And long after the fall of dusk, the tops of the cliffs glowed a fiery yellow and the girlishly slender outlines of the palms and the coal black cones of the granaries showed black against the crimson west.
The nights were as still as the days; only the jackals barked and howled in the desert and the hippopotamus in the papyrus thicket bellowed, like a bull, at the dazzlingly bright moon, the sun of the night.
And in the morning the day-sun rose as radiant as ever. The two streaks—the black and the yellow—stretched along the banks as monotonously as before; the oxen walked along as slowly, cutting deep furrows with the plough and the melancholy singing of the ploughman echoed in the stillness of the fields.
And everything was as still and gentle as the face of the god whose name is Quiet-Heart.
On the evening of the fifth day after passing a rocky gorge that seemed like a dark and narrow fortress gate, the ship suddenly came out into a sunlit expanse of water. One gate was in the south and another in the north; between them, surrounded on all sides by mountain ridges, as by fortress walls, lay the great plain cut in two by the Nile: in the west green meadows stretched as far as the Lybian Hills that melted into rose and amethyst in the light of the setting sun; in the east lay the semicircle of rocky and sandy desert, rising gradually towards the parched rocks of the Arabian mountains. Between the river and the desert there was a long and narrow streak of palm groves and gardens. White houses were scattered among them like dice and a huge white temple towered above them.
"The City of the Sun! The City of the Sun!" Dio recognised it at once and with a joyous terror she thought: "He is here!"
And just as when she stood by the body of Pentaur, the word 'He' had a double meaning for her: he—the king and He—the Son.