Apophis was an embodiment of primordial chaos. He had no sense-organs, he could neither hear nor see, he could only scream. And he operated always in darkness. As the sun-god's boat sailed through the underworld he tried again and again to block its passage by drinking up the imagined river on which it sailed. In every access of darkness — in an eclipse, in the waning of the moon, in a cloudy sky, but above all in those critical moments, the onset and the end of night — Apophis was at work.