the Delta:  four consecutive hours of sailing brought the bark from the province in which the four principal bodies of the god slept to that in which his four souls kept watch, and, as it passed, it illuminated the eight circles reserved for men and kings who worshipped the god of Mendes.  From the tenth hour onwards it directed its course due south, and passed through the Augarit, the place of fire and abysmal waters to which the Heliopolitans consigned the souls of the impious; then finally quitting the tunnel, it soared up in the east with the first blush of dawn.  Each of the ordinary dead was landed at that particular hour of the twelve, which belonged to the god of his choice or of his native town.  Left to dwell there they suffered no absolute torment, but languished in the darkness in a kind of painful torpor, from which condition the approach of the bark alone was able to rouse them.  They hailed its daily coming with acclamations, and felt new life during the hour in which its rays fell on them, breaking out into lamentations as the bark passed away and the light disappeared with it.  The souls who were devotees of the sun escaped this melancholy existence; they escorted the god, reduced though he was to a mummied corpse, on his nightly cruise, and were piloted by him safe and sound to meet the first streaks of the new day.  As the boat issued from the mountain in the morning between the two trees which flanked the gate of the east, these souls had their choice of several ways of spending the day on which they were about to enter.  They might join their risen god in his course through the hours of light, and assist him in combating Apophis and his accomplices, plunging again at night into Hades without having even for a moment quitted his side.

[Illustration:  066.jpg THE ENTRANCE TO A ROYAL TOMB]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph, by Beato, of the
     tomb of Ramses IV.

[Illustration:  066b.jpg ONE OF THE HOURS OF THE NIGHT]

They might, on the other hand, leave him and once more enter the world of the living, settling themselves where they would, but always by preference in the tombs where their bodies awaited them, and where they could enjoy the wealth which had been accumulated there:  they might walk within their garden, and sit beneath the trees they had planted; they could enjoy the open air beside the pond they had dug, and breathe the gentle north breeze on its banks after the midday heat, until the time when the returning evening obliged them to repair once more to Abydos, and re-embark with the god in order to pass the anxious vigils of the night under his protection.  Thus from the earliest period of Egyptian history the life beyond the tomb was an eclectic one, made up of a series of earthly enjoyments combined together.

The Pharaohs had enrolled themselves instinctively among the most ardent votaries of this complex doctrine.  Their relationship to the sun made its adoption a duty, and its profession was originally, perhaps, one of the privileges of their position.  Ra invited them on board because they were his children, subsequently extending this favour to those whom they should deem worthy to be associated with them, and thus become companions of the ancient deceased kings of Upper and Lower Egypt.*