As, day after day, the searching parties returned empty-handed, Pharaoh lost patience. Hundreds were slain. Soken and many of the palace eunuchs met their death at the strangler’s hands. Men soon went to the task of searching for the lost Queen as criminals already condemned to death.
For a full week the search was renewed. Fresh men were called up for the task. Finally, the soldiers of the Divisions of Khonsu, Ptah and Sutekh were pressed into service. All in vain.
One remarkable circumstance was discovered, following the disappearance of the Queen-Mother, and that by the Princess Bekit-aton. The portrait of the Ex-Queen Hanit, which had been painted on a column in the Audience Hall of the late Pharaoh, had been carefully and completely obliterated. This had been done just prior to or immediately following the Queen-Mother’s disappearance. Nothing remained, where once the portrait stood, but six words written in red in roughly drawn hieratic: “By the Power of the Book of Thoth.”
No one could explain this desecration of the former Queen’s portrait. Mention of the magic Book of Thoth struck terror into every heart, not excepting that of Pharaoh himself.
Thenceforth Pharaoh’s fanatical zeal in the interest of Aton, his Syrian sun-cult, slowly waned and finally ceased. The innumerable gifts to the many new Aton shrines throughout Egypt—one had been set up against the very walls of the Temple of Amen in the Apt—the gorgeous religious processions, the ceaseless theological studies and debates, all were suddenly abandoned.
With the change Pharaoh himself seemed to fade. Little nourishment passed his lips. Within the dim shadows of his private chapel, hour after hour the hollow-eyed monarch stood in prayer before the gold and gem-encrusted statue of Aton, the sun-god. At times the statue appeared to his distracted mind to mock him with a smile half-pitying, half-contemptuous!
Verily, the curse of Huy, High Priest of Amen was upon him! Noferith, his wife, had borne him no heir, no son to follow him upon the gold Horus Throne of Egypt! The scepter must go to others, to that hollow cousin of his, whom Thi had been wont to call the mirage.
As for old Ay, another distant relative and possible claimant to the Throne, Pharaoh suspected that Ay was even now in secret correspondence with the exiled priests of Amen, whose influence was again making itself felt, not alone in Thebes, but as far north as the new capital, the City of the Sun itself.
To whom then could he turn? Among the courtiers about him there was not one in whom he could trust. Not one could help him. Alas, too late, he bethought him of the exiled Ramses!