Anubis Speaks!: A Guide to the Afterlife by the Egyptian God of the Dead (12 page)

Step up! Step up!

Don’t be shy! It may seem crowded with all us gods on board—including Horus, Set, Isis, Nephthys (“Hi, Mom!”), Sekhmet, Thoth, Hathor, Serket, and others—but we’ll all fit. It’s a magic boat. Don’t expect a lot of conversation. We feel tense as Ra steels himself for battle, a battle he has waged since the beginning of time. The rest of this hour is disturbingly quiet. All we can hear is the slap of the dark water against the hull of our boat.

Do not make any sudden movements, young

mortal. We don’t want Apophis waking too early.

Still, do you feel it? That sense of inexplicable dread emerging from the deep? The premonition that something horrible is about to happen?

He’s out there somewhere: Apophis, our evil

enemy, slithering toward us in the dark.

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Water World

Hour Two

As we move into the darkness of the next cavern, we hear the drip, drip, drip of fetid liquid sweating from slimy cavern walls. The air reeks of rotting flesh. Apophis must have burped.

The river we are travelling on cuts through the underworld like the Nile snakes through Egypt. There is no wind, not even a trace of a breeze. We gods must do the rowing with special golden oars. And, yeah, they may look pretty, but they weigh a whole lot more than wood, which is why I’m thinking maybe
you
should be doing some of this hard labor! But no, we cannot let you. History has shown that you mortals go nuts over gold. We gods better hold onto these oars while you’re around.

Fleet of Gods

Look behind you. A fleet of boats carrying even more gods is trailing us in the dark. They are backup fighters. Not like we need their help, but it doesn’t hurt to have them around. You know, just to be safe.

Once we move past the stinky entrance to this second cavern, we can relax a little. Why? Because we are moving into the region of Wernes. This, my friends, is one of the few happy places on our journey.

It’s where those who have lived by the rules of Ma’at and have passed my judgment (more on that later) 25

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are set up for their eternal lives. Here Ra rises from the boat to dispense plots of rich farmland to the deserving dead. Ra owns the land in the underworld, just like the pharaohs owned most of the land of Egypt above. There the pharaoh assigned plots of farming land to individuals and families. This way, he could manage the land’s resources, storing grain in huge silos, for example, to make sure he could feed his people in case of famine.

Fortunately famine and starvation are

nonexistent in the underworld. The land that Ra distributes here is extremely fertile all year round.

Plus, everything grows to magical proportions—figs the size of melons and pomegranates the size of basketballs. The wheat and barley fields are as vast as the Red Sea. It’s truly a land of plenty for the dead.

Good thing, too; eternity is a
loooooong
time, people.

Magical Workers

Ra makes sure everyone gets the same amount

of land, whether they are poor peasants or rich nobles. The rich, of course, would rather not work their own fields. So they stuff their tombs with magical statuettes called
shabtis
, who will do the work for them.

Shabtis came into use after the days when only pharaohs got mummified. In the early days, pharaohs sometimes had servants killed and buried with them 28