"And perhaps on our Mount Ida the wind is howling, the pines creak and the snow is falling in big flakes," thought Dio, and the blue sky seemed to her still more blue, the bright sun still brighter; she wanted to weep with joy and to kiss the sky, the sun, the earth, like the faces of loved ones after a long parting.
She was smiling at the familiar feeling: it was not for nothing that she had felt the touch of death as she lay on the pyre, a victim ready to be slain. It was as though she had died then, and now another life, a life after death had begun: a different sky, a different sun, a different earth—alien? oh no, more like home than her own native land.
"Sick with sorrow I lie on my bed
Wise physicians are trying to heal me.
My loved one comes to my bedside,
My sister—she mocks the physicians.
Well does she know what ails me."
sang in an undertone a man of thirty, with a face fine as a woman's and large sad eyes like the eyes of a sick child; his head was shaven like that of a priest and he was wearing a white linen robe and a leopard's skin thrown over his shoulder. This was Pentaur, a former priest of Amon and the master of the temple dancers, who was teaching Dio Egyptian dances.
Kneeling down, he lightly touched with the tips of his fingers the crossed strings of a tall Amon's harp that stood on a hollow resounding box, adorned with two rainbow-coloured sun discs and a four-horned head of the god Ram.
The dulcet notes of the harpstrings accompanied the voice of the singer. He finished one song and began another:
"Each time that the door
In my sister's house opens
My sister is displeased.
I wish I were her doorkeeper,
She would then be displeased with me.
Each time that I heard her voice,
Frightened as a child I should be."
"Is that all?" Dio asked with a smile.
"That's all," said Pentaur, flushing slightly as though ashamed of his song being too short. He flushed often and easily like a little boy; it was strange and almost absurd in a man of thirty, but Dio liked it.
"Frightened as a child I should be," she repeated, this time without a smile. "Yes, hardly anything is said and yet all is said. With you in Egypt love is wordless, just as the sky is cloudless...."