The warders at the gates despoiled the new-comers of everything which they had brought with them, and conducted them in a naked condition before Allat, who pronounced sentence upon them, and assigned to each his place in the nether world.  The good or evil committed on earth by such souls was of little moment in determining the sentence:  to secure the favour of the judge, it was of far greater importance to have exhibited devotion to the gods and to Allat herself, to have lavished sacrifices and offerings upon them and to have enriched their temples.  The souls which could not justify themselves were subjected to horrible punishment:  leprosy consumed them to the end of time, and the most painful maladies attacked them, to torture them ceaselessly without any hope of release.  Those who were fortunate enough to be spared from her rage, dragged out a miserable and joyless existence.  They were continually suffering from the pangs of thirst and hunger, and found nothing to satisfy their appetites but clay and dust.  They shivered with cold, and they obtained no other garment to protect them than mantles of feathers—­the great silent wings of the night-birds, invested with which they fluttered about and filled the air with their screams.  This gloomy and cruel conception of ordinary life in this strange kingdom was still worse than the idea formed of the existence in the tomb to which it succeeded.  In the cemetery the soul was, at least, alone with the dead body; in the house of Allat, on the contrary, it was lost as it were among spirits as much afflicted as itself, and among the genii born of darkness.  None of these genii had a simple form, or approached the human figure in shape; each individual was a hideous medley of human and animal parts, in which the most repellent features were artistically combined.  Lions’ heads stood out from the bodies of scorpion-tailed jackals, whose feet were armed with eagles’ claws:  and among such monsters the genii of pestilence, fever, and the south-west wind took the chief place.  When once the dead had become naturalized among this terrible population, they could not escape from their condition, unless by the exceptional mandate of the gods above.  They possessed no recollection of what they had done upon earth.  Domestic affection, friendships, and the memory of good offices rendered to one another,—­all were effaced from their minds:  nothing remained there but an inexpressible regret at having been exiled from the world of light, and an excruciating desire to reach it once more.  The threshold of Allat’s palace stood upon a spring which had the property of restoring to life all who bathed in it or drank of its waters:  they gushed forth as soon as the stone was raised, but the earth-spirits guarded it with a jealous care, and kept at a distance all who attempted to appropriate a drop of it.  They permitted access to it only by order of Ea himself, or one of the supreme gods, and even then with a rebellious heart at seeing their