And it seemed to her that she herself were dead and lying in the bosom of the earth like a child in its mother's womb, waiting for resurrection—birth into eternal life. And the dulcet harpstrings sang
"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh...."
All of a sudden a light flashed into her eyes. A bent, decrepit old man with a torch—a priest, to judge by his shaven head and the leopard skin thrown over his shoulder—stooping over her, took her by the hand, helped her up and led her out of the room.
"Who are you? Where are you taking me?" she asked. He said nothing and was about to lead her down some more steep narrow stairs.
"No, I don't want to go down," she said. "Take me up. Where is Pentaur? .... Why do you say nothing? Speak."
The old man made an inarticulate sound and, opening his mouth, showed her a stump in place of a tongue; he explained by signs that Pentaur would come down too and that somebody was expecting her. She understood that he meant Ptamose.
They walked further down. Again Dio did not know whether she was asleep or awake. The dumb man had such a dead face that it seemed to her Death itself was leading her to the kingdom of death.
They stopped at a closed door. The dumb man knocked. Someone from within asked "Who is there?" and when Dio said her name the door was opened.
In a low sepulchral chamber or sanctuary, supported by four quadrangular columns, cut out in the thickness of the rock, stood a sepulchral couch, with a mummy in a white shroud lying on it. There was, Dio thought, something terrible in its face—more terrible than death.
Her dumb guide took her past the couch into the depths of the chamber, where a vaulted niche, lined with leaf-copper, glowed, like sunset, in the light of innumerable lamps. There, in the smoke of fragrant incense, a huge black lop-eared Lybian ram—probably transferred from the upper temple—lay asleep on a couch of purple. This was the sacred animal, "the bleating prophet," the living heart of the temple.