The western mountain had swallowed half the sun when Ra felt the cold reach his hands.
He tightened his grip on the staff. Below the boat, the last roofs of Egypt glimmered; a strip of river still held the light. A man on its bank was drawing a little fishing boat ashore. Then the mountain rose between them, and the man, the river and the whole green country disappeared.
Ra stood beneath the shrine of the night boat, bearing the head and curved horns of a ram. The disk above him gave a low red glow. Ahead, the steersman turned his oar into black water.
Twelve hours lay between this darkness and the eastern sky.
The boat slipped beneath the earth.
At first there was room to sail. Shapes stood along the banks, and when Ra called to them, faces lifted towards him. His light found a cheek, a pair of open hands, the folds of a garment. The dead received him in a murmur that passed from bank to bank. He answered as the boat went by, turning so that his voice would reach those farthest from the water.
Behind the stern their faces faded. He could still hear them after he could no longer see them.
The Road Beneath the Sand
In the fourth hour, the water gave way to sand.
The crew brought Ra into a narrow vessel whose prow and stern ended in serpent heads. Four gods took its towing rope. They leaned forward together, and the rope lifted from the ground, shedding dust.
Nothing moved.
They bent lower. A dry creak ran through the vessel. Then its keel slid, and Ra braced himself against the jolting deck.
The road descended in sharp turns through the country of Sokar. Fire from the serpent prow showed a little sand ahead, then a wall, then another bend. Beyond that small moving flame there was no distance he could measure. Ra listened to the gods hauling in front of him: the drag of their feet, the tightening rope, the pause before they pulled again.
Something stirred beyond the firelight.
Ra raised his head. He could see neither a face nor the edge of a dwelling.
“I have come,” he called.
A sound answered, faint and close. Farther away, another joined it.
He turned towards the first voice and spoke again. The boat lurched round a bend, carrying him past those he could not see. He kept calling until their replies dwindled behind him; then he called into the next stretch of darkness.
The rope remained taut.
Through the sandy ways of the fourth and fifth hours, the gods drew him onward. When water finally took the hull again, its soft knock against the wood made Ra lower his eyes. A black ripple slid along the boat. He watched it until it vanished beneath the stern.
The Hidden Body
In the sixth hour, the boat carried him to the body of Osiris.
The river was still here. Along its banks stood the forms of ancient kings, motionless in their wrappings. Ra spoke their greeting, and his voice entered the hidden houses. No wind disturbed the water. Even the steersman’s oar seemed reluctant to break it.
Within a guardian serpent’s encircling coils lay the hidden body.
Ra looked upon it. In that stillness he found Osiris, lord of the dead; he found, too, his own body, the flesh towards which his wandering life had been travelling through the night.
The distance between them narrowed.
His hand ceased to feel the staff. The boat beneath his feet grew faint, while the still body became near and solid. Ra sank into it as warmth sinks into earth. The last weariness of the day passed through him. For a moment he could neither lift a hand nor draw apart from the god with whom he had become one.
Then, deep within the stillness, life stirred.
It was small. He felt it before he could see any light: a gathering warmth, an impulse towards movement. It spread through the hidden flesh. Where Ra had found only the end of his strength, something was beginning.
The wood of his staff pressed against his palm again.
He stood in the boat. The river lay ahead; the kings and their silent houses remained beside it. Within him, the new warmth held.
He lifted his staff, and the boat went on.
The Seventh Hour
The water thinned before the prow.
Ra watched a dark ridge emerge from it. The steersman’s oar scraped bottom. A second ridge rose beyond the first, and the channel between them dwindled to a shining thread.
Then the nearer ridge moved.
Apep lay across the way, coil behind enormous coil. The water was disappearing into his mouth. Sand gleamed where the river had been, and the boat settled with a grinding shock.
Ra caught the edge of his shrine.
Above him, Mehen tightened into a living canopy. The protecting serpent’s body curved between Ra and the huge head rising ahead. Under that shelter the air grew close. Ra could see the prow, the bare channel and Isis standing before him with her arms extended.
Beside her stood the eldest magician.
Isis began to speak.
Her first words were clear in the sudden silence. Apep turned his head towards them. His coils shifted across the sand, closing the last narrow space in which the vessel might pass.
The eldest magician answered her. The two voices held their course, one joining where the other ended. Ra felt the deck tremble under his feet. The boat was still aground.
He had crossed the dark roads. He had reached the hidden body. The life newly kindled in him would remain beneath the earth if the boat could go no farther.
Ra raised his voice with theirs.
“Be bound. Let the passage open.”
The words went out over the dry channel.
At Apep’s head, Serqet drew a binding tight. The serpent jerked against it, dragging a furrow in the sand. At his far end another god fastened the tail. Between them the immense body heaved.
Isis did not lower her arms.
A coil lifted beside the prow. Ra saw its underside, pale in his light, rising higher than the boat. The steersman crouched over his useless oar.
The eldest magician spoke; Ra answered. Knives flashed in the hands of the divine defenders. The raised coil struck the sand.
Apep’s head strained once more against Serqet’s restraint. His mouth opened, but the binding held. The gods struck down his strength, and his vast body lay still across the channel.
For a breath, Ra heard only Isis.
Then the boat moved.
There was no returning flood beneath it, no towing rope drawn from the shore. Under the power of the utterances, the hull slid over the waterless road. Sand whispered against its sides. The prow passed the fallen coil; the shrine followed, with Mehen arched above it.
Ra kept speaking.
The serpent’s bound head lay close enough for its shadow to cover the deck. Slowly it slipped behind him. The stern cleared the narrow passage, and the dark opened ahead.
Only then did Isis bring down her hands.
Ra loosened his grip on the shrine. Apep had been overcome for this passage. The road beyond him still led through night.
The Mouth of Morning
The later hours carried the boat through the hidden country towards the east.
Ra’s voice went ahead of him among its dwellings. The crew held their oars ready. By the ninth hour they could stand in quiet together, listening to water instead of the scrape of sand. Ra looked from one to another: the hands on the shafts, the shoulders that had held against the boat’s sudden stopping. His light lay on them all.
Beyond that quiet, the remaining darkness awaited its appointed passage. They travelled on until the twelfth hour brought them to a serpent stretched across the end of the night.
This was the life-serpent. A rope led the boat towards its tail, and gods and goddesses took the rope in their hands.
Ra looked along the immense body. Somewhere beyond it was the mouth through which they must emerge. Beyond that lay the eastern sky, still hidden.
The haulers began to pull.
The boat entered the serpent. Its prow vanished first; then the darkness enclosed Ra and the shrine. He felt movement beneath him and heard the rope draw against the wood. The crew were close, though he could no longer distinguish their faces.
Within that passage, his old form loosened.
The weight he had carried under the earth fell away. The bent weariness of the night left his limbs; the warmth kindled beside Osiris filled him. Around him the others were changing too, their voices growing strong as they called to those who drew the rope.
A thin brightness appeared ahead.
It widened. Ra moved towards it, and the last shape of the night could no longer contain him.
At the serpent’s mouth he emerged as Khepri, the scarab of the morning. Shu’s waiting arms received him and raised him towards the opening sky.
Beneath him the underworld receded, with Osiris and the resting dead in its depths. Before him lay the river he had lost at sunset.
On its bank a fishing boat rested above the waterline. The first sunlight caught its mooring rope, crept across the pale reeds and shone upon the river.