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Thebes after the funeral of the old Pharaoh three years ago. I did not have to go: Akhenaten did not banish me from his side because I have never really been there. But I thought it best to go with her whose strength and courage I have always admired. There was nothing for me in the palace of men.
    We have with us brave little Tut, no longer the happy child he used to be. The intimations of the adult world have turned him old before his time, and the knowledge that he may be called upon at any moment to replace his brother weighs heavily upon him. I think he still loves and stands in awe of his brother—of both brothers, in fact—and the thought that he may be used to do them violence troubles and shadows what was once a sunny personality. No one has ever said, or indicated openly, that violence is what may be done: but it is implicit. Implicit in the air, and implicit, let us be honest about it, in the situation.
    Thus does the corruption of the Aten, confused and confounded yet more by the unhealthy love of the brothers, spread and poison the happiness of the Family, as it spreads and poisons the happiness of the land.
    Yet I do not think Tut sees it in these terms, being still a child, nor does the Chief Wife, nor her three daughters who also live with us. To Nefertiti particularly, whose powerful personality influences all of us who live closely with her, the Aten remains, I think, the perfect ideal to which she would like to see all Kemet aspire. She has never wavered in her faith in the Sole God, and she still, I think, loves the Sole God’s prophet. The habit of love, ingrained in them both by their parents from earliest childhood, remains unbroken in her in spite of all. As it does in him, I think, because he has made no move to “disgrace” her as those who fall from favor in Kemet can be disgraced—by the destruction of her portraits and cartouches everywhere in the land, the smashing of her statues, the abolition of her name, and thus of her very ka and ba ,the soul and essence of her being. (Only one cartouche, on a “sun-shade” on the Nile that he has given to Merytaten, has actually been replaced, of all her thousands.) Nor has she “disappeared,” except that she now occupies a separate residence and is no longer portrayed officially as being at his side.
    It is true that he has given his brother one of her names, Neferu-neferu-aten, “Fair is the Goodness of the Aten,” has conferred on him the titulary “Beloved of Akhenaten,” and has had the two of them portrayed together in poses more than brotherly. But she lives on, unmolested and well maintained, in the North Palace scarce three miles from his. Sometimes they even see one another when they proceed in their separate chariots to the Great Temple of the Aten to do worship, though both make every attempt to assure that their visits will not coincide. When they do, no glance is exchanged, no word is spoken. All fall silent and, oblations done as swiftly as is decent, they hastily remount and speed away to their separate palaces. But, for a wife the gossips of Kemet would have you believe is “disgraced,” Nefertiti manages to live on very well.
    Such, it seems to me, is token enough that somewhere in the strange world to which he has gone from us the Good God retains some sense of sanity and balance, at least on that particular subject; and also, I believe some memory of love, if not its actual being, which will not permit him to be fatally harsh to her.
    Partly because of this, but more, I believe, because she truly believes in the concept of one universal god, the Chief Wife remains true to the Aten. And so all of us in her household remain true to it too: Tutankhaten, who himself may yet rule in the name of the Aten; healthy and determined Ankh-e-sen-pa-aten, who will become his Queen; sickly Nefer-neferu-aten Junior and sickly Nefer-neferu-ra, both of whom give promise of soon following into the afterworld the sixth little sister,