The day before the feast she was sitting alone, late in the evening, in the newly decorated room of Tuta's summer house; he and his wife, the king's daughter Ankhsenbatona, or Ankhi, lived in the winter house. The smell of fresh paint and plaster came from the still unfinished part of the house, where in the daytime masons, carpenters and painters were at work. It seemed to Dio that the whole town was pervaded by this smell.
Red pillars with green garlands of palm leaves supported the sky-blue ceiling. The white walls were decorated with a delicate design of yellow butterflies, fluttering over fine seaweed.
The freshness of a winter evening came through the long, narrow stone-trellised windows, right up by the ceiling. Sitting on a low couch—a brick platform covered with rugs and cushions—Dio, wrapped up in her Cretan wolf-fur, was warming herself by the hearth—an earthenware platter of hot embers.
"To-morrow I shall see him," she thought with fear. She had begun to be afraid on the very first day she arrived, and grew more so as time went oh; and on this last night before the meeting such fear possessed her that she felt she might run away if she did not control herself. She went hot and cold at the thought that the next day she was to dance before the king. "My legs will give way under me, I shall stumble, fall flat, disgrace poor Tuta!" she laughed, as though to make her fear worse.
In the depth of the room two sanctuary lamps were hanging in two niches decorated with alabaster bas-reliefs of the king on the left and the queen on the right. The wall space between them was covered with rows of turquoise blue hieroglyphics on golden yellow ground, glorifying the god Aton.
Dio got up, and going to the niche on the left, looked at the bas-relief of the king standing at an altar. He was raising two round sacrificial loaves, one on each palm, towards the Sun. The enormously tall royal tiara, tapering to a point, seemed too heavy for the childish head on the slender neck, flexible like the stem of a flower. The childish face was irregular, with a receding forehead and a protruding mouth. The charm of his naked body was like that of a flower that had just opened and was already fading with the heat:
"Thou art the flower uprooted from the ground,
Thou art the plant unmoistened by running water."
Dio recalled the song of weeping for the dead god Tammuz.
The neck, the shoulders, the hands, the calves and the ankles were slender and narrow like those of a boy of ten, but the hips were wide like a woman's and the breasts too full: neither he nor she—he and she at the same time—a marvel of god-like beauty.
On Mount Dicte in the Island of Crete, Dio had heard an ancient legend: in the beginning man and woman were one body with two faces; but the Lord cut their body in two and gave to each a spinal cord; 'that's how people cut eggs in two with a hair for pickling,' old Mother Akakalla, the prophetess, used to add with a queer, uncanny laugh when she told this legend in Dio's ear.