But it was not only the friends and followers of Ra who thus accompanied him in his journey through the other world; his enemies were there also, and the horrible punishments they had to endure, as depicted on the walls of the royal tombs, were worthy of the imagination of a Dante. The banks of the infernal river were lined with strange and terrible monsters, some of them the older deities and spirits of the popular creed, others mere creations of symbolism, others creatures of composite form to whose invention the older mythology contributed. Fire-breathing serpents are prominent among them, lighting up the darkness for the friends of Ra, and burning his foes with their poisonous flames.(161)
The artificial character of this picture of the other world is clear at the first glance. With the pedantic attention to details which characterised the Egyptian, every part of it has been carefully elaborated. The names and forms of the personages who stand on the banks of the infernal river or enter the boat of Ra, as with each successive hour he passes into a new region, are all given; even the exact area of each region is stated, though the measurements do not agree in all the versions of the book. But the best proof of its artificial nature is to be found in a fact first pointed out by Professor Maspero. Two of the older conceptions of the other world and the life beyond the grave, which differed essentially from the solar doctrine, are embedded in it, but embedded as it were perforce. In the fourth and fifth hours or regions we have a picture of the future life as it was conceived by the worshippers of Sokaris in the primitive days of Memphis; in the sixth and seventh, the tribunal and paradise of Osiris.
The kingdom of Sokaris represented that dreary conception of an after-existence which was associated with the ka. Like the mummy, the ka was condemned to live in the dark chamber of the tomb, whence it crept forth at night to consume the food that had been offered to it, and without which it was doomed to perish. Long before the age when the Book of Am Duat was written, this primitive belief had passed away from the minds of men; but the tradition of it still lingered, and had secured a permanent place in the theological lore of Egypt. It has accordingly been annexed as it were by the author of the book, and transformed into two of the regions of the night through which the solar bark has to pass. But the terms in which the kingdom of Sokaris had been described were too stereotyped to be ignored or altered, and the solar bark is accordingly made to pass above the primitive Hades, the voices of whose inhabitants are heard rising up in an indistinct murmur though their forms are concealed from view. A memory is preserved even of the sandy desert of Giza and Saqqâra, where the inhabitants of Memphis were buried, and over which Sokaris ruled as lord of the dead. The realm of Sokaris is pictured as an enclosure of sand, flanked on either side by a half-buried sphinx.