He shut his eyes and again looked like one dead.
Dio was running upstairs, with one thought only in her mind: "Where is Pentaur, what has happened to him?"
Going out of the catacomb by the same door as she had entered, she went past the ruins of Tutmose's tomb and walked along the south wall of Amon's temple. On the white stones of the temple square, bathed in moonlight, dead bodies lay about as on a battlefield. Half-savage, hyena-like dogs were worrying them. An emaciated looking dog, with a blood-stained mouth, was sitting on its hind legs howling at the moon.
Dio stopped suddenly. The needle of the obelisk showed black against the moonlit sky: the hieroglyphics on the mirror-like polished surface of its granite glorified King Akhnaton, the Joy of the Sun, and someone was sitting hunched up against the base of it—-dead or alive Dio could not make out. She came nearer and, bending down, saw a dead woman, thin as a skeleton, stiffly pressing a dead baby to her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breasts, as she gazed at it with glassy eyes; her white teeth were bared as though she were laughing. It was the beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer.
Dio recalled a black granite figure she had once seen of the goddess Isis, the Mother with her son Horus, and it suddenly seemed to her that this dead woman was Mother Isis herself, accursed and killed—by whom?
"Go up, you will see what He is doing," the words of Ptamose sounded in her ears.
She turned round at the sound of footsteps. Issachar came up to her.
"Where is Pentaur? What has happened?" she cried, and, before he had time to answer, she understood from his face that Pentaur had been killed.
The familiar pain of inexpiable guilt, insatiable pity pierced her heart. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery," the words of the seer sounded in her ears again.
It took her some time to grasp what Issachar was saying; at last she understood: they would not give Pentaur's body to him, but perhaps they might give it to her.