A girl of thirteen—not an Egyptian to judge by her fair hair and skin—lay beside it, with her head on the animal's back and her eyes half-closed, like a bride on the bed of love. Completely naked, but for a narrow girdle of precious stones below the navel, shameless and innocent, she stretched herself out, pale and white on the black fleece, like a narcissus, the flower of death. She was one of the twelve priestesses of the god Ram—Amon-Ra.
At the approach of Dio, the little girl opened her eyes and looked at her intently. There was something so mournful in that look that Dio's heart was wrung; she remembered another victim of the god Beast—Pasiphae-Eoia.
Her dumb guide prostrated himself before the Ram. A young priest, with an austere meagre face, kneeling next to Dio, was burning fragrant incense in a censer.
"Bow down to the god!" he whispered, looking at her severely.
Dio looked at him, too, but said nothing and did not bow to the beast, though she knew it was dangerous—they might kill her for impiety.
When the girl opened her eyes and moved the Ram woke up and also moved slowly and heavily: one could see it was very old, almost at its last gasp. It opened one eye: the pupil, fiery-yellow like a carbuncle, glowed menacingly from under a dark heavy eyelid, with grey lashes, and looked into her eyes with an almost human look.
"The god opens his eye, the sun, and there is light in the world," the priest whispered the prayer.
When he had finished he got up, and taking Dio by the hand led her to the couch with the mummy. He bent down to the dead man and whispered something in his ear. Dio drew back horrified: the dead man opened his eyes.
His deathly, skeleton-like body, brown as a withered tree, showed through the transparent white of the winding sheet. The veins on the shrunken temples stood out as though stripped of flesh; the thin, thread-like lips of the sunk-in mouth and the gristle of the hooked nose—a vulture's beak—looked deathly under the tightly drawn shiny skin. But living, young, immortal eyes seemed to have been set in that mask of death.
The priest reverently lifted the mummy and raised its head on the couch. The dead lips opened and whispered, rustling like dry leaves.