After some months had gone by Pharaoh, quite weary of this play, asked the advice of his Council.  They suggested to him that he should journey through the great cities of Egypt, both because the change might completely re-establish his divine health, and in the hope that on her travels the Queen Neter-Tua would meet someone of royal blood with whom she could fall in love.  For by now it was evident to all of them that unless she did fall in love, she would not marry.

So that very night Pharaoh asked his daughter if she would undertake such a journey.

She answered that nothing would please her better, as she wearied of Thebes, and desired to see the other great cities of the land, to make herself known to those who dwell in them, and in each to be proclaimed as its future ruler.  Also she wished to look upon the ocean whereof she had heard that it was so big that all the waters of the Nile flowing into it day and night made no difference to its volume.

Thus then began that pilgrimage which afterwards Tua recorded in the history of her reign on the walls of the wonderful temples that she built.  Her own wish was that they should sail south to the frontiers of Egypt, since there she hoped that she might hear some tidings of Rames and his expedition, whereof latterly no certain word had come.  This project, however, was over-ruled because in the south there were no great towns, also the inhabitants of the bordering desert were turbulent, and might choose that moment to attack.

So in the end they went down and not up the Nile, tarrying for a while at every great city, and especially at Atbu, the holy place where the head of Osiris is buried, and tens of thousands of the great men of Egypt have their tombs.  Here Tua was crowned afresh in the very shrine of Osiris amidst the rejoicings of the people.

Then they sailed away to On, the City of the Sun, and thence to make offerings at the Great Pyramids which were built by some of the early kings who had ruled Egypt, to serve them as their tombs.

Neter-Tua entered the Pyramids to look upon the bodies of these Pharaohs who had been dead for thousands of years, and whose deeds were all forgotten, though her father would not accompany her there because the ways were so steep that he did not dare to tread them.  Afterwards, with Asti and a small guard of the Arab chiefs of the desert, she mounted a dromedary and rode round them in the moonlight, hoping that she would meet the ghosts of those kings, and that they would talk with her as the ghost of her mother had done.  But she saw no ghosts, nor would Asti try to summon them from their sleep, although Tua prayed her to do so.

“Leave them alone,” said Asti, as they paused in the shadow of the greatest of the pyramids and stared at its shining face engraved from base to summit with many a mystic writing.

“Leave them alone lest they should be angry as Amen was, and tell your Majesty things which you do not wish to hear.  Contemplate their mighty works, such as no monarch can build to-day, and suffer them to rest therein undisturbed by weaker folk.”