answered, understanding again that 'he' meant the king. "He knows that God is light, but he does not know that darkness and light go together...."
He knelt down and Dio knelt beside him; he began to pray and she repeated after him:
"Glory to thee, who dwellest in darkness,
Amon, the Hidden,
Lord of the silent,
Help of the humble,
Saviour of those in hell!
When they cry aloud to thee,
Thou comest to them from afar,
Thou sayest to them 'I am here!'"
They bowed down to the ground and Dio felt that the hair on her head moved with awe: 'He is here!'
They left the temple through the eastern gates where the litter was waiting for them. They got into it and were carried to the small temple Gem-Aton—Sun's Radiance—which had only just been built by King Akhnaton.
It had taken a thousand years to build Amon's temple of huge blocks of rock, and this one had been built quickly of small stones; Amon's temple was dark and mysterious, and this one was all open and sunny. There were no divine images in it except Aton's disc, with rays like hands descending from it.
They entered one of the porticos, on the wall of which there was a bas-relief of King Akhnaton making a sacrifice to the Sun god.
Dio looked at it dumb foundered. Who was it? What was it? A human being? No, it was some unearthly creature in human form. Neither a man nor a woman, neither an old man nor a child; a eunuch, a decrepit still-born baby. The arms and legs were so thin that they seemed to be nothing but bone; narrow childish shoulders and wide, well-covered hips; a big belly; a huge head shaped like a vegetable-marrow, bent down under its own weight on a long thin neck, flexible like the stem of a flower; a receding forehead, a drooping chin, a fixed stare and the smile of a madman.
Dio gazed at this face, trying in vain to recall something. All of a sudden she remembered.
In the Charuk Palace near Thebes, where Akhnaton was born and spent his childhood, she had seen his sculptured head: a boy looking like a girl; an oval, egg-shaped face, childishly, girlishly charming, quiet and gentle as that of the god whose name is Quiet-Heart.