to lift its eyes and see in what part of the firmament its course lay night after night.  Taken as a series, these tableaux form an illustrated narrative of the travels of the sun and the Soul throughout the twenty-four hours of the day and night.  Each hour is represented, as also the domain of each hour with its circumscribed boundary, the door of which is guarded by a huge serpent.  These serpents have their various names, as “Fire-Face,” “Flaming Eye,” “Evil Eye,” etc.  The fate of Souls was decided in the third hour of the day.  They were weighed by the god Thoth, who consigned them to their future abode according to the verdict of the scales.  The sinful Soul was handed over to the cynocephalous-ape assessors of the infernal tribunal, who hunted and scourged it, after first changing it into a sow, or some other impure animal.  The righteous Soul, on the contrary, passed in the fifth hour into the company of his fellows, whose task it was to cultivate the Fields of Aalu and reap the corn of the celestial harvest, after which they took their pleasure under the guardianship of the good genii.  After the fifth hour, the heavenly ocean became a vast battlefield.  The gods of light pursued, captured, and bound the serpent Apapi, and at the twelfth hour they strangled him.  But this triumph was not of long duration.  Scarcely had the sun achieved this victory when his bark was borne by the tide into the realm of the night hours, and from that moment he was assailed, like Virgil and Dante at the Gates of Hell, by frightful sounds and clamourings.  Each circle had its voice, not to be confounded with the voices of other circles.  Here the sound was as an immense humming of wasps; yonder it was as the lamentations of women for their husbands, and the howling of she-beasts for their mates; elsewhere it was as the rolling of the thunder.  The sarcophagus, as well as the walls, was covered with these scenes of joyous or sinister import.  It was generally of red or black granite.  As it was put in hand last of all, it frequently happened that the sculptors had not time to finish it.  When finished, however, the scenes and texts with which it was covered contained an epitome of the whole catacomb.[34] Thus, lying in his sarcophagus, the dead man found his future destinies depicted thereon, and learned to understand the blessedness of the gods.  The tombs of private persons were not often so elaborately decorated.  Two tombs of the period of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty—­that of Petamenoph at Thebes and that of Bakenrenf at Memphis—­compete in this respect, however, with the royal catacombs.  Their walls are not only sculptured with the text (more or less complete) of The Book of the Dead, but also with long extracts from The Book of the Opening of the Mouth and the religious formulae found in the pyramids.