"Listen, the Urma is speaking to you."
It was only then Dio grasped that this was the great seer—urma, watcher of the secrets of heaven and the prophet of all the gods of north and south, the high priest of Amon, Ptamose.
He was over a hundred years old—an age not infrequent in Egypt. Many people thought that he had long been dead, for during the last ten years, ever since the apostate king began to persecute the faith of his fathers, Ptamose had been hiding in subterranean hiding-places and tombs; some of those who knew him to be alive said that he would never die, while others asserted that he had died and risen again.
Dio knelt down and bending over the low couch put her ear close to the whispering lips.
"You have come at last, my dear daughter! Why have you delayed so long?"
There was an insidious caress in his voice, a magnetic power in his eyes.
"Pentaur has told me much about you, but one cannot tell all about others. Tell me yourself now."
He began asking her questions, but he seemed to know all before she had answered him and to read her heart as an open scroll.
"You poor, poor child!" he whispered when she told him how Eoia and Tammuzadad had perished through her. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery. Do you know this?"
"Yes, I do."