The book's architecture is announced in its modern name: between each hour of the night and the next stands a gate, drawn as a fortified portal with a coiled serpent upright on its door, attended by uraei and divine gatekeepers, and the solar barque may pass only when the serpent's name has been spoken. The night begins at the western mountain, where the ram-headed god enters the world between the horns of the horizon, and proceeds hour by hour through territories whose population is organised with an administrator's clarity: the blessed dead in their fields, provisioned and vindicated, the hostile bound and consigned to destruction.
Recurring actors give the book its texture. Atum walks ahead of the barque dealing with the enemies of his father; the crew tow the vessel through each region; and Apophis, the great serpent of dissolution, is met and mastered not once but repeatedly, chained by his captors so the voyage can continue. In the fifth hour stands the composition's celebrated ethnography, four groups of four men, the peoples of Egypt, the Levant, Nubia and Libya, each drawn with distinct dress and skin, all alike under the shepherding of Horus and Sekhmet, the netherworld receiving the whole of humanity. The judgment hall of Osiris interrupts the sequence near its middle, enthroned god, scales and condemned enemies, the only such tribunal scene in the royal netherworld books, written partly in cryptographic script.