Gilgamesh the King

I had not yet felt the goddess-presence. Nor had I laid eyes on the priestess Inanna. Thus far Uruk had withheld the goddess from me, and I had moved only in the presence of the Sky-father, to whom my mother is dedicated. But I knew Inanna would be manifested to me shortly.

"Come," said Ninsun, and we crossed from the precinct of An to the precinct of Inanna, and up the steps of the White Platform toward the Enmerkar temple.

Inanna waited for me there.

The sight of her drew a gasp of amazement from me. In the four years of my absence, time had burned all the girlishness from her. She had entered into the deepest ripeness of her womanhood and her beauty had become overwhelming. Her dark eyes gleamed with the old wanton sparkle, but also with ~trange power where there had been mere mischief before. She seemed taller, and more slender, with the blades of her cheekbones sharply outlined; but her breasts were fuller than I remembered. Her deep-hued skin was shining with oil. The only garments she wore were the ornaments of the goddess, the earrings and the beads, the golden triangle at the loins, the hip-jewels and the nose-jewels and the navel-jewels.

I felt the heavy musky aura of goddess-presence and the buzzing aura of god-presence both at once. The slow steady beating of the drum penetrated my soul and invaded it utterly, so that the drum became me, and I became the drum. I felt myself stretched taut in the sunlight as the felt-covered paddles descended again and again. My eyes met Inanna's and I was drawn toward those dark immensities just as long ago I had been drawn toward the eyes of my father Lugalbanda, and I yielded myself for a moment and let myself drift into a pool of darkness.

She smiled, and it was a terrifying smile, the smile of the Inannaserpent.

In a low husky voice she said, "The king Dumuzi has become a god. The city is without a king. The goddess requires this service of you."

"I will serve," I said, as all my life I had known I was destined one day to say.

Though I knew that it was Agga and Inanna who had conspired to give me this throne, for reasons of their own advantage, that did not matter to me. When I was king, I would be king: no one would own me, no one would use me. So I vowed to myself: I would be king, when I was king. Let them tremble who thought to have it otherwise!

They had everything in readiness. At a signal from Inanna I was taken aside, into a small three-sided building adjoining the temple where the preparations for high services are done. There I was stripped and bathed by halfa dozen young priestesses, and then I was anointed in every part of my body with sweet-smelling oils, and my hair was combed and brushed and plaited and gathered behind my head, and they gave me a skirt of flounced wool to cover myself from my hips downward. Finally I gathered into my arms the gifts that a new king must offer to Inanna, and I went slowly forward from the robingroom out into the terrible blast of the summer sunlight, and to the vestibule of the Enmerkar temple. And went within to claim my kingship.

There were the three thrones, the one with the sign of Enlil, the one with the sign of An, and the one flanked by the reed-bundle of Inanna. There was the scepter. There was the crown. And there on the center throne sat Inanna, priestess and goddess, radiant now in all her awful majesty.

Her eyes met mine. She looked close upon me, as if to say: You are mine, you will belong to me. But I met her gaze steadily and evenly, as if to answer: You much misjudge me, lady, if that is whatyou think.

Then it began, the great ceremony, the prayer and the libations. About me stood the officers of Dumuzi's reign, the chamberlains and stewards and overseers and tax-gatherers and viceroys and governors, who soon would be dependent upon my mercies. The flutes sounded, the trumpets played. I lit a globe of black incense; I laid down my gifts before each of the thrones; I touched my forehead to the ground before Inanna, and kissed the ground, and gave the proper gifts to her. It seemed to me I had done this a thousand times. I felt new strength flowing through me as though my blood had doubled in volume, as though my breath was the breath of two men, and both of them giants.

Inanna rose from the throne. I saw the beauty of her long arms and graceful neck; I saw her breasts swaying beneath the blue necklaces of beads. "I am Ninpa the Lady of the Scepter," she said to me, and took the scepter from the throne of Enlil and handed it to me. "I am Ninmenna the Lady of the Crown," she said, and lifted the crown from the throne of An and let it rest upon my brow. Her eyes met mine; her gaze was burning, burning.

She spoke my birth-name, which would never again be heard in the world of mortals.

Then she said, "You are Gilgamesh, the great man of Uruk. So do the gods decree." And I heard the name from a hundred voices at once, like the roaring of the river in the time of flood: "Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh!"

THAT NIGHT I slept in the palace of the king, in the great bed of ebony and gold that had been my father's, and Enmerkar's before him. The family of Dumuzi had already departed from the place, all his wives, his plump doughy daughters; the gods had not granted him sons. Before I went to my bed I confirmed in their position all the officers of the kingdom, according to the tradition, though I knew I would remove most of them from office in the months to come. And I feasted most royally with them, until spilled beer ran in foaming torrents along the channels of the feasting-hall floor.

At the evening's end the chamberlain of the royal concubines asked me if I meant to have a woman with me in the night. I said that I did, as many as he could supply; and he supplied them all night, seven, eight, a dozen of them. From the eagerness of them I suppose

Dumuzi had been making little use of them. I embraced each one only once, and sent her out and called for the next. For a moment, in their arms, it seemed almost as ifI might be able to fill that hollow place within my soul that gave me such torment. Indeed I could- for a moment, for half an hour, and then the pain came rolling back in upon me like a storm cloud. One woman alone might have freed me from this distress, I thought. But that woman, the woman I would have chosen for myself that night had I been free to choose, was of course not for me to have-not then, not until the new year and the rite of the Sacred Marriage. But I allowed myself to imagine that I was with her, as I pressed my body against this concubine and that one.

At dawn I found that I still had vigor in me. I rose and went by foot, disdaining all bearers, to the cloister of the holy priestesses. There I asked for the priestess Abisimti, who had initiated me into manhood. It seemed to me that there was terror in her eyes, as much perhaps for my great height and strength as for the fact that I was now the king. I smiled and took her hand in mine, and said, "Think of me as that boy of twelve with whom you were so gentle."

I was not gentle with her that morning, I suspect. Great strength had come upon me, greater even than I had already had, simply from having assumed the kingship. And there was the godhood within me as well. Three times I had her, until she lay back panting fitfully, looking a little dazed and plainly hoping I was sated. Nothing could have sated me that day; but for her sake I spared her further toil. Abisimti was as beautiful as I remembered her, with skin like cool water and breasts round as pomegranates; but her beauty was to Inanna's as the moon is to the sun.

So passed my first day in the kingship. Hour by hour I felt the power and the greatness flowing into me. On my second day I received homage from the assembly of the city.

If a stranger were to ask how the king of Uruk is chosen, why, any citizen of the city would reply that he is chosen by the assembly. And in truth that is the case; but that is not the entire case.

The assembly elects, but the gods direct, and in particular it is Inanna, speaking through her priestess, who makes known the one who is to be king. Nor does the kingship pass automatically, as it does in Kish and as I hear it does in many other cities, to the son of the king. We understand these matters differently. We think that there is a divine inwardness that some men have, a kind of grace, which makes them fit to be king. If that grace happens to pass from father to son, as it had from Enmerkar to Lugalbanda, and from Lugalbanda to m~, it is only because a father often passes his traits to his son-his stature, his breadth of shoulders, the turn of his nose, and, perhaps, his kingliness. But it does not necessarily happen that way. Not all our kings have been the sons of kings.

Once the assembly has chosen the king, the assembly may only advise, not command. If there is disagreement between the assembly and the king, the king's wishes will prevail. This is not tyranny; this is the inherent outcome of the correct choice of king. For, mark you well, in time of crisis and doubt it is vital that a city speak with a single voice. And have the gods not indicated which voice that voice should be, by making him the king? The assembly, in its discourse with the king, tunes that voice as a harper tunes his strings; but when the voice speaks, it is the voice of the king, which is to say, it is the voice of the city, it is the voice of heaven. And if the king in his speech does not speak with heaven's voice, everyone will know it, and heaven will cast him from his place.

These matters were much on my mind when the men of the assembly paid their ceremonial call on me in the audience-chamber of the palace. First came the free citizens, what we have always called the house of men: those who speak for the boatmen and fishermen, the farmers and cattlebreeders, the scribes and jewelers and carpenters and masons. They passed through, and put down their gifts before me, and touched their hands to my ankles in the customary way. When that was done, the elders of the assembly came, those who speak for the great estates, the princely families, the priestly clans. Their gifts were more weighty, their scrutiny of me more intense. I met their gaze evenly and with assurance. I was aware that I was the youngest man in the room, younger than any of the elders, younger than any of the house of men. But I was king.

I felt the sacred force that is a king's glory, and I revelled in it. But even then a dark shadow lay upon my joy, for I remembered Lugalbanda lying upon his alabaster bier, and I remembered the day I had stood by the city wall and watched the corpses of the poor go floating down the river. I was mindful always of the bleak jest the gods have played upon us, even on those who are of a greatness approaching theirs: Never forget that you are mortal, never Jbrget that you have but a brief moment of grandeur and then you are dragged off to the House of Dust and Darkness. Such matters chilled my warmest moments. Yet I was young; yet I was strong; I pushed the thought of death from me as often as it arose within me, and told myself, as I had when I was a child: Death, I will de, at you! Death, I will devour you.t

"All during the time of Dumuzi," said the great landowner Enlilennam, "we waited for your return. For Lugalbanda is within you."

I looked at him, startled. Was that fact such common knowledge in Uruk? But then I realized that he meant it only as a manner of speaking. It was merely as if he said, Lugalbanda's bloodflows in your veins. And everyone knew that.

"It has been a dark time for us," said white-haired Ali-ellati, whose standing of nobility could be traced back ninety thousand years. "Signs and omens became confused. The gods gave no clear answers. The portents were sinister. We lived in fear and foreboding. It was because of the king. Yes: because of the king."

"And what manner of king was Dumuzi?" I asked.

"Well, he was not Lugalbanda,' Enlil-ennam said, smirking broadly. "He was not Enmerkar."

"He was not even Dumuzi," said Lu-Meshlam, whose estates were like a little kingdom in themselves. "Sufficient to be Dumuzi, if one cannot be Enmerkar. But he was not even Dumuzi!" And they all laughed at that.

"What are you telling me?" I asked.

Piece by piece they unfolded a tale of weak and sorry kingship, this one speaking a little while, then another taking up the story. A silly man, swollen with pride-ill-starred projects, abortive military adventures, the raising to power of upstarts and nonentities, foolish quarrels with the great men of the city, neglect of the rituals, public funds consumed on absurdities while necessities went unrepairedJ the sad account went on and on. Once the dam was broken, the flow of their accusations was unending. I felt some embarrassment for their sake, listening to it all: for who had put Dumuzi forth to be king, at the time of my father's death, if not they? The old priestess Inanna must have had a reason for proposing him, and they for accepting him, and I think that reason must have been that he was pliant and malleable, very soft metal indeed. But the nine years of his kingship had not, so it seemed, brought them the advantage they had hoped to hav~ out of it. Which was small surprise, if they had knowingly chosen a weak man. So now they were turning, eagerly, gladly, hopefully, to a stronger one, in whose veins the blood of greatness flowed. I could not help feeling some scorn for their folly. But I was swift to pardon them. They saw their error; they were redeeming themselves now from it; and, if they had not comported themselves according to the way of the gods when they chose Dumuzi, so be it. The fault had not been theirs. The fault was the gods'.

"Tell me of the death of Dumuzi," I said.

They became evasive. "Heaven withdrew the kingship from him," said Lu-Meshlam, and the others nodded sagely.

"I understand that," I said impatiently. "But how did he die?"

They looked at one another. No one would speak. I had to draw it from them. A lingering, horrible death, they said. A slow wasting away, in great pain. The gods forsook him and many demons entered him: Ashakku, Namtaru, Utukku, Alu, the fever-maker, the sick maker, the evil spirit, the diabolical one. No door could shut them from his body. No bolt would turn them back. Through the gate ways of Dumuzi they glided like snakes. Through the hinges of his spirit they blew like the wind. The diviners had struggled mightily, but there was no healing him, not even any understanding of the malady that consumed him.

The old priest Arad-Nanna said, when the elders were done with this grim recital, "His mistake was in the choice of his name. There is a doom upon Dumuzi that was proclaimed at the first day of time.

How could he have hoped to escape it, with such a name, in this city of all cities?"

I was preoccupied with other thoughts at that moment and I suppose I did not pay close attention to those words of Arad-Nanna. Only afterward, when I sat alone thinking these matters through, did I see their likely meaning. In this city of all cities. The city of Inanna, he meant. Who is the ultimate ruler of Uruk, beyond assembly, beyond king? Why, it is the goddess, and none other! And it is in the nature of the goddess that she is destined to destroy the god Dumuzi, the holy shepherd: we have that tale taught us from childhood. Had the priestess Inanna re-enacted, with the king Dumuzi, the downfall that the goddess Inanna works each year in heaven upon the god Dumuzi? Everything cried out yes to that. She had sent me that seal-cylinder, while I was still in Kish, showing the death of Dumuzi, the triumph of Inanna, and I had taken it for word that she was casting some spell which would bring an end to him. But had she settled for mere spells, or had she made use of actual potions? I thought back through what they had told me of the king's sufferings, his fevers, his agonies, his wasting away. And I grew uneasy. If Inanna could slay one king, she might slay another, when she saw fit. And in Uruk every king plays the role of Dumuzi to the goddess, whether his name be Dumuzi in fact, or Lugalbanda, or Enmerkar-or Gilgamesh.

This I pondered, Inanna and Dumuzi, Dumuzi and Inanna. My mind returned, as it often had since my childhood, to that tale of her descent into hell, in that time when she longed for conquest beyond her allotted realm.

Holding sway over heaven and earth was not enough for her. She must also have the nether world, the realm where her older sister,

Ereshkigal, rules. So she dons her great scarlet robes of power, her crown, her double strand of lapis beads, her breastplate, her ring, the lapis measuring-rod and line of her authority; and she goes to that place in Uruk which is the gateway to hell, and makes her way downward. "If I do not return in three days," she tells the goddess

Ninshubur, her vizier, her right hand, "get you to Father Enlil, beg him to set me free."

At the first gate of the nether world the gatekeeper blocks her way and demands to know why she has come. She offers a false answer, but the gatekeeper is not deceived; he has instructions from his queen Ereshkigal to deprive Inanna of her power and bring her to humility. And so at the first gate the gatekeeper takes her crown from the goddess; and at the second gate he demands the lapis beads; and thus it is at each of the seven gates, until the scarlet royal robe itself is taken from her, and she enters the throne-room of Ereshkigal naked, bowing down low. For anyone who comes before the queen of the nether world must do so naked, even if she be the queen of heaven. What a humbling for proud Inanna! Nor is she given the chance to assail her sister's throne: the judges of the lower realm surround her at once, they utter their judgment, and Ereshkigal fastens the eye of death on her. Just like that, Inanna is slain. Her corpse, like a side of rotting meat, is 'hung from a peg on the wall. And there she remains, for a day and a second day and a third, and in the world it is wintertime, for Inanna is gone from it.

Then Ninshubur takes herself to Father Enlil and begs mercy for the dead Inanna; but Enlil will not lift a hand to save her. Nor will Nanna of the moon, to whom Ninshubur turns next. But the wise and compassionate Enki, who knows the water of life, is willing to come to her aid. Enki sends two messengers into the nether world, and they find Ereshkigal in the pangs of childbirth. "We can lift this pain from you," they tell her, but they must have a gift in return, and the gift they ask is the corpse of Inanna. Ereshkigal yields; the envoys ease her pain; and then they take the dead Inanna from the wall and restore her to life. But she must not leave the nether world,

Ereshkigal insists, unless she provides someone in her place.

Ah, and who will Inanna send? Why, who else but Dumuzi her husband? He sits upon his splendid throne beneath the great apple tree in Uruk, clad in shining garments and all unmoved by Inanna's torments. Yes, Dumuzi will be the one. Where is Inanna's love? Ah, there is no love! It is her life or Dumuzi's, and she does not hesitate. Dumuzi has shown no grief over Inanna's disappearance; perhaps he feels well rid of his troublesome consort. And so he is doomed. She looks upon him with the eyes of death, and cries out to seven demons, "Seize him! Take him away!" The demons take him by his thighs; they break the flute that he has been playing; they gash him with axes so that his blood pours forth. He flees. They follow. He appeals to the gods to spare him, and they aid him in his flight, but Inanna is implacable, and at last he is seized and slain and carried down into hell. It is the time when the great death of summer settles over the Land, that time when Dumuzi is taken away. In summer he must die, though he returns in the autumn, with the rains, with the new year, to celebrate the Sacred Marriage with Inanna and bring about the new birth of all things. Where is the mercy of Inanna, in this tale? There is no mercy. Inanna is a force that will not be gainsaid. Dumuzi must die, he who is the king, he who is the god.

To all this I gave most careful thought. Inanna had made me king, that much was certain: she and Agga both, working in some sly alliance. She had made me, but she could unmake me also. I would be on my guard, I resolved, against any further playing out in Uruk of the tale of the goddess and god.

On the third day of my kingship, Inanna summoned me. When the goddess beckons, even the king must hasten.

We met in a small room of the temple, not at all majestic, with pink-washed walls and a few lopsided rickety chairs that a poor scribe would have deemed too shabby for his house. She wore a plain robe and her face was unpainted. Two days earlier she had been goddess and priestess both, terrible in her majesty and overwhelming in her beauty. The woman I saw now had not troubled this day to assume the goddess. Her beauty was with her at any time, but the grandeur of it did not shine forth. It was just as well; I had had little sleep in my two nights of kingship, and confronting Inanna in her majesty is an exhausting business for anyone, even one who is in part a god.

I wanted to have the truth from her concerning Dumuzi's death. But how could I ask it outright? "Did he die at your hands? Did you drop poison in his bowl, priestess?" No. No. Should I say, "I am grateful for your slaying my predecessor, so I might have his throne"? No. Or, perhaps, "I am young and new in these matters of state. Tell me, is it the custom for the goddess to murder a worthless king, when the city can no longer tolerate his worthlessness?" No. Nor did I choose to bring up the old matter of my having been forced into exile: "Did D umuzi grow so suddenly frightened of me, perhaps, because you happened to tell him that the spirit of Lugalbanda had entered into me?"

No, I said none of these things. Nor did she, who had looked upon me with such fierce hunger in years gone by, favor me with the flashing eyes now, the savage grin of triumph, the fiery embrace toward which her scheming had been directed so long. She took care to convey to me nothing but what was fitting between priestess and king on the first ceremonial visit of his reign: cool formality, a strict observance of the rites. Inanna and the king are not meant to embrace in passion, except on the night of the Sacred Marriage, and that is but once a year.

So in the appropriate phrases she congratulated me upon my ascension, and offered me her blessing; and [, just as formally, pledged myself to serve the goddess in kingly manner. We shared sweet wine from a single bowl, and ate of the charred meat of an ox that had been sacrificed at dawn. When all that was done, we talked, like two old friends who 'had not seen one another for a long while, of the past, of our first meeting in the Enmerkar temple, events of my boyhood, how tall and strong I had grown in the four years of my exile, and so on and so on, but everything offhand and distant. She spoke of the death of certain princes and great men while I had been away. That led her eventually to the subject of the death of Dumuzi: she looked sad, she sighed, she cast down her eyes, as though the king's passing had been a great sorrow to her. I searched her face but saw no clues. "With my own hands I ministered to him," said Inanna. "I put cool cloths on his forehead. I mixed the medications myself, the quunabu and the kushumma, the duashbur seeds, the root of nigmi and arina. But nothing availed. From day to day he withered and shrank." I felt a chill, as she talked of mixing medicines for Dumuzi, and wondered what devilish things she had mixed into those powders to hasten him onward to the next world. But I did not ask. I think I know what truths lay beneath my unspoken questions. But I did not ask.

NOW THE full weight of kingship fell upon me, and it was far heavier a burden than I had ever imagined. Nevertheless I think I bore it well.

There were the rituals to perform, the offerings and sacrifices. I expected that. But so many, so many! The Feast of the Eating of Barley, the Feast of the Eating of Gazelles, the Feast of the Blood of Lions, this feast and that one, a calendar of ceremonies that was unsparing of the king's time and strength. The gods are insatiable. They must be fed constantly. I had not been king ten days when I found myself wholeheartedly sick of the reek of roasting flesh and the thick sweet smell of freshly poured blood. You must understand that I was still hardly more than a boy: I knew it was my duty, all this ritual, but I would rather by far have been cracking heads together in the wrestling-house, or hurling javelins on the field of war, than spending my days and nights at spilling the blood of beasts in these high ceremonies. Yet I moved past that early revulsion, and performed my tasks as I knew I must. The king is not only the leader in warfare and spokesman of the gods in matters of statecraft; he is the highest of the high priests, which is a formidable job.

So on the proper evening I would come forth on the roof of the temple of An in the first night watch, when the star of An had appeared, and preside at the golden table where a feast for the Skyfather had been laid out, with food also for the wife of An and for the seven wandering stars. To these great ones I offered the flesh of cattle, sheep, and birds, beer of the best quality, and the wine of dates, poured from a golden ewer. I made an offering of every kind of fruit, and spread honey and aromatic spices on the seven golden incense burners. I went around to each of the four horns of the altar and kissed it to renew its holiness.

I drank wine and beer and milk and honey, and even oil, until my stomach was bloated from it. In some rites I had to sip from ewers of blood, which I never have come gladly to do. I wore heavy robes for certain rituals and in others I was altogether naked. There was never a night without some observance, and often there were some by day, as well. The gods must be fed. I began to feel like a cook and a serving-boy.

And like a butcher also, sometimes. For one rite they brought me a sacrificial ox too fat to stand: it looked like a great tub of fat. It peered at me with great brown sad eyes as if it knew I was its death approaching, but it was too placid to protest. They held its head up and put the blade in my hand. "The gods created you for this moment,'' I told it. "Now I return you to them." I cut its throat with a single stroke. The ox, panting, sighing, sank on its forelimbs, but was a long time dying; I thought I heard it weep. I let its warm blood gush over my naked skin until I was slippery with it from head to toe. This is what it is to be a king in Uruk.

There were restrictions and constraints upon me. On this day of the month I could not eat beef, and on that one I might not have pork, and on another I was forbidden any cooked meat at all. On a certain day it was perilous for me to eat garlic; on another day, for the sake of the security of the commonwealth, I was required to abstain from intercourse with women; on a day of setting-out of boundary-stones in the fields I must not go within sight of the river; and so forth. Many of these things seemed absurd to me, but I observed them all. Some of them I still perform. But some I have discarded with the years, and I have never seen any hardship come to me or to Uruk for my having done that.

These obligations and burdens of kingship grew less oppressive as I became accustomed to them. Now and again I found myself yearning for the freer and more vigorous life I had led as a warrior of Kish; but such feelings passed quickly by, like the birds of winter that flash silver in the blue sky. I did what was required of me, and did it ungrudgingly. A king who grudges his own tasks is no king, but a mere imposter.

There was one rite I would have performed not merely ungrudgingly, but altogether eagerly. But I had begun my reign at the height of summer; that one that had to wait until the new year. I speak of the Sacred Marriage, when Inanna would at last lie in my arms.

At last the heat abated and that soft sweet wind, the Cheat, swept out of the south. The scent of the warm sea travels on that wind; I stood a long time on the terrace of the palace by myself, breathing deep, drawing it into my lungs. It is the harbinger, I thought. The season now changes; the rains return; the time arrives for tilling and sowing. And before the fields may be sown, the goddess must be. I trembled with anticipation.

That morning the chamberlain in charge of such things told me I must cease lying with the palace concubines now, for the festivaltime was nigh. The days of purification had arrived, when the seed of the king must be dedicated entirely to Inanna. I laughed and said that I would gladly make that sacrifice, though within a day or two I had other thoughts about that. I have always felt the surge of desire as the shore feels the surge of the sea, that is, something that comes steadily, insistently, unceasingly. Nothing can check the sea-surge; and when I sought to check that other surge within myself, I found it almost as difficult as it would have been to halt the waves from crashing against the beach. I had not gone without a woman's embrace for as much as half a day since coming into manhood, I think. Now I decreed for myself a great drought of the passions, that parched my blood most amazingly. It was a very hard time for me. I withstood it, but only because I knew that my reward would be Inanna, coming to me as the cool winter rains do after the hellish summer.

All ordinary business of the city halted. The festival preparations began, the repair and cleansing of buildings, the sacrifices, the fumigations, the pa~ades. Exorcists were busy in every part of Uruk, driving the demons beyonds the walls. Priests marched out into the dry fields and sprinkled them with holy water from golden ewers. Those who belonged to the unclean castes went to their temporary villages outside the city, and anyone who was a stranger to Uruk also was asked to leave.

I remained secluded in the palace, fasting, bathing, eating no meat, touching no woman. All day long I breathed the fumes of sacred royal incense, burning in long-legged braziers. I slept hardly at all, but spent my nights in prayer and chanting. Gods came and went in my bedchamber, great shadowy figures who stood by my side a little while. One night I felt the presence of Enlil; on another, I woke from a light doze to see the hooded figure of Enki before me, with eyes blazing like red embers. The visits of these gods and others left me cold with dread. No one, not even a king, can go easy in such presences. If there had been some good friend by my side then whom I loved, it would have been less difficult for me to face those spirits. But in that time I was alone. They walked about my room and passed through me as though I were not there, and each time they did I felt a bleak gray wind blowing into me out of the nether world. At this season of the year, when the dry death that is summer still grips the Land, the nether world is very close: its mouth lies just below the gateway that opens into Uruk.

Gungunum, the high priest of An, came to me on the third morning. My servants dressed me in the fullest of my royal regalia, and I went with him to the chapel of the palace. There I knelt before the Sky-father. Then Gungunum stripped me of all my ornaments of rank, and slapped my face, and pulled my ears, and otherwise humbled me before the god, and made me swear that I had nothing that was evil in the sight of the gods; and when that was finished, he lifted me and dressed me with his own hands, and gave me back my kingship.

Afterward he handed me a bowl that contained tender slivers of the heart of the palm, the young bud of the date tree. We hold this tree to be holy, for it has as many uses as there are days in the year, and gives us food and drink, and fibres for ropes and nets, and wood for our furniture, and everything else: it is a godly tree. So I took the bowl from the priest and ate the slivers of the heart of the palm, and Dumuzi immediately entered into me.

I mean the god Dumuzi, of course, not that silly shallow king who had taken that name upon himself. The heart of the palm is the power of the tree to produce new fruit, and when I ate it, that power, which is Dumuzi the god, passed into me. All fertility now was embodied in me. I was the rainfall; I was the rising sap; I was the flower; I was the seed. I was the force that could engender dates and barley, wheat and figs. From me would come the rivers. From me would flow wine and beer, milk and cream. The god throbbed within me, and I was bursting with the new life of the new year. When I looked down at my naked body I saw the rigid scepter of my maleness standing out far in front of me like a third arm, and there was a pulsing within it.

But Dumuzi without Inanna is useless. It was time now for me to release the power of the god into her receptive loins.

So, then-at last, at last-the night of the Sacred Marriage was at hand. The moon had vanished into the place of its slumber. That morning I had bathed in pure water from the font of the temple of

An, and then handmaidens oiled my body, omitting no part of it, using the golden oil pressed from the richest of dates. I put on my crown and my robe, leaving the upper half of my body bare. They took me to the dark windowless Dumuzi-house at the edge of the city, where I spent half the day in silence, emptying my mind of everything but the god. I tell you that I was like a man in a dream, void of all self, possessed entirely by Dumuzi. And at nightfall I went by boat-the journey must be done by water, so that the king glides into the city as seed does into the womb-to the quay nearest the Eanna precinct, and from there on foot to the White Platform and the temple where the goddess awaited me.

I mounted the Platform at its western end, looking neither to the left nor to the right. I led a black-fleeced sheep by a leather leash, and held a tiny kid resting on my arm, as offerings to Inanna. I suppose the air was warm or cool that night, and the stars were bright or perhaps veiled by mist, and possibly there was a breeze on which the perfume of young blossoms drifted, or possibly not. I could not tell you. I saw and felt nothing, except the gleaming temple before me, and the smooth brick of the Platform beneath my bare feet.

I entered the temple and gave the kid to a priestess and the sheep to a priest, and went to the long chamber. Inanna stood there. If I live twelve thousand years I will never see a sight more glorious.

She was as bright as a polished shield. She glistened in her splendor. They had bathed her, they had anointed her, they had draped her nakedness with ivory and gold and lapis lazuli and silver. Sheaths of alabaster surrounded her thighs and a triangle of gold lay over her loins. Clear blocks of lapis rested upon her breasts. Strands of gold braided were woven through her hair. But those were mere ornaments. I had seen them all before, worn by her on the night of her first Sacred Marriage to Dumuzi, and worn by her predecessor in the time of Lugalbanda. What awed me was not the magnificence of her jewelry but the magnificence of the goddess that shined through from beneath. Just as I had become the embodiment of the virile power-there was that insistent throbbing between my legs to remind me of that-so too was she the blazing essence of the female, now. From that golden triangle at the base of her belly came wave upon wave of intense power, like the brightness of the sun.

Smiling, she extended her hands toward me, fingertips outstretched. Her eyes met mine. I leaped back across the chasm of years to that moment, in this very temple, when the girl Inanna had found me wandering, and stroked me and spoke my name, and looked into my eyes and told me that I would be king, and that she would lie in my arms one day: my cheek against the little' buds of her breasts, her perfume pungent in my nostrils. Now indeed everything that she had prophesied had befallen, and we stood face to face in the temple on the night of the Sacred Marriage, and her dark eyes, gleaming like onyx by torchlight, were ablaze with goddess-fire.

"Hail, Inanna!" I whispered.

"Hail, royal husband, fountain of life."

"My holy jewel."

"My husband. My true destined love."

Then she laughed a very human laugh. "See? It has all come to pass. Has it not? Has it not?"

I heard the music of the showing-forth. My fingers touched hers-just the tips, but it was fire! fire!-and together we walked down the corridor and out upon the porch of the temple. The door swung open before us. The bright crescent of the new moon rose above the temple. A thousand pairs of eyes stared back at me out of the night.

We spoke the words of the rites. We sipped from the flask of honey, and poured the vessel of barley out on the ground. We stood with joined hands during the singing of the hymn of the showing forth. Three naked priests pronounced blessings. The blood of the kid, my gift, was daubed on my forearm and on her cheek. The seared meat of my other gift, the sheep, was offered to us on plates of gold, and we took one mouthful each. It took me twelve hundred years to swallow that little morsel of meat.

Once again we entered the temple, preceded and surrounded by priestesses and priests, musicians, dancers, all leaping and chanting about us as we made our way to the bedchamber of the goddess. It was a small high-vaulted room, strewn with soft green rushes made sweet-smelling with oil of cedar. The bed that was at its center was of the blackest ebony, inlaid with ivory and gold. A sheet of the finest linen covered it, bearing the emblem of Inanna. All about the bed lay heaps of freshly harvested dates, still clustered as they had come from the tree: the true treasure of the Land, more precious than any gem. She broke one date from a cluster and put it tenderly in my mouth, and then I made the same offering to her.

You may think that at this point I was maddened with desire and impatience. But no, no, the god was in me and I had a god's divine calmness. How many years in the making had this Marriage been? What did a few minutes more matter, now? I remained tranquil while the priestesses of Inanna removed the jewels from her, the beads, the alabaster sheaths, the rings, the ornaments of her ears, her eyes, her hips, her navel. They took from her the beads that covered her bosom, and laid bare her breasts, which were high and round and stood forth like those of a girl, although she was past twenty. They lifted the latch of her golden loin-covering and revealed to me the inner zone of her womanhood, dark and deeply thatched and richly perfumed. And then the same women undid my robe and uncovered my body; and when we were both naked they went from the room and left us with each other.

I went close to her. I stood before her. I watched the rising and falling of her breasts. She drew her tongue across her lips, slowly, making them gleam. Her eyes traveled shamelessly over my body; and mine made the journey over hers, lingering at fullness of breast, breadth of thigh, the dense rich nether beard that concealed the well of womanhood. I took her lightly by the hand and led her toward the couch.

For a moment, as my body hovered above hers, my god-self flickered and went from me and my mortal self returned. And I thought of all the intricacies of my dealings with this woman, how she had baffled and bewildered me. I thought of her wantonness, her dark playfulness, her mystery, her power. I thought also of that other Dumuzi, the mortal one, whom she had embraced year after year in this same rite, and then, when he was of no further use to her, had casually slain. Then the god reasserted himself in me and all these thoughts went from me, and I said, as the god must say to the goddess in this moment, "I am the shepherd, I am the ploughman, I am the king: I am the bridegroom. Let the goddess rejoice!"

I will not tell you what further words passed between us on that night. The things that the goddess must say to the god, and the god to the goddess, you already know, for those words are the same every year; and the things that the priestess said to the king, and the king to the priestess, can easily be guessed, and are of no interest. Besides god and goddess and king and priestess, there were also a man and a woman in that room; and as to the words that were said by the woman to the man and by the man to the woman, why, I think they are the secrets of that woman and that man, and I will not tell them, though I have told so much else. Let those words remain our mystery. The greater mystery that we performed that night, you can imagine. You know what rites of lips and nipples, of buttocks and hands, of mouths and loins, must be acted out by the sacred couple. Her skin was hot, burning like the ice of the northern mountains. Her nipples were hard as alabaster in my hands. We did all that must be done, before the final thing, and when it was the moment for that, we knew it without saying it. To enter her was to glide in honey. As we joined, she laughed, and I knew it to be as much the laughter of the girl of the corridor as the goddess on high. I also laughed, to be having the fulfillment of my desire after so long a waiting; and then our laughter was lost in a deeper, heavier sound. When we moved together, she spoke in babbling phrases that I did not know; the woman-language, the goddesslanguage of the Old Way. Her eyes rolled upward so that I saw only the whites. Then my own eyes closed, and I gripped her tightly with both my arms. The god-power, flowing from me like liquid fire, brought the goddess-power within her to its fruition. In the outpouring of my seed the new year was born. A cry of rejoicing burst from my lips, and from hers, and we heard the answering melodies of the musicians who waited outside the bedchamber. It was then that we spoke with each other, first with our eyes and our smiles, then with words. In a little while we began the rite anew, and then again, and again and again, until the dawn brought the new year's blessing to us, and we went quietly from the temple to stand naked in the gentle rain that our coupling had summoned into the Land.

SO, THEN, passed the night of the Sacred Marriage, when Inanna and I were united at last. But it was the goddess and the god who had been married, not the priestess and the king; and once the festival was over, we went on in our separate lives, she in the isolation of her temple, I amidst my concubines in the palace. I did not so much as set eyes on her again for some weeks. When I did, at the rite of casting wheat-seed, she treated me in a cool and formal way. That was right and proper: but I hated it. The taste of her was still on my tongue. Yet I knew I would not embrace her a second time until the season of the new year had come round again, twelve months hence. I ached from that knowledge.

Ties of ritual and responsibility kept us in constant communication, all the same. In Uruk the king is the right arm of the goddess, and her sword; and she is the holy staff on which he leans. Without the goddess, there would be no king; without the king, the goddess could not touch the souls of the people. So they are forever joined, twin centers of the city, one revolving about the other and all else revolving about both of them.

The gentle rain of Tashritu gave way, early in the month Arahsamna, to rains that were not gentle at all: torrential downpours that came sweeping out of the north nearly every day. The dry soil drank greedily at first, but soon its thirst was slaked, and still the storms roared across the Land. In this time I began to give close thought to the condition of the canals. They had not been kept in proper repair during the last year of the reign of Dumuzi. If the rains continued with such force and the silt were not cleared from the canals we might very well suffer from flooding by early spring.

I was deep in the midst of these matters, conferring with my waterchamberlain and my overseer of canals and three or four other high officials, when my viceroy of the palace entered the royal chamber. A priest of the temple of Enmerkar, he said, had come with a message from Inanna. She had urgent need of me. A demon, it seemed, had taken up residence in her huluppu-tree, and I must drive it away.

My mind was full of the needs of the canals, and I made no attempt, I suppose, to veil my impatience. I looked at the viceroy in amazement and said bluntly, "Can she find no other exorcist?"

There was some muttering from the officials who sat at the table with me. I heard their disapproving tone, and thought at first that they were as annoyed as I was by this interruption of our work; but no, what troubled them was my surly refusal, not Inanna's ill-timed request. They peered at me uneasily. For a moment no one would speak.

Then the overseer of canals murmured, not looking directly at me, "It lies in the province of the king to do such tasks, my lord, when they are asked of him." Sudden perspiration put a sheen on his face.

I spread my hands wide before him. "We have important work-"

"The summons of Inanna may not be ignored, O majesty," said my viceroy softly, touching his forehead with the greatest tact.

"The canals m" I said.

"The goddess," said the water-chamberlain.

"Do all of you feel this way?" I asked, glancing about me at them all.

This time no one spoke. But there was no mistaking their insistence. I yielded, and I yielded smiling.! know no other way to yield, but with a smile. What could I do? There was no help for it: busy as I was, I must go at once to the temple, and rid Inanna's tree of its demon.

This huluppu-tree was, and for that matter still is, a great towering thing of graceful weeping boughs, which was planted by the goddess in the garden of her temple five thousand years ago. The ground where it grows is so holy that a pinch of the black soil from its roots is enough to cure many ailments of the spirit; in springtime barren women come to it and embrace its trunk, and many are made fertile by the dripping of its sap; and a green tea is brewed from its leaves that is sometimes used in divining the future. It is a noble and sacred tree, and I would not have had it come to any harm. But it seemed to me that Inanna might well have looked after her own tree just then, and left me free to look after the canals.

In the second watch of the morning-the rain had stopped for a time; the sky was bright and clear, the air had the newly washed scent of early winter-I went to the temple garden in the company of a band of the younger men of the palace. The huluppu-tree, vast and spreading, stood in the northeast corner of the enclosure, looming above everything else. Half a dozen wailing priestesses stood close beside it, and a dozen old women of the city shuffled slowly in a wide circle about it, chanting a tuneless dirge.

One did not need to be an expert gardener to know that something was amiss with the tree. The rain had swept nearly all of its long narrow leaves from it, and they lay piled in huge mounds. Those that had not yet fallen were withered and yellowing, and the branches themselves looked limp and lax. I went to it and put my hands against its thick wrinkled bark, as though trying to feel the demon that had taken up residence within it. But all I felt was thick wrinkled bark.

I had brought with me a certain Lugal-amarku, a little hunchbacked man with black eyebrows that met above his nose, who knew spells and exorcisms. He put his hands to the tree too, and pulled them back as though they had been burned.

"Well?" I said. "What do you discover?"

"Not one demon, my lord. Three!"

"Ah," I said. "Three, is it?" That was tiresome. I thought of the silt clogging the canals, and the rain that surely would return in a few days. Three demons, then? Three?

From behind me came a whispering of the priestesses and the old women. I looked about, and saw Inanna striding toward me, heedless of the muddy ground that flecked her white robe at every step. It was only the second time I had seen her since the dawn following the Sacred Marriage. Instantly there flashed into my mind the vision of that night, Inanna before me, her face hot and flushed, her breasts heaving. But the vision passed. Brusquely she made toward me the sign that the high priestess makes when she greets the king, and I made the goddess-sign to her.

"You must save the tree," she said immediately.

"It houses three demons, I am told."

"Ah, you see that also?"

I nodded toward Lugal-amarku. "Not I. He sees it."

The hunchback said, turning his palms outward modestly, "It is apparent, my lady."

"So it is," she said, and went to the tree. She glanced toward me. "Here: look. The snake who knows no charm has made his dwelling here. And in the crown of the tree the Imdugud-bird has built her nest, and rears her young. And here, in the trunk: the vampire Lilitu now resides, the maid of desolation, the eater of souls."

I stared. Inanna's words fell upon me like the tolling of leaden bells. Was this what it was, to be king in Uruk? Must I carry out some impossible task every morning, and three to do on special days? The snake who knows no charm? The Imdugud-bird? The vampire Lilitu? There was indeed a hole in the ground at the base of the tree, opening between two of the huge tangled roots. I peered in, but I saw nothing. Nor could I see a nest in the crown, nor any demon-house in the middle of the trunk. I glanced from Inanna to Lugal-amarku, and back toward Inanna again. Three demons, and my task to drive them out! If only I could shrug, and walk away, and return to my palace to grapple with problems that could be seen and felt! But I could not. I must do Inanna's bidding in this thing, or all Uruk would know within the hour that Gilgamesh had shirked his tasks and that he feared the invisible world. I felt such despair as I cannot tell you, as I stood there thinking, ah, my canals, my canals, my canals!

Then I said, "We will deal with these things, and quickly."

I gave orders to Lugal-amarku to concoct a potion so foul, so stinking, that no creature could resist it, not even the snake who knows no charm. Bring it here within the hour, I told him. I sent one of the men of my band-he was the warrior Bir-hurturre, my old schoolmate and boyhood tormentor, now taken into my closest counsel-back to the palace to fetch my great axe. And I bade the priestesses to get me a length of thick and sturdy rope from the Enmerkar temple. We would deal with these demons then and there.

Even so early in my reign I had come to my basic idea of governing, which is that everything may be achieved through decisiveness and the show of clear determination.

The hunchback returned, not in an hour but in half that time, carrying a deep brazen beaker filled with some bubbling yellow stuff, flecked with bits of green and red, a substance so noxious and pestilent that I was surprised it did not eat holes in the bronze. He looked proud of himself. I clapped him lustily on his hump, rubbing it hard for luck, and cried, "This will do it, by Enlil! There's nothing better for the job!"

Gagging and half puking from the stench, I took the beaker from him and emptied it into the hole at the base of the tree. The earth hissed as that stuff touched it. I will offer an oath that the edges of the hole drew back as if in loathing. We waited. The snake who knows no charm obeys neither An nor Enlil nor even Inanna, the mistress of all serpents. But in moments there was a stirring in the earth, and angry yellow eyes flared within the hole, and a forked black tongue came flickering forth.

"Give me my axe," I said quietly to Bir-hurturre.

Slowly, slowly, the snake glided from its hole. Its skin was dark as night, with bands of yellow upon it, and its supple body was nearly of the thickness of my arm. Behind me, the priestesses chanted holy names over and over and over, and even my own men were whispering incantations of defense. Yet I felt no fear of it, perhaps because it looked so forlorn, so sickened and bemired by Lugalamarku's dreadful fluid. Ordinarily I am not one to slay an enemy whom I have at such a disadvantage; but there was no time for such tender niceties now. I raised my axe and in a single swift blow split that serpent in two. The sundered halves coiled and uncoiled and leaped wildly, and from the mouth of the snake came a wild roaring, and I think it meant to spit its venom upon me, but I was not harmed. I heard sobbing and prayer behind me.

After a few moments the snake lay still.

"One," I said.

Now I took the thick rope from the temple, and wound it about the trunk of the tree, and tied it behind my back in such a way that when I put my feet against the tree and held the rope I could pull myself upward, and walk, more or less, up the side of the tree. This

I did, higher and higher, climbing with ease. The bark was rough and ridged, and from it, as I bruised it with my feet, came the fragrance of almond blossoms, or of heavy wine.

Soon I reached the middle of the trunk, where they had told me the demoness Lilitu was making her home, that dark maid who dwells in ruined places and brings sorrow on wayfarers. I suppose that if I had allowed myself pause to think, I would have felt sore afraid. But there are times when it is perilous to pause to think. I held both ends of the rope in one hand and slapped the other lustily against the trunk. "Lilitu? Lilitu? Do you hear me? I am Gilgamesh king of Uruk." I laughed, to show I had no dread of her. "Hear me, Lilitu! I forbid you this tree, which is Inanna's! I forbid you! I forbid you! Begone, begone, begone!" Would she obey? I believed she would. Inanna's name has great power among such creatures. I slapped the trunk twice more, but did not wait for an answer, and went climbing higher.

"Two," I said.

In the crown of the tree, so Inanna had said, the Imdugud-bird nested her young. I peered through the close-packed branches and did not see her, but it seemed to me that I felt her presence. I pulled myself upward, no longer clambering up the trunk now but going hand over hand from branch to branch.

"Imdugud?" I said softly. "Imdugud, it is I, Gilgamesh son of Lugalbanda."

She is the most fearsome of birds, the storm bird, bearer of thunder and rain, whose body is that of an eagle and whose head is that of a lioness. She is the bird of destiny, who decrees the fates and utters the word which none may transgress; and she is bound to no city, to no god, but goes wherever she will, alone, independent. Yet I had no reason to f~ar her. My father had spoken of her often, and warmly. When he was young, in Enmerkar's time, he had gone at Enmerkar's behest as emissary to many distant realms, and his wanderings brought him at last to the land of Zabu at the end of the world. When he sought to go home to Uruk, he found that he could not, for that is a journey from which none return. Yet he was undaunted. He discovered in that land the nest of the Imdugud-bird, and when the Imdugud was away, Lugalbanda entered her nest, and offered honey and bread and sheep-fat to her young, and painted their faces with the colors of honor, and put crowns upon their heads. The Imdugud, when she returned, took great pleasure in what Lugalbanda had done, and bestowed her favor and friendship upon him, offering him whatever reward he would have of her. "Decree a safe journey homeward for me, then," he said, and so she did, and in time he made his way unharmed to his native city.

Gently I said, peering into the branches of the crown, "I am the son of Lugalbanda, O Imdugud. But this tree is Inanna's; and I ask you in Lugalbanda's name to make your home elsewhere. Will you do that, Imdugud? For Lugalbanda's sake, who loved you well, will you do that?"

I heard no reply; and there was no movement in the almost leafless branches. I clung in silence, scarcely breathing. I did not feel the presence of the storm bird any longer. It seemed to me then that the Imdugud, if she truly nested there, had listened to me, and had obeyed, and had risen from the tree with her nestlings and now was soaring high above the Land. At any rate I gave her my thanks.

"Three!" I called to those who waited below.

Before I left the tree I climbed about in the crown, putting my feet in turn on each of the great branches. The sixth or seventh one that I came to had, I thought, something of death about it. It was stiff and unyielding, and felt dry and strange to the touch. Such a branch must be removed, or it would spread its deadly magic to the rest of the tree. So I called out to the onlookers to stand back, and raised my axe and hacked at the branch until I had severed it entirely. It was of immense size, as big in girth as some trees are altogether, and it was no small labor to cut it loose, but finally it fell. I hurled it outward so it would clear the branches below it and land in an open place of the garden. Then I swung myself downward, leaping the last of the way and landing on my feet with a joyous shout. Inanna, pale and silent, looked at me in a way I had never seen from her before: there was awe in her eyes.

"The demons are gone from your tree, lady," I said.

I felt the warmth of work well done. Whether I had driven off Lilitu and the Imdugud, or even if they had truly been there, who can say? But about the snake there could be no doubt; and a little later in the winter the huluppu-tree of Inanna began to sprout new leaves, so that by spring it looked as healthy as it had before. Perhaps the fiery breath of the snake at its roots had been doing it injury, or perhaps the other two demons had indeed been haunting it as well.

I could not say. I say only that the tree recovered, after I had done my work in it.

From the dead limb that I had cut off, Inanna had a throne and a couch made for herself. Out of the remaining wood she caused a gift to be fashioned for me, a drum and a drumstick, most elegantly carved by the craftsman Ur-nangar, whose hand must be guided by

Enki himself. The drumstick was so perfectly balanced that it seemed almost to fly into my hand when I but reached for it, and it needed only the smallest movement of the wrist to make the most intricate ofdrummings. The drum itself was polished smooth until its surface felt like the skin of a maiden's buttocks; and for the drumhead Ur nangar used the hide of an unborn gazelle, stretched taut and held in place by sinews made of its mother's gut. There has never been such a drum, nor such a drumstick, in all the world, to equal the one that Ur-nangar made for me at Inanna's behest. It is lost to me now, and I think not a day goes by but that I wished I had it again.

During the years that it was with me, I used the drum of Urnangar in two particular ways. One, that was best known to the citizens of Uruk, was as a summons of war: when it was time for the troops to gather, I went forth into the plaza outside the palace and beat a brisk tattoo, and everyone knew what I meant by it. "Listen," they would cry, "Gilgamesh drums us to war!" And at its sound all the city began to stir, knowing that soon there would be new heroes made, and also new widows.

The other use I had for the drum was far more private. It was the doorway into the world of the gods, for me. Maybe there was goddess-power in the drum, coming as it had out of Inanna's holy huluppu-tree, or ma53be some remnant of the Imdugud-bird's magic clung to it. I do not know.

This was its gift: when I retired to my innermost room and began quietly to beat on it in a certain way, it carried me up and out of myself and into that realm where Lugalbanda dwells. With it I could bring on at will all those things that arose in me when the god-aura was upon me. I would feel the droning and the buzzing, I would see a luminous glow in tones of gold or vermilion or deepest blue, I would find an entrance into another place, whether it was a ladder going up into the sky or a column of black water into which I sank or a tunnel, curving downward and away from me, inviting me to run along its shining cylindrical walls. And that place was the godplace. When I was there, I changed my shape, I soared, I flew. I shrieked like an eagle, I roared like a lion. I journeyed into the underworld and into the lands of monsters. I supped with gods and demigods. I danced with spirits. I spoke the languages of dreams. I became the mate of the Thunderbird; I saw all things, all wisdom was open to me. I think Etana of Kish must have had such a drum, and made use of it in order to leap into the sky, instead of going aloft on the wings of an eagle as the old tale would have us believe.

I did not use the drum often that way. It was too strange and frightening, and too deep a drain on my energies, which I needed for the daily tasks of kingship. When I came back from such a flight, my jaws ached and sometimes my tongue was swollen as if I had bitten it in my ecstasies, and I felt dazed and weary for hours or even days afterward. So it was a secret thing, which I did only when the need was great upon me, whether for reasons of my own soul's hunger or because the city was faced with a peril that I alone could master. When I sat alone tapping on that drum I was close to being a god.

THE RAINS returned, more intense than ever, and the problem of the canals became urgent.

In the days before my nation came into the Land, when the people of the Old Way were here, those who used sickles made of clay and lived in mud huts, there were no canals. Each spring, when the snows melted on the mountains of the north, the Two Rivers would rise and burst from their banks and the waters would pour out over the fields, drowning the crops and the villages. Some years the flooding was great, and the work of years was destroyed. In other years the waters retreated quickly under the hot sun of the dry season, and there was no moisture left to keep the crops alive. Even in the flood years, when water covered the valleys all summer long, much of the Land remained desert, too dry for any use, and there was no way of conveying the water from the drowned places to the parched places. It was a dreadful way to live.

When we conquered the goddess-people and took the Land from them, we found another way. It was Enlil's son who showed us, Ninurta, the warrior god, god of the stormy south wind.

It happened that Ninurta fell into a quarrel with the demon Asag, who dwelled in the nether world; and Ninurta went down into the nether world and slew this demon after a terrible battle. But the slaying of Asag loosed a great calamity upon the Land: for it was Asag who held in check the dragon Kur, which is the river that flows through the nether world. When Asag died, the Kur broke free and rose up out of the earth to the surface, and the vile waters of the subterranean river poured forth into the lands of daylight and everything was flooded.

Great were the lamentations of the gods who had charge of the fields and gardens, and those who carried the pickaxe and basket. The Kur covered the Land and famine was severe. Nothing grew except the weeds that will grow in all circumstances. But at this dark time Ninurta found a way. He gathered a heap of stones in the mountains and sent them floating like drifting rain clouds to the Land. These he piled up, then, over the place where the Kur had burst out of the nether world, and dammed it so that its waters could no longer escape. Once this was achieved he built dikes to contain the flood-water, and canals to guide it into the beds of the Two Rivers and from the rivers to the fields. So the dragon was contained and its depredations halted. And now the fields brought forth abundant grain, the vineyards and orchards yielded their fruit, and the harvest was heaped up in great hills in the granaries.

Since then it has fallen to us to maintain and extend the canals: it is our chief work, the great duty that underlies all others, for on the canals all our prosperity depends. At times of high level on the rivers they allow us to lead the dangerous waters aside into storage channels. When the rivers begin to fall, we close the sluices, and retain the water to use in the dry months. Other canals carry water from these reservoirs into the cultivated fields, and even into lands that once were desert. Thus the rivers, once our great enemies, now are our servants. By controlling the level and the flow, we spare our fields from the menaces of flood and of drought. Quays and wharves now rise along the shores of our cities, where once we had only muddy swamps. All across the land spreads the network of water-channels, linking field to field, village to village, city to city.

But the soil of the land is deep and soft, and easily breaks away under the force of the current in spring, so that the canals are filled and silt blocks their mouths. We cannot afford that. If the canals become too shallow, water will not flow down from one to the next, and soon nothing will flow at all, and then when the rivers are in spate disaster will fall upon us as if the dragon Kur has returned. So we must toil constantly at maintaining the canals. It is each farmer's responsibility to look after his little canal, and it is the responsibility of the overseer of each village to see that the greater feeders are in order, and it is the responsibility of the officials of the government to survey the main channels. But the final responsibility falls to the king: he must understand the grand design, and know where it is weakening, and give the orders to send forth the armies of repair.

Dumuzi had let that responsibility slip. For that alone, he can never be forgiven; for that alone, he merited being sent to the House of

Dust and Darkness.

There was little that I could do during the worst of the rainy season but look through the surveyors' reports, and decide where it was most essential to begin the repairs. Soon the tablets were piled high all about me, basket upon basket of them, bearing the close packed inscriptions that told of Uruk's peril. Scribes stood at my right shoulder and at my left to read them to me, but I called upon them rarely: it seemed better to me to do my own reading, so long as I had the skill. It gave me a stronger grasp of what needed to be done.

In midwinter the rains relented, and we began our task. The rivers and canals were high from the constant downpours, but not seriously so: the real danger would not arrive until the snows of the north began to thaw. But there was little time to spare.

I chose as the place to begin the canal known as the Mouth of Ninmah, which lies just north of Uruk and conveys our drinkingwater to us. It was in bad need of dredging and scouring, but that was no serious matter, for it called for nothing more than sweat and the straining of muscles. But also the embankments and regulating sluices were in need of rebuilding, particularly the main dam, which my engineers told me might very well be swept away by the first brunt of the spring flood.

It is an old custom, in starting any great work of construction, that the king must make and put into place the first brick. Whether this custom has been honored by each and every king, I cannot say; but I took gladly t6 it, since it has always been one of my great pleasures to toil as an artisan does. My star-watchers chose a propitious day for the ceremony. On the night before, I tied back my hair and went in a simple robe to the small temple of Enlil, where I bathed myself and spent the night alone, sleeping on the floor of black stone. In the morning the sun shone splendidly. I went to the temple of An and made an offering of cattle and goats without blemish. Then, at the shrine ofLugalbanda, I performed the ritual gesture of hand to the face, and felt the god my father stirring within me.

And when the midday hour came I went to the place where bricks are made, wearing a head-pad and carrying builders' tools on my head.

Priests of the several craftsman-gods stood about me beating their drums as I began my task, working half-naked like any laborer in the sun. First I made a libation, pouring the water of good luck into the frame of the mold. Then I lit a fire of aromatic wood, to drive off impurities and any evil spirits that might be lurking about. I smeared the mold with honey and butter and fine oil of the best quality. Now I took the clay and wet it until it puddled, and mixed the straw with it, and trod upon it; I took the holy hod and scooped up the mixture, and pressed it into the mold; I smoothed the face of the bricks with my hands, and put them out in the drying-place to dry. There was no rain that night; I think I would have flayed my star-watchers alive if there had been. On the morrow, we had the ceremony of the breaking of the mold, when I kindled more aromatic wood, and seized the mold by its handles and drew it away, and lifted out the first brick. I raised it to the sky like a crown. "Enlil is satisfied," I cried.

Indeed he should have been. The brick was perfect. The gods had accepted my service, which was a sign that the period of trial was past and Uruk would be sustained.

Throughout those days I worked alongside the others in the making of bricks, and the transporting of them to the canal, and the stacking of them in great rows. Then, when the star-watchers once again announced a propitious day, we carried out the task of closing the flow into the canal. It was not easy; two men lost their lives at it. But we achieved it. In those days I knew no moderation, neither for myself nor for those about me, when there was the work of the city to be done. I stood for an hour in mid-water, in the deepest part, holding my arms outstretched while they wove the fabric of the barrage about me. It was necessary for me to do it, not so much because I was king, but because I was the tallest and the strongest of the men. When we had accomplished the closing, we opened the farther sluices and drained the canal, and set about the job of repairing its lining. I placed the first brick, which was the brick I had made with my own hands on that other ceremonial day. We labored until darkness, and at dawn we returned, and so it was day after day: I would not let them rest, for the time was short and the task urgent. I never tired. When the others grew weary, I went among them, clapping my arm to their shoulders and saying, "Come, fellow, rise up, the gods require our service!" And, weary as they were, they rose up and worked again. I drove them hard-I drove them unsparinglymbut I drove myself even harder. Great pyres of aromatic wood purified the place of our toil, and Enlil was pleased, and the work went swiftly and well. All was well with Uruk that winter. When the high waters came in spring, the canals received and stored the _flow, and there was no flooding. I rejoiced in my kingship.

THEN ON the first day of summer messengers from Agga of Kish appeared, and demanded that I pay tribute to him.

There were three of them, officers of his court, men known to me from my stay in Kish. I did not realize, when they arrived, that they had come as enemies. I received them warmly and offered a great feast in their honor, and we sat far into the night, talking of times gone by, the feasts in the palace of Agga, wars against the Elamites, the turns of fate that had enmeshed this one and that one whom I had known in Kish. I opened the wine of the cask of Enki for them, and slaughtered three of the oxen of the fields of Enlil. "Tell me," I said, "how goes it with the lordly Agga, my father, my benefactor?" And they told me that Agga was well, that his love for me was great, that when he spoke with his gods he never failed to ask them to provide for my continued welfare. I gave each of the envoys a choice concubine and sent them into the finest of the chambers of state for the night. The next day they told me they carried a message from Agga the king, and they put before me a tablet of large size, sealed in a jacket of costly white clay that bore the royal seal of Kish. Their eyes, when they put this tablet before me, were flickering swiftly; I should have taken that for a sign. "We ask leave to withdraw," they said, and I dismissed them. When they were gone, I broke open the jacket of white clay and drew the tablet forth, and began to read it. And my eyes grew wider and wider with every line I read.

It began in a routine way, the usual formulas, Agga son of Enmebarragesi, king of Kish, king of kings, lord of the Land by merit of Enlil and An, to his beloved son Gilgamesh son of Lugalbanda, lord of Kullab, lord of Eanna, king of Uruk by merit of lnanna, and so on and so forth, followed by pious expressions of wishes for my continued good health and prosperity, and so on and so forth, followed by expres sions of regret that Agga had heard no word lately from his beloved son Gilgamesh, no tidings of the kingdom which Agga had placed into the hands of his beloved son. That was my first hint of im pending trouble, this reminder that Agga had helped to make me king of Uruk; it was true, yes, but perhaps it was a little tactless of him to call attention to the point. It was not as though he had raised me up out of utter obscurity to give me my crown: I was the son of a king, and the chosen of the goddess.

But swiftly I saw what he was after. It was implied right in his formula of greetings: "king of kings, lord of the Land." That was the ancient title of the king of Kish, which no one ever had formally bothered to challenge. But Agga's use of it now seemed plainly to say that he regarded me as a vassal. And, indeed, I had sworn an oath of fealty to him when I came as a young fugitive to his city. I read on, feeling a growing uneasiness.

Now began the demands for tribute.

He did not quite call it tribute. He spoke of it as the "gift," the "offering," the "donation of my love." But it was tribute, all the same. So many sheep, so many goats, so many barrels of oil, so many jars of honey; this many gur of date-wine, this many mana of silver, this many gu of wool, this many gin of fine linen; so many male slaves, so many female ones, of such-and-such ages. The request was couched in the most bland and pleasant terms, with no hint of ultimatum. He seemed to be saying that it was unnecessary for him to use threatening language, since these gifts and donations were selfevidently owing to him from me, from the loyal son to the benign father, from the vassal to the serene overlord.

I was thrown into confusion. This letter of Agga's stole not only my kingship but my manhood from me. Yet I had sworn fealty to him, had I not? By the net of Enlil I had sworn it. And now I was caught in that net. My cheeks blazed; tears of anger came to my eyes. I read his message four times over, and each time the words were the same, and they were damning words. I should have foreseen this, but I had not. Agga had taken me in when I was homeless; Agga had given me rank and privilege in his city; Agga had conspired with Inanna to make me a king. And now he was presenting his bill. But how could I pay his price, and still hold my head up among the kings of the Land, and among the people of Uruk?

By darkness I went alone to the shrine of Lugalbanda and knelt and whispered, "Father, what shall I do?"

The aura of the god came upon me and I heard Lugalbanda within me saying calmly, "You owe Agga love and respect, and nothing more than that."

"But my oath, father! My oath!"

"It said nothing of tribute. If you pay him these things, you sell yourself and your city to him forever. He is testing you. He wants to know whether he owns you. Does he own you?" "No one owns me but the gods."

"Then you know what you must do," said Lugalbanda within me.

I passed the night in prayer, before this god and that, wandering restlessly about the city from temple to temple. The only one I did not consult was Inanna, though she was the goddess of the city. For to do that I would have had to confess myself to the priestess Inanna, and I did not want her to know my shame in this matter.

In the morning, while the envoys of Agga were being diverted with women and singing, I sent out messengers to all the elders of the assembly, telling them to come at once to the palace. In rage and anxiety I strode back and forth before them, corded veins standing out on my neck, sweat on my forehead, until I could bring myself finally to speak.

Then I said, "We are asked to submit to the house of Kish. We are called upon to pay tribute." They began to mutter, those old men. I held up the tablet of Agga and shook it angrily and read the list of demands aloud. When I was done I stared about the room and saw their faces: pale, drawn, fear-ridden. "How can we submit to this?" I asked. "Are we vassals? Are we serfs?"

"Kish is very mighty," said the landowner Enlil-ennam.

"The king of Kish is the overlord of the Land," said old Ali-ellati, of venerable noble lineage.

"It is not a great amount of tribute," said the wealthy Lu-Meshlam mildly.

And they all set up a nodding and a bowing and a murmuring, and I saw that they were dead set against any defiance of Kish.

"We are a free city!" I cried. "Are we to surrender?"

"There are wells to dig and canals to dredge," said Ali-ellati. "Let us pay what Agga demands, and go about our business in peace. War is very expensive."

"And Kish is very mighty," said Enlil-ennam.

"I call for your pledges," I said. "I will defy Agga: give me your support."

"Peace," they said. "Tribute," they said. "There are wells to dig," they said.

They would not hear of war. In despair I sent them away, and summoned the younger house of the assembly, the house of men. I read Agga's lists of demands to them, I spoke to them of my anger and indignation, and the house of men gave me the answers I wished to hear. I knew how to speak to them. I fanned the fires of their tempers, and appealed to their courage; for if they also went against me, I was lost. I had the power of overruling the elders if I must, but I could not make war if both the houses of the assembly were against me.

The house of men did not fail me. They gave me no talk of having wells to dig and canals to dredge. They shouted their scorn at the idea of tribute. I cried out for war, and they cried it louder back to me. Do not submit, they said. Let us smite the house of Kish with our weapons, they said. You will shatter Kish, they said-you, Gilgamesh, king and hero, conqueror, prince beloved of An. One after another the men of the house of men rose up and called out such ringing words as those. What was there to fear in the coming of Agga? they asked. His army is small, its rear-guard is feeble, its men are afraid to lift up their eyes.

I put a higher value on the army of Agga than they did, and I had better reason for my opinion. But I rejoiced at their words all the same, and my spirit brightened. For how could I have accepted vassalhood? Whatever Agga thought I might have pledged to him, my strength of kingship was at stake in this, my strength of manhood. I could not reign in Uruk at the sufferance of the king of Kish.

So, then, it was resolved: we would cast our lot for freedom. We would defy Agga. We would spend the summer preparing for war.

Let him come, I said to the house of men. We will be ready for him.

I went to the palace and came upon the ambassadors of Agga in their debauch, and said to them, cold as stone, "I have read the letter of my father Agga your king. And you may tell him this, that I overflow with boundless love for him, and I feel the highest gratitude for the favor he has shown me. I send him my warmest embrace. That is the only gift I send him: my warmest embrace. There is no need for any other gift-giving between father and son, is there? And Agga is my second father. Tell him, then: I embrace him."

That night the envoys departed for Kish, carrying with them my filial embrace, and nothing more.

Now we began our preparations for war. I will not say that the prospect saddened me. I had not heard that wild hot music in the air since the days when I had fought for Agga in the land of Elam, and that was already several years behind me. A man must make war now and then, especially if he is a king, or he will begin to rust from within: it is a matter of keeping one's edge, of maintaining the sharpness of one's spirit, which will go blunt soon enough in any case, but far more swiftly if left unhoned. So it was a time of polishing chariots, of oiling the shafts of javelins and spears, of sharpening blades, of taking the asses from the stables and letting them remember what it is like to run. Although the heavy heat of summer lay upon us, there seemed a crispness in the air of Uruk in those first few days as though it were the finest midwinter day. It was the excitement, the anticipation. The young men were as thirsty for battle as I was. That was why they had shouted down the elders, that was why they had voted for war.

But there was a surprise for us all. No one in the Land makes war in the summer, if it can be avoided. Why, in those months the air itself will go ablaze, if one moves too swiftly through it. So I was sure we had all the summer long to make ourselves ready for Agga. I was wrong in that. My judgment was altogether confounded. For Agga must have been expecting my defiance, and his armies were ready; surely they must have set forth from Kish on the very day his envoys returned with my message. Trumpets brought me the news as I slept among my women, at dawn on the sultriest morning of the summer. Boats of Kish had come swiftly down the river, months before I expected them. The troops of Agga were at the quay. The waterfront was in their hands; the city was besieged.

It was the first full testing of my kingship. I had never led the city in war. I stepped out on the terrace of the palace and beat the wardrumming upon the drum that was made from Inanna's tree. It was the first time I had sounded that drumming in Uruk, though it would not be the last. My heroes gathered about me with darkened faces. They were uncertain of my leadership. Many had fought in the wars of Dumuzi, some had fought in the armies of Lugalbanda, there were even some who might remember Enmerkar; but not one had fought under me.

"Where is one with heart," I said, "who will go to Agga and ask him why he trespasses here?"

That splendid warrior Bir-hurturre stepped forth. His eyes were shining. He had grown tall and strong, and I think there was no man more valiant in all of Uruk. "I am the one to go," he replied.

I put troops behind each of the gates of the city wall, the High Gate and the Royal Gate and the North Gate and the Holy Gate, the Ur Gate and the Nippur Gate, and the rest. I sent patrols to move along the perimeter of the wall to guard against the men of Kish, should they try to scale the wall with ladders, or to chop their way through the brick. Then we opened the Water Gate, and Bir-hurturre went out to parley with Agga. But before he had gone ten paces the men of Kish seized him and dragged him away. This was done by the order of Agga son of Enmebaraggesi, he who had told me that heralds were under sacred protection. Perhaps he meant only the heralds of Kish.

Zabardi-bunugga came running to me with the news. "They are torturing him, my lord! May Enlil eat their livers, they are torturing him!" Zabardi-bunugga was now my third-in-command, a sturdy man, no lovelier bf face than he had been in boyhood, but loyal and steadfast. He told me that he had mounted the wall by the lookout post of Lugalbanda's tower and had seen the men of Kish assaulting Bir-hurturre in plain view, striking him, beating him, kicking him as he lay in the dust. "Enlil will have their livers!" he cried. And he told me that when he had ascended the wall, the men of Kish had called out to him, asking if he were Gilgamesh the king. To which he had shouted back that he was not, that he was nothing in comparison with Gilgamesh the king.

"Will we ride out to them now?" he asked.

"Wait a little longer," I answered him. "I'll go up on the wall so that I can see what kind of enemy we have."

I strode quickly through the streets. Faces peered at me from the rooftops: the ordinary people, frightened, chilled. It was many years since an enemy had come to the gates of Uruk; they did not know what to expect, and they dreaded the worst. At the watchtower of Lugalbanda I ran up the wide brick stairs two and three at a time, carrying a yellow-and-blue banner that I had seized from one of the tower guardsmen, and I stepped out onto the wide platform at the top of the wall. My blood sang in my ears as I looked out at that sea of inv;:ders. The longboats of Agga crowded our quays. The troops of Kish swaggered along the wharves. I saw the banners of Kish, crimson and emerald. I saw tough tanned faces, men I knew, the warriors with whom I had swept through the forces of Elam as though they were mere fleecy clouds. Under the fierce midsummer sun they wore their coats of thick black felt without show of discomfort; the light gleamed like fire from their shining copper helmets. I saw two of the sons of Agga; I saw six high officers of the Elam campaign; I saw Namhani, my old charioteer, and he saw me and waved and pointed and grinned his snag-toothed grin, and called me by the name by which I had been known in Kish.

"No," I roared back. "Gilgamesh! I am Gilgamesh!"

"Gilgamesh," they answered me. "Look, it is Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh the king!"

I carried no shield and I stood exposed against the sky, but I felt no fear. They would not dare aim a shaft at the king of Uruk. I scanned them from south to north, the hundreds of them, perhaps the thousands. They had set up tents; they were here to stay for a lengthy siege.

"Where is Agga?" I called. "Bring out your king. Or is he afraid to show himself?."

Agga came. If I was unafraid of showing myself upon the wall, he could do no less. From one of the far tents he emerged, moving slowly, fatter than ever, a mountain of flesh, pink-skinned, freshly shaved from scalp to chin. He carried no weapon; he leaned on a staff of black wood carved in curves and angles that troubled my eye. When he stood close below me I made a gracious sign of reverence to him and said in a calm voice, "I bid you welcome to my city, father Agga. If you had sent word of your visit, I would have been better prepared to entertain you."

"You look well, Gilgamesh. I thank you for the embrace you sent me."

"It was only my obligation."

"I had expected more."

"Indeed, so you had. Where is my herald Bir-hurturre, father Agga?" "We are discussing matters with him, in one of our tents." "They tell me he was beaten and kicked and thrown down in the dust, and taken off for torture, father Agga. I think I treated your envoys with more kindness."

"He was unruly. He lacked politeness. We are teaching him courtesy, my son."

"In Uruk I teach such lessons, and no one else," I said. "Return him to me, and then I will invite you within for the feast that is my obligation to so noble a guest as you."

"Ah," said Agga, "I think I will invite myself within. And I will bring your lackey with me, when I am done with him. Open your gates, Gilgamesh. The king of kings decrees it. The lord of the Land decrees it."

"So be it," I replied. I turned away, and threw down my banner on the side within the wall. It was the signal: we opened every gate at once, and came riding forth upon the men of Kish.

When an enemy comes to the gate of a walled city, it is often best to wait within, especially if the enemy has been so rash as to arrive in summer. In that dry time there is no food outside the walls, except whatever is stored in the outlying granaries, and when that is gone, there will be nothing left for the besiegers. Within, we had supplies enough to see us through to winter, and fresh water aplenty. They would suffer more keenly than we, and eventually they would withdraw: that is the usual wisdom.

But the usual wisdom usually does not apply. Agga understood these things as well as I; far better, in fact. If he had chosen to lay siege in summer, plainly he did not mean the siege to be a lengthy one. And so I guessed that he intended a direct attack. The walls of Uruk-Enmerkar built them-were not high, then, as the walls of great cities go. No doubt there were ladders aplenty on those boats of Agga's, and in a little while warriors of Kish would be scrambling up our walls in a hundred places at once. Meanwhile their axewielders would be attempting to breach the ramparts from below: I knew those axes of Kish, which could readily cut through the old bricks of our wall. So it was pointless to sit inside the city waiting for them to attack. I had more men at my command than Agga had brought with him; once they were within the walls, tossing torches about, we would be at their mercy, but if I could defeat them on the quay we would be saved. We had to carry the attack to them.

We burst forth in chariots out of five gates at once. I think they had not expected us to emerge so soon, or even for us to emerge at all. They were confident and arrogant, and thought I would bow my knee to Agga without a struggle. But we fell upon them with axes high and spears flashing. Zabardi-bunugga's chariot was in the vanguard, with ten others just behind it, carrying the finest heroes of the city. The men of Kish met that first wave with valor and energy. I knew how well they could fight; I knew them, indeed, better than my own soldiers. But while the first skirmishes were under way I came down from the wall and entered my own chariot, and led the second wave of the assault myself.

I will be very plain about it: when the men of Kish beheld me, it struck them with terror and froze their souls. They had known me in the Elam wars, but though they remembered me they did not remember me as well as they should have, until they saw me riding into their midst, casting my javelins equally well with my right hand and my left. Only then did they remember. "It is the son of Lugalbanda!" they cried, and they began to panic. There is no pretending otherwise: I know no finer music than the music that sings through the air of the battlefield. Joy rose in me, and I rode into the enemy like the emissary of death. My charioteer that day was the brave Enkimansi, a narrow-faced man of thirty years who acknowledged no fear whatever. He drove the asses forward, and I stood high behind him, hurling my weapons as though I bore the wrath of Enlil upon Kish. My first cast took the life of a son of Agga; my second and third slew two of his generals; my fourth pierced the throat of one of the envoys who had borne Agga's message to me. "Lugalbanda!" I cried. "Sky-father! Inanna! Inanna! Inanna!" It was a cry that these men of Kish had heard before. They knew that a god rode among them that day, or at least a godling, with divine keenness to his sight and divine strength to his arm.

Into the breach made by Zabardi-bunugga and the rest of the front line of chariots I followed, cutting a deep hole in the forces of Kish. Behind me came my footsoldiers, crying out, "Gilgamesh! Inanna! Gilgamesh! Inanna!"

I give the men of Kish credit for courage. They tried their best to slay me, and only some fast work with my shield and some deft maneuvering by the skillful Enkimansi kept me from harm. But there was no halting me. Terror overcame them despite themselves, and they turned and ran toward the water; but we cut them off from the sides and began to chop them apart.

It was over far more swiftly than I could have hoped. We sent multitudes of them rolling in the dust. We reached their longboats and took them, and cut their prows off and carried the images of Enlil away as trophies. We got Bir-hurturre free, and found him still well, though he had been shamefully bloodied and bruised. As for Agga, we fought our way through to him-he was no fighter himself, not at his age, but he was surrounded by a ring of a hundred picked guardsmen, who perished to the last man-and took him prisoner. Zabardi-bunugga led him to me as I stood leaning against my chariot, drinking a flask of the beer of Kish that I had taken from one of their stewards.

Agga was dusty and sweating and flushed, and his eyes were red with weariness and dismay. There was a small wound on his left shoulder, only a scratch, but it shamed me to see that he had been touched. I gestured to one of my field surgeons. "Clean and bind the wound of the king of kings," I said. Then I went up to Agga and to his amazement I knelt before him. "Father," I said. "Royal master of the Land."

"Don't mock me, Gilgamesh," he muttered.

I shook my head. Rising, I put the flask of beer in his hand, saying, "Take this. It will ease your thirst, father."

He regarded me bleakly. Slowly he put his hand to his belly and kneaded the thick rolls of flesh. Rivulets of sweat ran down him, cutting through the dust that lay on his skin. I will not deny it: I savored my triumph, I doted on his discomfiture. It was sweet wine to me.

"What will you do with me?" he asked.

"You will be my guest at.the palace this evening, and for two days thereafter. Then we will have the rite of the burying of the dead; and then I will send you back to Kish. For are you not my lord, the king of kings, to whom I have sworn my loyalty?"

He understood me now, and anger flared in his eyes; but then he laughed, and looked sadly about at his warriors and his sons heaped in the blood-soaked dust, and at his mutilated longboats, and he nodded. "Ah, is that it?" he said after a time. "I did not think you were so shrewd."

"My debt is paid now, is that the case?"

"Ah," he said, "that is the case. Your debt is paid, Gilgamesh."

SO IT was done. I gave a great feast to Agga, and sent him back to Kish with what was left of his army.

But before he left I had sad news from him: my wife Ama-sukkul his daughter was dead, and both the children she had borne for me. These tidings went through me like blades. Death, there is no place to hide from you! I thought of how on my last day at Kish I had embraced her and patted her swelling belly so lovingly. The child in being born had been the death of her, though, and he perished with her; and then our first-born son had languished for lack of his mother and went quickly from the world. Doubtless the gods had not intended for me to plant my seed in Kish. I have had other sons since, many of them, but I wonder often what those two would have been like had they grown to manhood. And the sweet little Ama-sukkul: she was a gentle person and not the least loved of my wives.

In the hour of Agga's departure I insisted on pledging myself once again in fealty to him. This I did of my own free will, as everyone saw. Such a pledge given freely is a sign not of submission but of strength: it is a gift, it is a splendid offering, which loosed me rather than bound me. It was my way of acknowledging what Agga had done for me in years past, when he helped me gain my kingship upon the death of Dumuzi, and it freed me forever from any real sort of vassalage. At last I was king in my own right, through prowess in battle and greatness of soul. It would not be wrong to say that the true beginning of my reign could be dated to the time of the war with Kish.

But if it was the true beginning of my kingship, it was the end of Agga's, though he lived on a little while after. He withdrew within the walls of Kish and was not heard from again outside it. When he died it was the end of the dynasty of Kish after thousands of years, for Mesannepadda king of Ur marched north and seized the city. Soon we had reports that Mesannepadda had put to death the last of Agga's sons and taken the throne for himself; and thereafter he called himself king of Kish instead of king of Ur. I allowed this to happen because I was preoccupied with other matters at that time, as I will duly tell; and later I had my own reckoning to make with the king of Ur and Kish.

The first thing I did, when the excitement of the war had begun to recede a little into memory, was to rebuild the walls of Uruk. In truth I did not so much rebuild them as build them anew, for the old walls of Uruk were as no walls at all, compared with the ones that I constructed for the city. Perhaps they were good enough for Enmerkar's time; but I had seen the walls of Kish. I knew what city walls should be.

A wall must be high, so that the enemy cannot scale it with his ladders. It must be thick, so it cannot easily be breached. It must have a deep and broadly based foundation, so it cannot be undermined and tunnels cannot be dug beneath it. All that is evident enough; but the walls of Uruk were barely adequate in all those respects. We needed, also, more towers from which we could observe the approaches to the city, and a wide parapet along the top of the wall where defenders could take up positions and aim their fire upon the heads of the invaders. In particular there had to be guard-towers and parapets flanking each of the city gates, since the gates are the weak points in any wall.

All the rest of the summer there was scarcely anything done in Uruk but the making of bricks and the building of the wall that I think will be known until the end of days as the Wall of Gilgamesh. As in the repair of the canals, I worked alongside the common artisans, and I think no one worked as hard as I: I built that wall with my own hands, and that is the truth. Nor was there any artisan more skillful than I in the placing of the bricks as it must be done, on edge, leaning sideways against one another in careful rows, each row leaning in the direction opposite the one below it. That is the only true way to build. We ripped away the old wall of Enmerkar so that the city stood naked, and then, quickly as we could, we put up the new wall, or, rather, the walls, for there are two of them. The seven wise sages themselves could not have designed a better plan. I used only kiln-baked bricks, for what is the use of building with mud, and having to do it all over again five years later? And they were the finest of bricks. The outer wall shines with the brightness of copper, and the inner wall, a gleaming white, is a wall without equal anywhere. The foundation terrace is, I think, the mightiest ever built. The wall of Uruk is famous throughout the world. It will last twelve thousand thousand years, or I am not Lugalbanda's son.

I would not have you believe we finished the entire wall in a single summer. In truth, there has been no year of my reign when we have not continued to work on it, strengthening it, increasing its height, adding new parapets and watchtowers. But in that first summer we built the greater part of it, sufficient to defend us against any enemy we could imagine.

In those early months I was in the fullest flush and most robust joy of my kingship. Scarcely did I even take the time to sleep. I worked all day at the things a king must do, and made my people work as I did. I suppose I made them work too hard; indeed, I drove them to exhaustion, and they began to call me tyrant behind my back. But I did not realize that. My energies were immense, and I did not understand that theirs were not. When their day's toil was done, they wanted nothing but sleep. But I would feast magnificently with my court by evening, and then at night there were the women. Perhaps I was excessive, with the women, though I did not think so then. My appetite for them was like the unceasing hunger of the gods for meat and drink. I had my concubines, I had the priestesses of the holy cloister, 'I had the casual women of the town, and even they were not sufficient. You must never forget that I am in part a god, by my descent from Lugalbanda, and also from Enmerkar who called himself the son of the sun; and a god's force blazes within me. How could I deny that force? How could I stifle it? The god-presence throbbed in me like the beating of a drum, and I marched to its tune.

Within my joy and vigor, though, I must tell you that there was a hidden melancholy. All Uruk waited upon me, yet I never could forget that I was a man alone, a lofty and isolated figure. Perhaps it is that way with everyone: I do not know. But it seems to me that others are bound in close league with wives, sons, friends, companions. I who had never had a brother, who had scarcely known his father, who had been set apart by size and strength from his playfellows, was now as king cut off as though by colossal walls from the normal flow of human intercourse. There was no one around me who di4 not fear me and envy me and in some way draw back from me. And I saw no way of altering that; but the toil by day and the feasting by evening and the women by night were my consolations for this pain of separation. Especially the women.

My chamberlain of the royal concubines was hard pressed to meet my needs. When the wandering tribesfolk of the desert came to Uruk for the market, he brought their girls to me, tawny long-legged girls with dark shadows about their eyes, and wide thin-lipped mouths. When wedding contracts were drawn in the city, the brides were given first to me before their husbands had them, so that I might bring divine grace upon them. If the wife of one of my noblemen pleased me, that man would convey her to the palace for the night without murmur, should I ask for her. No one spoke out against me. No one would; no one could; I was king; my strength was like the strength of the host of heaven. I saw nothing wrong in what I did. Was it not my privilege, as king, as god, as hero, as shepherd of the people? Could I be left in need, when my hungers raged so powerfully? Ah, the wine, the beer, the music, the singing of those nights! And the women, the women, their sweet lips, their smooth thighs, their swaying breasts! I never rested. I never halted. The beating of the drum was unrelenting. By day I led the men in the building of walls or the playing of the games of war, until they were dull-eyed and drooping with fatigue, and by night I swept my way through their women as a raging fire roars through the dry grass of summer.

I never grew weary. I was making Uruk weary of me, but I did not know that yet.

Now it was the season of the new year, and once again the time of the Sacred Marriage arrived. I had been king of Uruk a year and some months. Tonight the goddess would open to me for the second time. I performed the rituals of purification, I meditated in darkness and silence in the Dumuzi-house, and when evening came they took me in the traditional way, by boat, toward my union with Inanna.

And as I debarked at the very quay where I had shattered the forces of Agga, and strode into the city through a gate in the wall I had built with my own hands, I felt a great surge of pride in what I had achieved. I felt like a god, in truth: not like one who merely has some godly blood in his veins, but in truth a god, a wearer of the horned crown, who walks through the bright heavens in splendor. Was I wrong, to feel such pride? I had come from exile to receive the crown; I had repaired the canals; I had crushed the most powerful of foes; I had built the walls of Uruk, and all this before I had reached my twentieth year. Was that not godlike to have done? Did I not have reason for pride?

And now the goddess awaited me.

In these months I had had little in the way of dealings with her, only the customary sacrifices and rituals that required both our presences. We had scarcely spoken otherwise. There were times when I could have gone to her to seek counsel or blessing, and I had not. There were times when she might have sought me out, and she did not. I think I understood even then why we were keeping such a wary distance from one another. In Uruk we were like rival kings; she had her zone of power, and I had mine. But already I was extending the reach of my zone. This was not with the intent of provoking her enmity, but simply because I knew no way to be king, other than to exercise power to the fullest. When I had made war on Agga, I had not asked her consent: it seemed too risky, when I had already met the opposition of the house of elders to the war. The war had to be fought; and with Inanna against me I would not be able to levy the army I needed; therefore I did not consult Inanna. I feared the interference her power could create. I was even then concerned with placing myself beyond the range of that power. And, she, seeing the growing strength of my own authority, had drawn back, uncertain of my intentions, unwilling to challenge me before she understood my purposes more completely.

But on the night of the Sacred Marriage all such dreary considerations of state are set aside. I went to her in the long chamber of the temple and found her glittering in her oils and ornaments. I hailed her as my holy jewel, and she greeted me as royal husband, fountain of life; and we performed the rite of the showing-forth; and when that was done we went within, to the chamber of the sweet-smelling green rushes, and the handmaidens of the goddess undid her sheaths of alabaster and plates of gold and left her naked to me.

When we were alone I put my hands to her sleek shoulders, and stared deep into the shining mysteries of her eyes, and she smiled at me as she had smiled that first time when we were children, a smile that was in part warm and loving, in part fierce, intense, challenging. I knew she would devour me if she could. But on this night she was mine. She had grown no less beautiful in the twelve months gone by. Her bosom was deep, her waist was narrow, her hips were broad; her fingernails were long as daggers, and painted the color of the moon in eclipse. She beckoned me to the bed with a single small gesture of her hand.

We glided down to it and embraced. Her skin was like the fabrics they weave in heaven. My body rose over hers. Her back was arched beneath me. Her fingers dug deep into the cords and sinews of my shoulders, and she drew her knees toward her breasts and turned them outward, and her lips parted, her tongue came flickering out, her breathing was a thick heavy hissing. She kept her eyes open all the while, as women rarely do. I saw that. For I kept my eyes open also, throughout every moment of that night.

At dawn I heard the coming of the new year's first rain, a faint muffled drumming against the ancient white brick of the temple platform. I slipped from the bed and looked about for my robe, so that I could take my leave. She lay facing me; she was watching me the way a serpent watches its prey.

"Stay a while longer," she said softly. "The night is not yet done."

"The drum is beating. I must go."

"All the city sleeps. Your friends lie sprawled in drunken dreams. What can you do alone at this hour?" She made purring sound. I mistrust serpents that purr. "Come back to my bed, Gilgamesh. The night is not yet done, I tell you."

With a smile I said, "You are not yet done, you mean."

"And are you, then?"

I shrugged. "We have performed the rite. And performed it amply, I think."

"So the insatiable one is sated, for the moment? Or are you merely bored with me, and ready to begin the search for your next woman of the day?"

"You speak cruelly, Inanna."

"But not without truth, eh, Gilgamesh? You never have enough. Not enough women, not enough wine, not enough toil, not enough warfare. You rage through Uruk like a torrent, sweeping everything before you. You are a burden under which all the city groans. The people cry out for mercy from you, so terribly do you oppress them."

That stung me. My eyes went wide with surprise. "I, an oppressor? I am a just and wise king, lady!"

"Perhaps you are. No doubt you think you are. But you overwhelm and crush your own people. You march the young men up and down the drilling-fields, up and down and up and down, until everything gets black before their eyes and they fall down from exhaustion, and still you have no mercy on them. And the women! No one has ever consumed women as you do. You use them as though they are playthings, five, six, ten a night. I hear the stories."

"Not ten," I said. "Not six, not five."

She smiled. "That is not how they tell it. They say that no one can content you, that you are like a wild bull. They look at me and say, 'Only a goddess can satisfy him.' Well, there is a goddess within me, and you and I have passed this night together. Are you content, for once? Is that why you are so eager now to leave?"

I was eager to leave now because I had no defense against this onslaught of hers. But I would not admit that to her. Stiffly I said, "I wish to walk by myself in the rain."

"Walk, then, and then come back." Her eyes flashed. She had the force within her of a snapping whip. I picked up my robe, hesitated, let it fall again and stood naked before her. There was the musky odor of our night's lovemaking in the chamber. The last of the incense still sputtered in the bowl. Her lips were taut, her nostrils were flaring. In a low harsh voice she said, "Will you come back? For you there are ten women every night, Gilgamesh. For me there is only you, one night a year."

Suddenly I feared her less, hearing her trying to wheedle me that way with pity.

"Ah, is that how it is, Inanna? No one else, all the year long?" "Who else but the god may touch the goddess, do you think?" I grew more bold. I dared to tease her a little. "Not even in secret?" I asked playfully. "Some lusty slave, summoned in the darkest watch of the night-"

Fury flared in her. She pulled her hands toward her breasts. Her fingers tightened, so that they looked like claws. "You say such a thing, under the temple's own roof?. Shame, Gilgamesh! Shame?' Then she softened. Cat-like still, she stretched, she purred again, she raised one knee and let her foot slide down the calf of her other leg. More gently she said, "There is only you, one night of the year. I swear it, though it makes me feel soiled that you should require me to take oath on it. There is only you. I am not yet ready to let you leave me. Will you stay? Will you stay just a little while longer? It is only the one night I have, this one night."

"Let me cleanse myself first in the rain," I said.

I stood some time outside the temple, in the virgin air of the rainswept dawn. Then I went back to her. Cat or serpent, priestess or goddess, I could not refuse her, not if it was the only night'of the year that she might know an embrace. And the rain, washing the night's staleness from me, had reawakened my strength and my desires anyway. I would not refuse her. I wanted her. I went to her and we began the night afresh.

EARLY IN the new year a strange dream came to me, and I was unable to make any sense of it. Later that night came a second dream just as strange, just as unreadable.

I was troubled that I had so little understanding of these dreams. The gods often speak to kings as they sleep, and perhaps I was being given some knowledge important to the welfare of the city. So I went to the temple of An and took my dreams to my mother the wise priestess Ninsun.

She received me in her chamber, a dark-walled room with heavy pilasters painted crimson. Her cloak was black, bordered below with a broad band of beads of lapis, gold, and carnelian. There was about her, as always, a supreme tranquility and beauty: all might be in turbulence, but she was ever at peace.

She took my hands between her small cool ones and held them a long while, smiling, waiting for me to speak.

"Last night," I said after a time, "I dreamed that a feeling of great happiness came upon me, and I walked full of joy among the other young heroes. Night fell, and the stars appeared in the heavens. And as I stood beneath them one of the stars plunged to earth, a star that bore in itself the essence of Sky-father An. I tried to lift it, but it was too heavy for me. I tried to move it, but I could not. All Uruk gathered around to watch. The common peoplej ostled; the noblemen dropped down and kissed the ground before the star. And I was drawn to it as I would be drawn to a woman. I put a carrying-strap on my forehead and braced myself and with the help of the young heroes I lifted it and carried it to you. And you told me, mother, that the star was my brother. That was the dream. Its meaning baffles me."

Ninsun appeared to stare off into some great empty space. Then she said, still smiling, "I know the meaning." "Tell me, then."

"This star of heaven, that attracted you as a woman might attract you-it is a strong companion, it is a loyal friend, your rescuer, your comrade who will never forsake you. His strength is like the strength of An, and you will love him as you love yourself."

I frowned, thinking of that vast loneliness that I believed was the inescapable price of my kingship, and how weary I was of it.

"Friend? What friend do you mean, mother?"

"You will know him when he comes," she said.

I said, "Mother, I dreamed a second dream the same night."

She nodded. She seemed to know.

"An axe of a strange shape was lying in the streets of great-walled Uruk," I said, "an axe unlike any of the axes familiar to us. All the people were gathering around it, staring, whispering. As soon as I saw it, I rejoiced. I loved it: again, I was drawn to it as I would be to a woman. I took it and fastened it at my side. That was the second dream."

"The axe you saw is a man. He is the comrade who is destined for you-"

"The comrade, again!"

"The comrade again, yes. The brave companion who rescues his friend in a time of need. He will come to you." "May the gods send him swiftly, then," I said with great fervor. And I leaned forward close to her and told her something I had never revealed to anyone before: that I was in terrible need, that a great chilling loneliness assailed me in the midst of all my power and plenty. Those were not easy words to speak. Twice my tongue stuck fast, but I forced it to say the words. My mother Ninsun smiled and nodded. She knew. I think it was she that had induced the gods to fashion a companion for me. When I left her temple that morning I felt a lightness in my soul, as of the lifting of storm-clouds after they have hung heavy in the air for many days.

About the time these dreams were coming to me a great strangeness-so I was afterward told-was befalling a man I did not know, a certain hunter, Ku-ninda by name. This Ku-ninda was a man of one of the outlying villages, who had his livelihood from trappmg wild game; but this time when he went out into the wilderness on the far side of the river to inspect the traps he had set, he found them all torn apart. Whatever beasts might have been snared in them had been set free. And when he went to look into the pits he had dug, he discovered that they had all been filled in.

This was a great mystery to Ku-ninda. No civilized person will disturb the traps of a hunter or fill in his pits: it is a discourtesy, and an ignoble act. So Ku-ninda searched for the man who had done these things to him; and soon enough he caught sight of him. But he was like no man Ku-ninda had ever seen. He was of huge size, naked, rough and shaggy all over, covered with dark coarse hair everywhere, more like a beast than a man, a wild creature of the hills. He carried himself like an animal, crouching, grunting, snorting, running swiftly on the balls of his feet. The beasts of the wilderness seemed to have no fear of him, but ran freely at his side: Ku-ninda saw the wild man among the gazelles on the high ridges, grazing with them, fondling them, eating grass as they ate grass. Ku-ninda was troubled by the strangeness of what he saw. He made more traps. The wild man sought them out and destroyed them, every one. One day Ku-ninda encountered the wild man at the watering-hole: they stood face to face. "You, wild one: why do you disturb my traps?" Ku-ninda demanded. The wild man made no reply, but only sniffed the air. He growled, he snarled, he bared his teeth, he glared with fiery eyes. A spume of spittle came forth and rolled down into his thick beard. Ku-ninda was no coward, but he shrank back: his face was frozen with fear, and terror numbed his limbs. Again the next day they met at the watering-place, and the day after that, and each time, when the wild man saw Ku-ninda, he growled and snarled, and Ku-ninda did not dare go near him. And at last, seeing that the shaggy stranger was making it impossible for him to hunt, Ku-ninda yielded, and went back empty-handed to his village, greatly downcast.

He told this tale to his father, who said, "Go you to Uruk, and set yourself before Gilgamesh the king. There is no one more mighty than he: he will find a way to help you."

When next it was my audience-day for the common people, there was this Ku-ninda waiting in the audience-hall, a strong and sturdy man of more than middle height, with a lean hard face and keen penetrating eyes. He was clad in black skins, and he had the smell of sinews and blood about him. He put an offering of meat before me and said, "There is a wild fellow in the fields who tears up my traps and frees my catch. He is as strong as the host of heaven and I dare not approach him."

It seemed strange to me that this sturdy Ku-ninda could show fear of anyone or anything. I asked him to tell me more, and he spoke of the growling, the snarling, the baring of teeth; he told me how the wild man ran with the gazelles on the high ridges, and grazed beside them in the grass. Something in that stirred me deeply and held me fascinated. My skin crept a little with wonder and amazement, and the hair prickled along my neck. "What a marvel," I said. "What a mystery!"

"Will you slay this creature for me, O king?"

"Slay him? I think not: it would be a pity to slay him for no other reason than being wild. But we can't let him run loose in the fields, I suppose. We will trap him, I think."

"Impossible, majesty!" Ku-ninda cried out. "You have not seen him! His strength is as great as yours! There is no trap that could hold him!"

"There is one, I think," I said, with a smile.

An idea had come to me as Ku-ninda spoke: a notion out of one of the old tales that the harper Ur-kununna had sung in the courtyard of the palace when I was a boy. I think it was the tale of the goddess Nawirtum and the devil-monster Zababa-shum, or perhaps the goddess was Ninshubur and the monster was Lahamu: I do not remember, and the names are I suppose not important. The point of the tale was the power of womanly beauty over the forces of violence and savagery. I sent to the temple cloister for the holy courtesan Abisimti, she of the round breasts and long shining hair who had initiated me into the rites of fleshly love when I was young, and told her what I would have her do. She hesitated not at all. There was true holiness in Abisimti. She was in all ways a servant of heaven, and her way of giving services was to give it without question, which is the only true way.

So Ku-ninda took Abisimti with him out onto the steppe, out into the hunting-lands, to the watering-hole where Ku-ninda had had his encounters with the wild man, three days'journey from Uruk. There they waited a day and a second day, and the wild man was among them. "That's the one," said Ku-ninda. "Go to him now, use your arts upon him."

All unafraid and unashamed, Abisimti went to him and stood before him. He growled, he grunted, he frowned, not knowing what sort of creature she might be; but he did not snarl, he did not bare his teeth. She unfastened her robe and disclosed her breasts to him. I think he must never have seen a woman before, but the power of the goddess is great, and the goddess made the beauty of the holy whore Abisimti manifest to his understanding. She uncovered herself and showed him her soft ripe nakedness, and let him fill his nostrils with the rich perfume of her, and lay down with him and caressed him, and drew him down atop her so that he might possess her.

It was his initiation. He had been like a beast; by embracing her he became like a man. Or it would be just as true to say that by embracing her he became a god. For that is the way that the divine essence enters into us, through the rite of the life-giving act.

Six days and seven nights they lay together coupling. I will testify myself to Abisimti's skills: I could have sent no one to him who was wiser in the ways of the flesh. When she lay with Enkidu-for that was the wild man's name, Enkidu-she surely must have made use of all her wisdom with him, and after that he could never be the same. In those' hot days and nights the wildness was burned from him in the forge of Abisimti's passion. He softened, he grew more gentle, he gave up his savage grunting and growling. The power of speech came into him; he became like a man.

But he did not know yet what had befallen him. When he had taken his fill with her, he rose to return to his beasts. But the gazelles ran off in fright as he approached. The smell of mankind was on him now, the smell of civilization. The wild creatures of the steppe no longer knew him, and they drew away from him. As they fled he would have followed them, but his body was held back as though bound with a cord, his knees would not serve him, all his swiftness was gone. Slowly, bewilderedly, he made his way back to Abisimti, who smiled tenderly and drew him down beside her. "You are no longer wild," she said, with gestures more than with words. And at those last words his eyes grew bright and his face became hot, and he said, in his thick-tongued way that was still freighted with the sounds of the beasts, that he would indeed go with her to Uruk, and to the temple of Inanna and the temple of An. But chiefly he wished to be shown this Gilgamesh, this king, this so-called strong man. "I mean to challenge him,' Enkidu cried. "I will show him which one of us is the stronger. I will let him feel the might of the man of the steppes. I will change things in Uruk, I will reshape destinies, I who am the strongest of all? Or such, at any rate, were the words that Abisimti reported to me afterward. Thus was it carried out, the snaring of the wild man Enkidu. In accordance with the strategy I had devised, he was caught in the softest and sweetest of traps, and brought away from the fields of beasts into the world of settled folk. Abisimti divided her garments, clothing him with one half and herself with the other, and took him by the hand; and like a mother she led him to the place of the sheepfolds close by the city. The shepherds gathered around him: they had never seen anyone like him. When they offered him bread, he did not know what to do with it, and held it in his hand staring at it, confused, embarrassed. He was accustomed to eating only the wild grasses and berries of the fields, and to sucking the milk of wild creatures. They gave him wine, and it bewildered him, and when he tasted it it made him gag and choke, and he spat it out. Abisimti said, "This is bread, Enkidu: it is the staff of life. This is wine. Eat the bread, drink the wine: it is the custom of the land." Cautiously he nibbled, cautiously he sipped. His fear went from him; he smiled, he ate more gladly, he gobbled bread until he was full, he drank down seven goblets of strong wine. His face glowed, his heart exulted; he leaped about, he danced a merry dance. Then they took him and they groomed him, they rubbed the tangles out of his matted hair, they trimmed him and clipped him and anointed him with oil, and gave him decent clothing, so that he came to look more like a human being, although one who was of more than usual size and more than usual hairiness.

He lived some while among the shepherds. Not only did he learn to eat the food of men and drink the drink of men and wear the clothes of men; Enkidu learned to work as men must do. The shepherds taught him how to use weapons, and made him the watchman of their flocks. By night, while the herdsmen slept peacefully, he patrolled the fields, driving away the beasts that came to raid the sheepfold. He chased lions, he caught wolves, he was the tireless guardian of the sheep-he who had been as a wild beast himself. No word of any of this was brought to me. I confess that I had forgotten all about the wild man of the steppes, so busy was I with the tasks of kingship and with the pleasures by which I eased my heart's ache.

One day at this time Enkidu and Abisimti were sitting in a tavern that the herdsmen were fond of frequenting, when a wayfarer came in, a man of Uruk, and called for a beaker of beer. The stranger, seeing the courtesan Abisimti, recognized her, and he nodded to her and said, "Count yourself fortunate that you are not living in Uruk these days."

"Why, is life so unlucky in the city?" she asked.

"Gilgamesh oppresses us all," said the stranger. "The city groans beneath him. There is no containing the force of him, and he exhausts us. And he practices abominations: the king defiles the Land."

At that, Enkidu looked up and said, "How so? Tell me what you mean."

The stranger replied, "There is a house of assembly in the city that is set aside for the people, where they celebrate their marriages. The king ought not to intrude there; but he enters it, even while the wedding drums are beating, he seizes the bride, he demands to be first with her, before the husband. He says that this right was ordained by the gods at the time of his birth, from the time the cord that bound him to his mother was cut. Are such things right? Are such things proper? The wedding drums roll, but then Gilgamesh appears to claim the bride. And all the city groans."

Enkidu grew pale on hearing this, and great anger came over him. "It must not be!" he shouted. And to Abisimti he cried, "Come, take me to Uruk, show me this Gilgamesh!"

Abisimti and Enkidu set out at once for the city. When they came within the walls he caused a considerable stir, so broad were his shoulders, so powerful his arms. Crowds gathered about him, and when they heard from Abisimti that this was the famous wild man who had been setting trapped animals free on the plains, they pressed close, gawking, whispering. The bravest of them touched him to feel the strength of him. "He is the equal of Gilgamesh!" someone cried. "No, he is not as tall," said another, and a third said, "Yes, but he is broader in the shoulders, his bones are stronger." And they said, "A hero has arrived! He is one that was suckled on the milk of wild beasts! Finally Gilgamesh has met his match! At last! At last!"

This was the man, this Enkidu, whose coming had been foretold in my two dreams. He was the companion whom the gods had provided to lift me from my loneliness, to be the brother I had never had, the comrade with whom I would share all things. To the people of Uruk he was also a godsend for whom they long had prayed, but for a different reason. For it was indeed the case-though I did not know it-that they had been groaning under the burden of my reign, that they feared my surging energies and condemned me for arrogance. So the people of Uruk had asked the gods to create my equal and send him to their city: my double, my second self, matching me stormy heart for stormy heart, in order that we would contend with one another, and leave Uruk in peace. And now that man had come.

IT WAS the day of the wedding of the nobleman Lugal-annemundu and the maiden Ishhara. The wedding drums were beating, the bridal bed had been laid out. The maiden was desirable to me, and at nightfall I made my way to the assembly-house of the people to take her to the palace.

But as I was crossing the marketplace known as the Market-ofthe-Land, which lies just across the street from the assembly-house of the people, a burly figure rose up out of the shadows and blocked my path. He was a man almost of my own height, no more than a finger's breadth or two shorter: I had never seen anyone else so tall before. His chest was deep and heavy, his shoulders were wide, wider even than mine, his arms were as thick as an ordinary man's thighs. By the flickering light of my servants' torches I stared close into his face. His chin thrust boldly forward, his mouth was broad, his brow was strong and dark; and there was something fierce and smouldering in his eyes. His beard was thick, his hair was shaggy. And how calm he was, how self-assured! Look at him standing in my way! Did he not know I was Gilgamesh the king?

I said quietly, "Step aside, fellow."

"That I will not do."

It amazed me to hear such words. I will not say that I felt fear, but I was put on my guard, for I knew this could be no common citizen. My yeomen stirred uneasily and began to draw their weapons. I beckoned them to hold back. Going closer to the stranger, I said, "Do you know me?"

"I think you are the king."

"So I am. It is not wise to bar my way like this."

"Do you know me?" he asked. His voice was rough and deep, his accent uncouth.

I said, "Not at all."

"I am Enkidu."

"Ah, the wild man! I should have guessed as much. So you have come to Uruk, now? Well, what do you want with me, wild man? This is not the hour for presenting petitions to the king."

Bluntly he said, "Where are you going, Gilgamesh?"

"Am I answerable to you, then?"

"Tell me where you are going."

Again my yeomen stirred. I think they would gladly have speared him dead, but I held them back.

In some irritation I answered, waving beyond him to the assembly house, "Over there. To attend a wedding. From which you delay me, wild man."

"You may not go," he said. "Do you mean to take the bride for yourself?. You may not have her!"

"I may not? I may not? What strange words to offer a king, wild man!" With a shrug I said, "This ceases to amuse me. Once more I tell you: step aside, fellow."

I moved forward. But instead of yielding the way, he put out his foot to prevent me, and then he laid hold of me with his hands.

It is death to touch the king in such a fashion. I left no space, however, for my yeomen to strike him down; for as he touched me a sudden terrible rage sprang up in me, and I grabbed him as if I meant to hurl him to the far side of the marketplace. Instantly we were grappling in a tight embrace, and the spearmen could not have struck him without wounding me; so they stepped back and let us go at it, not knowing what else to do.

In the first moments I saw that he was my equal in strength, or nearly so. That was something new to me. In my boyhood, in my days of military training in Kish, in the roistering frolics with the young heroes of my court after I had become king, I had wrestled often, purely for the sport of it, and I had always sensed in the first laying-on of hands that the man with whom I had contended was at my mercy: I could throw him whenever I chose. That was sat isfying only when I was a child. When I grew older I lamented it, since it robbed the wrestling of sport, to know that the power of victory was mine for the taking, at any moment, always. This was different. I had no assurance. When l tried to move him, he did not budge. When he tried to move me, it took all my strength to resist. I felt as though I had crossed over into some strange other world where Gilgamesh was no longer Gilgamesh. What I tasted was not fear-I do not think it was fear-but something almost as unfamiliar. Doubt? Uncertainty? Unease?

We fought like maddened bulls, snorting, lurching up and down, never once releasing one another. We shattered doorposts and made the walls of the buildings shake. Neither of us was able to prevail. Because he was of my height, or nearly so, we stared eye to eye as we contended; his eyes were deep-set and reddened with strain, and they gleamed with an astonishing wildness. We grunted; we bellowed; we roared. I shouted out defiance in the language of Uruk and the language of the desert folk and any other language I could think of; and he muttered and stormed at me in the language of the beasts, the harsh growling of the lion of the plains.

I yearned to kill him. I prayed that it be given to me to break his back, to hear the sharp snapping sound of his spine, to toss him like a worn-out cloak into the trash-heap. Such hatred went through me as made me dizzy. You must understand that no one had ever stood up to me in this way before. He was like a mountain that had risen in the night across my highway. How could I have felt, if not enraged: I the king, I the invincible hero? But I could not defeat him, nor he me. I cannot tell you how long we strained and struggled, and my strength and his were in equal measures.

But there is godhood in me, and Enkidu was altogether mortal. In the end it was inevitable that I would prevail. I felt my strength holding, while his' was beginning to wane. At last I planted my foot firmly on the ground and bent my knee, and was able to catch him and pull him down, so that his feet flew up beneath him and he lost his balance.

In that moment every vestige of hatred for him went from me. Why should I hate him? He was splendid in his strength. He was close to being my equal. As a river batters down a dam, so did love for him sweep away all my anger. It was a sudden love so deep that it swept upon me like the fullest torrents of springtime and entirely conquered me. I bethought me of my dreammof that piece of starstuff which had fallen from the heavens and which I had been unable to budge. In the dream I had braced myself and with the greatest of efforts I had lifted it and taken it to my mother, who had told me, "This is your brother, this is your great comrade." Yes. I had never known a man so much my equal in so many ways, so fitted to me as though joined by a master carpenter. I clove to him in that moment as if we were of one flesh in two bodies, long sundered, now united. That was what f had felt, while my strength was being tested by his. That was what had passed between us as we struggled. I went to Enkidu and raised him from the ground and embraced him a second time, not in strife now, but in love. Great sobs shook me, and him also; for we both knew in the same moment what had passed between us.

"Ah, Gilgamesh!" he cried out. "There is not another one like you in all the world! Glory to the mother who bore you!"

"There is one other," I said, "who is like me. But only one."

"No: for Enlil has given you the kingship."

"But you are my brother," I said.

He looked at me, dazed like one who is roused too soon from sleep. "I came here meaning to do you injury."

"And I the same to you. When I saw you would block my way, I imagined myself cracking you in half, and throwing the pieces of you aside like gnawed bones."

He laughed. "You could not have done it, Gilgamesh!"

"No. I could not. But I meant to try."

"And I to cast you down from your high place. I could have done that, if the luck had gone with me."

"Yes," I said. "I think you could. Try it again, if you will. I will be ready for you."

He shook his head. "No. If I cast you down, if I do you grave injury, I will lose you. I will be alone again. No, I would rather have you for a friend than an enemy. That is the word I mean. Friend. Friend. Is that not the word?"

"A friend, yes. We are too much alike to be enemies."

"Ah," said Enkidu, frowning. ",8re we alike? How so? You are the king, and I am only-I amm"I He faltered. "A shepherd's watchman is all I am."

"No. You are the king's friend. The king's brother."

I had never thought I would be able to say those words to anyone.

Yet I knew them to be true.

"Is it so?" he asked. "Shall we not fight again, then?"

With a grin I said, "Of course we'll fight! But it will be as brothers fight. Eh, Enkidu? Eh?" And I took him by the hand. Forgotten now was the wedding, forgotten was the maiden Ishhara. "Come with me, Enkidu. To Ninsun my mother, the priestess of An. I would have her meet her other son. Come, Enkidu. Come now!" And we went to the temple of the Sky-father, and knelt in the darkness before Ninsun; and it was very strange and wonderful for us both. I had thought the loneliness would be with me forever; and here it was gone, suddenly, vanished like a thief in the night at the moment of the coming of Enkidu.

That was the beginning of that great friendship, the like of which I had never known before, and will never know again. He was to me my other half; he filled a place in me where there had been an emptiness.

But it has been whispered that we were lovers as men and women are. I would not have you believe that. That was not the case at all. I know that there are certain men in whom the gods have mixed manhood and womanhood so that they have no need or liking for women, but I am not one of them, nor was Enkidu. For me the union of man and woman is the great holy thing, which it is not possible for a man to experience with another man: they say that they do experience it, those men, but I think they deceive themselves. It is not the true union. I have had that union, in the Sacred Marriage with the priestess Inanna, in whom the goddess resides. Inanna too is my other half, though a dark and troubled half. But a man may have several halves, or so it seems to me, and he may love a man in a way that is altogether different from the way in which he finds union with a woman.

That kind of love that exists between man and man existed between Enkidu and me. It sprang to life in the moment of our wrestling, and it never faded thereafter. We did not speak of it with one another. We did not need to speak of it. But we knew its presence. We were one soul in two bodies. We scarcely had to voice our thoughts, because we could hear them unspoken in one another. We were well matched. There is a god within me; there was the earth within him. I come from the heavens downward; he came from the ground upward. Our meeting-place was the place between, which is the world of mortal men.

I gave him rooms in the palace, the grand white-walled suite along the southwestern wall that previously had been reserved for the use of visiting governors and kings of other cities. I provided robes of the finest white linen and wool for him, and gave him maidens to bathe and oil him, and sent him my barbers and my surgeons to trim and polish the last traces of wildness out of him. I awoke in him a love of fine roasted meats, and sweet strong wines and rich foaming beer. I gave him the skins of leopards and lions to bedeck himself and his rooms. I shared all my concubines with him, holding back none for myself alone. I had a bronze shield made for him engraved with portrayals of the campaigns of Lugalbanda, and a sword that gleamed like the eye of the sun, and a richly ornamented red and gold helmet, and spears of the most exquisite balance. I taught him myself the arts of the chariot, and the casting of the javelin.

Though there remained always something rough and earthy at the core of him, nevertheless he quickly came to take on the outer look and manner of a noble of the court, dignified, accomplished, handsome. I tried even to have him taught to read and write, but he drew the line at attempting that. Well, there are many great men of the court who lack that skill also, and few who have mastered it.

If there was jealousy of him at court, I suppose I did not notice it. Perhaps there were some in the inner circle of heroes and warriors who turned away bitterly, saying behind his back and mine, "There is the king's favorite, the wild man. Why was he chosen, and not me?" But if they did, they hid their scowls and mutterings very well.

I prefer to think that no such envious feelings existed. It was not as though Enkidu had displaced some earlier favorite. I had never had a favorite before, not even such old comrades as Bir-hurturre or

Zabardi-bunugga; I had never allowed anyone so close. They saw at once that the companionship I enjoyed with Enkidu was of a different sort from anything I had known with them, just as his strength was of a different sort from theirs. There was no one like him in the world; and there was nothing like our friendship.

I took him completely into my confidence. I made every aspect of myself open to him. I even allowed him to watch me when I went into seclusion to beat the drum made of the huluppu-tree in the special way that put me into the trance. He crouched beside me as I disappeared into that other realm of blue light; and when I came out of it I found myself lying with my head cradled against his knees. He was staring at me as though he had seen the god emanating from me: he touched my cheekbones, he made holy signs with his fingertips. "Can you show me how to go to that place?" he asked. And I replied, "I will, Enkidu," but he never could reach it, try as he would. I think it was that he had not been touched in an inward way by the god as I had been; he had never felt the fluttering of the great wings in his soul, he had not heard the droning and the buzzing, or seen the crackling aura, that are the first signs of being possessed. But often I let him sit beside me as I drummed, and he guarded me when I rolled about on the floor and thrashed and lashed my arms and legs in the ecstatic fit.

When there was work to do-the construction of canals, the strengthening of the wall, whatever labor the gods decreed for me-Enkidu was by my side. At the rituals he stood near me, and handed me the sacred vessels, or lifted the offerings of oxen and sheep to the altar as easily as if they were birds. When it was the season of hunting, we hunted together, and in that he was my superior, since he knew the wild beasts with a brother's knowledge. He stood with his head thrown back and sniffed the air, and said, pointing, "That way is lion. That way is elephant." He was never wrong. We went time and again into the marshes or the steppes or the other places where the great beasts dwelled, and there was no beast that did not fall to us. Together ~ve killed three strong male elephants in the great bend of the river, and we carried their hides and teeth to Uruk and hung them up for a show on the facade of the palace. Another time he built a pit covered with branches and we captured an elephant alive, and brought it to the city also, where it stood bellowing and snorting in an enclosure for the whole winter until we offered it to Enlil. We hunted lions of the two kinds, the black-maned ones and those without manes, from our chariot: like me, Enkidu cast his javelins with the right hand or the left, with equal accuracy. I tell you, we were one soul in two bodies.

He was different from me, of course, in many ways. He was louder and far more boisterous, especially when he had had overmuch wine, and he had a low taste in wit, roaring endlessly with laughter over jokes that would make a child's nose wrinkle with distaste. Well, he was a man who had been reared among beasts. He had a dignity, a natural one, but it was not the dignity of one who has grown up in a palace with a king for a father. It was good for me to have Enkidu booming and roistering at my side, for I am too serious a man for my own good, and he lightened my hours, not as a court jester does with his carefully devised jollities, but in an easy and natural way, like a cool crisp breeze on a sultry sweltering day.

He spoke out with complete honesty. When I took him into the Enmerkar temple, thinking he would be overwhelmed by its beauty and majesty, he said at once, "It is very small and ugly, is it not?" I had not expected that. Afterward I began to see my grandfather's great temple through Enkidu's eyes, and indeed it did appear small and ugly to me, and old, and in bad need of repair. Instead of repairing it I tore it down and built a splendid new one, five times its size, atop the White Platform: that is the temple that stands there now, which I think will win me fame through the thousands of years to come.

It cost me some little trouble with the priestess Inanna, when I tore the Enmerkar temple down. I told her what I meant to do, and she looked at me as if I had spat upon the altars and replied, "But it is the greatest of temples!"

"The one that was there before it, that Meskiaggasher built, was also the greatest of temples, in its day. No one remembers it now. It is in the nature of kings to replace temples with greater temples. Enmerkar built well, but I will build better."

She glared at me sourly. "And where will the goddess live, while you are building your temple?"

"The goddess inhabits all of Uruk. She'll live in every house and in every street and in the air about us, as she does now."

Inanna was furious. She summoned the assembly of elders and the house of men to declare her protest; but no one could not stop me from building the temple. It is in the province of the king to enhance the grandeur of the goddess by offering temples to her. So we swept the Enmerkar temple away, down to its foundations, al though we left intact those demon-haunted ancient underground passageways beneath it: I did not want to meddle with those. I brought in limestone blocks from the limestone country to be the new foundations of my temple, and laid it out on a scale that no one in Uruk had ever imagined before. The citizens gasped in surprise when they came to watch the work and saw the length and breadth of what I intended to build.

In building the new temple I made use of everything I had learned of the craft. I raised the height of the White Platform until it towered halfway to heaven, and put my temple high on its foundations above that, as the temples are in Kish. I made the walls thicker than anyone had ever thought to make walls, and I supported them on immense columns as sturdy as the thighs of the gods. By way of ornament for the walls and columns I devised a new thing so wondrous that I should be remembered for it alone, even if all my other achievements are forgotten. This was, to drive thousands of long pointed cones of baked clay into the mud-plaster that covered the walls and columns, before it had hardened. Only the heads of these cones were allowed to remain visible, and they were painted in red or yellow or black, and placed one next to the other to form dazzling colorful patterns in diagonals and zigzags and lozenges and chevrons and triangles. The result is that wherever the eye looks within my temple, it is delighted by vividness and complexity: it is like seeing a vast tapestry, woven not with colored wools but of an uncountable number of small bright roundels of painted clay.

Enkidu thought also that the small shrine to Lugalbanda that Dumuzi had erected years ago by the military barracks in the Lion district was unworthy of'my father. I had to agree; and I tore that down too, and built a far more appropriate one, with arches and pilasters of great size all covered over with my cone-mosaic decorations in brilliant colors. At the center of it I put the old image of Lugalbanda in black stone that Dumuzi had erected, for it was a noble enough representation, and I would not lightly discard anything made of a material so rare as the black stone; but I surrounded it by tripodmounted lamps against mirrors of bright copper, so that a dazzling light filled the shrine at every hour. We painted the walls with pictures and leopards and bulls, as offerings to Enlil of the storms, whom Lugalbanda loved. At the dedication I poured the blood of lions and elephants over the tiles of the floor. Can anyone say that the hero Lugalbanda merited anything less?

There were no wars in those years. The Elamites were quiet, the Martu desert tribesmen went marauding elsewhere, the collapse of the dynasty of Agga of Kish removed a powerful menace to our north. That the king of Ur had made himself king of Kish did not trouble me; Ur and Kish are far apart, and I saw no way that he could combine the power of the two cities in league against us. So we lived a calm and easy life in Uruk, growing rich in peace, fattening ourselves with trade instead of going forth to seek the booty of warfare.

In those years the merchants and emissaries of Uruk went everywhere at my bidding, to the great enhancement of the city. From the mountains in the east they brought beams of cedar-wood fifty and even sixty cubits in length, and logs of urkarinnu-wood to the length of twenty-five cubits, which we used for the beams of the new temple. From the town of Ursu in the mountain of Ibla they fetched zabalu-wood, great beams ofashukhu-wood, and the timber of plane-trees. From Umanu, a mountain in the land of Menua, and from Basalla, a mountain of the land of Amurru, my envoys returned with great blocks of the rare black stone, out of which the craftsmen fashioned new images of the gods for all the older temples. I imported copper from Kagalad, a mountain of Kimash, and with my own hands I made a great mace-head out of it. Out of Gubin, the mountain of huluppu-trees, I brought huluppu-wood, and from Madga came asphalt to use in the platform of the temple, and from the mountain of Barshib I fetched blocks of the sumptuous nalua-stone by boat. I laid plans to send expeditions even farther, to Magan, to Meluhha, to Dilmun. The city thrived. It grew daily in splendor. I took a wife, and she bore me a son; and I took a second wife, as was my right. There was peace. On the night of the new year I went to the temple I had built, and lay with fiery Inanna in the rite of the Sacred Marriage: each year she clung more fiercely to me, and her body moved with greater abandon, as she received in a single night the whole year's fulfillment of her hungers. I had the love of Enkidu to buoy me through my days. The wine flowed freely; the smoke of burning meat rose each day to the gods, and all was well. This was how I thought my reign would be forever and ever. But the gods do not grant such ease forever and ever: it is a miracle when they grant it at all.

ONE DAY I came upon Enkidu and found him in a bleak and downcast mood, scowling and sighing and well-nigh close to tears. I asked him what troubled him, though I was fairly sure that I knew; and he said, "You will think me a fool if I tell you."

"Perhaps I will, and what of it? Come, speak it forth."

"It is foolishness, Gilgamesh!"

"I think not," I said. I gave him a close look and said, "Allow me a guess. You grow restless in our civilized life of ease, is that not it? You've become weary of dallying here in idleness."

His face reddened and he replied, startled, "By the gods, how did you know that?"

"It takes no great wisdom to see it, Enkidu."

"I would not have you think that I want to return to my old life and run naked on the steppe." "No. I doubt that you do."

"But I tell you, I'm becoming soft here. The edge of my strength is going from me. My arms are limp, my breath comes short."

"And the hunting trips we make? And the games we play on the jousting-field? Not enough, are they, Enkidu?"

In a low voice I could barely hear he said, "I am ashamed to say it. But they are not enough."

I put my hand to his arm. "Well, they are not enough for me either."

He blinked in surprise. "What is that you say?"

"That I feel the same restlessness you do. My kingship binds and confines me. The tranquility that I've labored to achieve for the city has become my enemy. My soul is troubled even as yours is. I yearn as much as you for adventure, Enkidu, for danger, for mighty deeds that will raise up my name before mankind. I chafe here. I long to take a great journey."

It was the truth. All was so serene in Uruk that being the king did not seem much different to me from being a shopkeeper. I could not accept a shopkeeper's lot, for the gods had put divinity in me, and the divine part of me was and is unsleeping, forever questing, forever unsatisfied. That is the jest the gods have played on me- that I yearn for peace but am not satisfied when I attain it; but I think

I have solved the riddle of that jest now, as I will tell you in its proper time.

"Ah, is it so?" he said. "You suffer as I do?"

"Exactly as you do."

He laughed. "We are like two overgrown boys, casting about for new diversions. But what will we do, then, Gilgamesh? Where can we go?"

I gave him a long steady look. Slowly I said, "There is a place known as the Land of Cedars. For some time now I have been thinking of undertaking an expedition to that place." That was not the truth: the idea had leaped into my mind that moment. "Do you know of it, Enkidu?"

With a frown he said, speaking somewhat darkly and grimly, "I know of it, yes."

"Would it cure your restlessness, do you think, to go there with me?"

He moistened his lips. "Why that place, Gilgamesh?"

"We have need of cedar. It is a splendid wood. There is none of it in the Land." I was not being devious with him. It was the truth. But also I had chosen the Land of Cedars for its sharp and bracing air, which I thought would bring Enkidu out of his melancholy. And above and beyond that, there was talk of late that the Elamites were staking claim to all the land around the cedar forest. I could not permit that.

"There are other places where you can obtain cedar."

"Perhaps. But I mean to go to the Land of Cedars for it. They say it's wondrous country there, high and green and cool, very beautiful."

"And very dangerous," said Enkidu.

"Is it?" I shrugged. "Better and better! You said you were growing restless dallying here in civilized ease-that you are hungry for challenge, for peril-"

He said, looking as abashed as I had ever seen him, "Possibly you offer more than I bargain for."

"What? Too much peril, is that it? Did those words come from Enkidu's lips? I never thought to hear you speak in a cowardly way."

His eyes flashed; but with an effort he kept himself in check. "There is a free line, brother, between cowardice and common sense."

"And is it common sense to fear a skirmish with a few Elamites?"

"No, not with Elamites, Gilgamesh."

"Then what-"

"Are you not aware that the Lord Enlil placed the demon Huwawa at the gateway to the Land of Cedars to guard the holy trees?"

I nearly laughed out loud at that. Indeed I had heard tales of the demon of the forest; every forest has its demon or two, and terrifying tales abound. But generally demons can be propitiated or otherwise turned aside; and I had not expected Enkidu to care a rat's eyelash for beings of that sort in any case.

I said lightly, "Well, there is some such story. But perhaps the demon will be busy elsewhere when we get there. Or perhaps the demon isn't as ferocious as the tales make him out to be. Or perhaps, Enkidu, there's no demon in the forest at all."

Quietly Enkidu said, "I have looked upon Huwawa with my own eyes."

His words had the force of a blow in the belly, so hushed was his voice, so taut with conviction. Now it was my turn to blink with amazement. "What?" I blurted. "You have actually seen him?"

"When I was still ranging through the wilderness with the wild beasts," he said, "I wandered once far to the east, and came into the forest where the cedars grow. It extends ten thousand leagues in every direction; and Huwawa is everywhere in it. There is no hiding from him. He rose up before me and roared, and I thought I would die of fright; and I am no coward, Gilgamesh." He looked at me very closely. "Am I a coward, do you think? But Huwawa rose up and roared, and when he roars it is like the roaring of the storms that bring the great floods. I thought I would die of fright. His mouth is fire itself, his breath is death."

I still could not believe it. "You say that you saw the face of the demon?" I asked.

"I saw it. There is nothing more frightening in this world. This Huwawa is a monster beyond belief. His teeth are like the fangs of a dragon. His face is a lion's face." Enkidu was trembling. His eyes were gleaming with the recollection of terror. "When he charges, it is like the onrushing waters of the river. He devours trees and reeds as though they are grass."

Dully I said yet again, "You saw the demon!"

"I saw him, Gilgamesh. I was lucky to get away. He turned aside; he forgot me. I would not get away a second time. He will slay us. I tell you this: if we go to the Land of Cedars, he will slay us. He perceives everything that happens in that forest. He can hear the sound of the wild heifers roaming in the woods, even if they are sixty leagues away. There's no escaping him. The contest is unequal." He shook his head. "Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, I am as hungry for some great exploit as you are: but are you hungry for death?" "Do you think that I am?"

"You mean to go to the Land of Cedars."

"For the sake of adventure, yes. For the sake of making my heart beat faster in my breast. But I have no hunger for death. It is the love of life that draws me to the Land of Cedars, not any craving for dying. You know that."

"Yet to enter the lair of Huwawa-"

"No, Enkidu. I have seen the corpses floating on the river, and it weighs heavy on my soul, seeing them and knowing that that is our fate too. I abhor death. Death is my enemy."

"Then why go-"

"Because we must."

"Ah, why must we? We can go north! We can go south! We can go-"

"No," I said. The fire was upon me now. It pained me to see Enkidu languishing in such fear. His soul had softened in Uruk; he would die of it if I did not pull him forth. For his sake we must undertake this thing, no matter the risks. "There is only one place we can go, and that is the Land of Cedars." "Where we will most certainly die."

"I am not so certain of that. But consider this, friend: only the gods live forever under the sun, and even they taste death now and then. As for mortals like us, what we attempt is nothing but empty air, the blowing of the wind. Yet we must attempt it, I think, even so."

"And die. I have never known you so eager for death, Gilgamesh. No matter what you say, that is how you seem."

"No! No! I mean to fend off death as long as I can. But I will not live in fear. How can it be, Enkidu, that you are afraid?"

This time my jeering roused no anger in him. He looked away, scowling, bleak-faced.

"I have seen Huwawa," he said sullenly. Now I grew angry myself. This was not the Enkidu I knew. "Well, then," I cried, "fear him! But I will not. Stay back where it is safe, then. Come with me to the Land of Cedars, yes. The journey will refresh you; the keen air will awaken your soul. But when we are in the forest, I will let you walk behind me. What if he slays me? If I fall to him, well, at the least of it I will have left behind me a name to last forever. They will say of me, 'Gilgamesh has fallen to fierce Huwawa.' That is no disgrace, eh? Where can there be any disgrace, in falling to a demon so dreadful that he frightens even the hero Enkidu?"

His eyes met mine. He grinned fiercely, and his nostrils flared. "How sly you are, Gilgamesh!" "Am I? How so?"

"To tell me you'll let me walk behind you."

"It will be safer for you there, Enkidu."

"Do you think so? And have everyone in Uruk say afterward, 'That is Enkidu, he walked behind his brother in the forest of the demon'!"

"But if the demon frightens youm"

"You know I will walk at your side when we come into Huwawa's domain."

"Ah, I would not require that of you-you who have seen the dreadful Huwawa."

"Spare me your mockery," said Enkidu wearily. "I will stand beside you. You know that, Gilgamesh. You have known it from the beginning."

"If you are unwilling to go?"

"I tell you, I will stand beside you!" he bellowed. And we laughed and seized each other in a great hug, and made an end to all this talk: and I let the word go out that I soon would set forth from Uruk to the Land of Cedars.

I cannot tell you how many times, as we made our preparations for the journey, I asked Enkidu to describe the demon for me. Each time he offered the same words. He spoke of the roaring, the mouth like fire, the vast outpouring of storm-force. Well, I could not give him the lie: there was no artifice in Enkidu, he had not the slightest trace of the skills of deception. Plainly he had seen the demon, and plainly the demon was no trifling foe. From time to time we all see demons, for they are everywhere about, lurking behind the doors, in the air, on the rooftops, under bushes; I had seen demons often enough myself; but I had never seen one to match Huwawa. Still, ] felt no fear. The very fear Enkidu had voiced only sharpened my resolve to fetch cedars from Huwawa's forest.

I chose fifty men to go with us, among them Bir-hurturre, but not Zabardi-bunugga, for I told him that he must remain to command the army of the city while I was away. I had great adzes cast for felling the trees, of a weight of three talents each, with handles of willow and box-wood; and my artisans made for us swords worthy of heroes, with blades of two talents' weight each, and golden sheaths, and pommels on the hilts that only a big man's hand could grasp. We gathered together our finest axes, our hunting-bows, our spears. Even before the day of departure I heard the war-song humming in my ears, which I had not heard in too long a time, and I felt like a boy again, I felt fresh blood coursing hot in my veins.

Of course the elders were gloomy. They formed a delegation on the quay and marched into town through the Gate of Seven Bolts, chanting prayer~ in their dour long-faced way. The people gathered around them in the Market-of-the-Land and began to chant and weep too, and I saw there was going to be trouble; so I went to the marketplace and presented myself before the elders. It was not hard to predict what they would say: "You are still young, Gilgamesh, your courage is greater than your wisdom, your heart leads you into something rash. You take a road you have never traveled, and you will be lost. You are strong, but you will never prevail against Huwawa. He is a being of a monstrous kind; his roaring is like that of the storm-flood, his mouth is fire itself, his breath is the breath of death. "And so on and so forth. Which was exactly what they said. I heard them out; and then I replied, smiling, that I would seek the protection of the gods and that I was confident the gods would protect me, as they always had in the past. "It is a road I have never traveled, I admit," I said, "but I go without fear. I go with joyful heart."

When they saw there was no changing my mind, they altered their tune. Now they warned me simply not to be too sure of my own strength. Let Enkidu go first, they said. Let him lead the way, let him protect the king. To this advice I listened calmly, smiling still, not entering into any dispute with them. They told me also to place myself under the mercy of Utu of the sun, who is the god who guards those in danger, and I swore to go that very day to the temple of Utu and offer him two kids, a white one without blemish and a brown one. I would beg the aid of Utu, and I would promise him a glorious offering of praise and gifts if he granted me a safe return. And on my journey to the Land of Cedars I would perform this rite and that one, this observance and that, to insure myself against all harm. I promised these things in all sincerity. I was not unaware, after all, of the perils.

When the elders were done plaguing me, it was the turn of the priestess Inanna, who summoned me to the temple I had built for her and said angrily, "What is this madness, Gilgamesh? Where are you going?"

"Are you my mother, to speak to me this way?"

"Hardly. But you are king of Uruk, and if you die in this venture, who will be king after you?"

Shrugging, I said, "That is for the goddess to determine, is it not, and not I. But have no fear, Inanna. I will not die on this journey."

"And if you do?"

"I will not die," I said again.

"Is it so important to attempt this thing?"

"We must have the cedar." "Send your troops, then, and let them fight with the demons." "Ah, and would you have me tell them that I am afraid of Huwawa, and send them in my place, while I sit here comfortably at home all the rest of my days? I will go, Inanna. That much is settled."

She stared at me furiously. I felt, as I always did, the power of her beauty, which was in its fullest ripeness now; and I felt also the force of her love for me, which had raged within her like the fire of the heavens since we were children; and I felt, beyond that, the anger that she had for me because she was unable in any way to fulfill that love as women and men ordinarily do.

I thought also of those times, one night a year, when she and I had come together in the bed of the goddess, when she had lain naked in my arms with her breasts heaving and her thighs parted and her fingers clawing the skin of my back, and I wondered whether

I would live to embrace her that way again. For in my way I loved her also, though my love was always mixed with a certain mistrust and more than a little dread of her wiles. We were silent a time.

Then she said, "I will make offerings for your safety. And go, get you to your mother the old queen, and ask her to do the same."

"I mean to go to her next," I said.

It was true. Enkidu and I crossed the city to the wise and great Ninsun, and I knelt before her and told her that I was setting out on an uncertain road, with a strange battle to fight. She sighed, and asked why it was that the gods, having given her Gilgamesh for a son, had endowed him with such a restless heart; but she made no attempt to dissuade me from going. Instead she rose and cloaked herself in her holy crimson robe, and donned her breastplate of gold and her necklaces of lapis and carnelian, and put her tiara on her head, and went to the altar of Utu on the roof of her dwelling. She lit incense to him and spoke to the god for a time; and then she returned to us, and turned to Enkidu, saying, "You are not the child of my flesh, strong Enkidu, but I adopt you as my son. Before all my priestesses and votaries I adopt you." She hung an amulet about Enkidu's neck, and embraced him, and said to him, "I entrust him to you. Guard him. Protect him. Bring him back safely. He is the king, Enkidu. And he is my son."

The praying and discussion were done with at last; and I led my men forth out of Uruk the city, to the Land of Cedars.

SWIFTLY WE went up out of the warm lowlands, leaving behind us the groves of date-palms and the golden breast of the desert, and rose into the cool green high country to the east. We traveled in forced marches from dawn to dusk, crossing seven mountains one after the other without pausing, until at last the forests of cedar stood before us, uncountable legions of trees ranging along the slopes of the rough land ahead. It was strange for us seeing so many trees, the Land having scarcely any. They made the jagged hills look almost black. They seemed like a hostile army, waiting calmly for our onslaught.

There was another great strangeness in those fanged ridges and rocky gullies: the fires of the outcast gods and demons that rose out of the stone here and there, and their thick black oily outpourings, which came rolling down toward us like the sluggish snakes of the nether world. For we were entering the land that is known as the Rebel Lands, into which the gods who rose up against Enlil were exiled. Here did the victorious warriors Enlil and Ninurta and Ningirsu cast their banished enemies in that great battle of gods long ago; and here they still sulked, still rumbling and growling and shaking the earth, still giving off their great blasts of smoke and fire and letting their serpents of oil seep from the depths of the ground. With each step we took we penetrated deeper into this dark realm, knowing all the time that sinister deities with angry red eyes snorted and puffed beneath our feet.

Yet we allowed ourselves no fear. We paused at the proper times and made the proper observances to Utu, to An, to Enlil, to Inanna. When we camped at night we dug wells and let the holy Waters rise to the surface as offerings. At the last, before sleep, I invoked Lugalbanda and took COUnsel with him, for he had been in these lands himself, and had suffered greatly from the noxious fumes and blasts of the rebel gods. His presence was a strong comfort within me. Enkidu knew this country well. Like the wild creature he once had been, he guided us through the out fall. He took us around the places that had been burned and blackened by the hot breath of dangerous spirits. He led us past the regions where the land had slipped and broken and heaved Upward and was impassable. He brought us past thick deep oily slicks that lay like black lakes upon the breast of the earth. Nearer and nearer did we draw to the inner forest itself, to the domain of the demon Huwawa. Now we Were amidst the first outlying cedar trees. If we had come only for Wood, I suppose we could have chopped down twenty or sixty of the trees and returned happily with them to Uruk, claiming triumph. But we had not come only for Wood.

Enkidu said, "There is a great gate here, sealing off the sacred groves within. We are very near it now." "And Huwawa?" I asked. "On the other side of the gate, not far." I peered close at him. His voice Was Strong and steady, but yet I was not entirely SUre of him. I had no desire to injure his Pride; but after a moment I asked, "Is all well with you thus far, Enkidu?', He smiled and said, "Do I look pale? Do you see me quaking with fear, Gilgamesh?"

"In Uruk I heard you speak with great respect of Huwawa. There is no escaping him, you said. He is a monster you said. When he roared, you thought you would die of the fright of it. You said those things."

"I said those things in Uruk, perhaps. In cities men grow soft. Here I feel my strength returning. There is nothing to fear, my friend. Follow me: I know where Huwawa dwells, and the road he travels." And he put his hand to my arm and squeezed it, and locked his arm hard around mine. A day later we came to the wall of the forest, and to the great gate.

I had wondered about that wall since Enkidu first told me of it. The Land of Cedars lies in the unsettled borderland between the Land and the country of the Elamites, and ownership of it has been in dispute at least since the days of Meskiaggasher, the first king of Uruk. Since it is a territory that cannot be farmed, we have never tried to take formal possession of it, but whenever we found need of cedar-wood we have freely entered into it and collected all that we wanted. It was a serious business if someone was building walls through the forest. It is one thing if Enlil chooses to post some dread fire-demon here to guard the trees in his name: I have no say in what Enlil does. But I would not tolerate the setting-up of walls here by any black-bearded Elamitish mountain king who meant to try to claim the whole forest for his dirty ragged tribesfolk.

The moment I saw the wall I knew that Elamites and not Huwawa or any other spirit had built it. It had the mark of men all over it, and not very skillful men at that. Cedar logs, roughly squared and indifferently bound with withes, were piled in a helter-skelter fashion along a crudely slashed track that stretched off in both directions as far as the eye could see: the pink heartwood of the trees was sadly exposed, as if the timber had been flayed rather than planed. Anger rose in me at the sight of this huge clumsy wall. I looked about at my men and said, "Well, shall we knock the thing apart and go into the forest?"

"You should see the gate first," said Enkidu.

The gate lay half a league around to the south. Even before I reached it I gasped in surprise. It rose high above the wall, more a tower than a gate, and it was superb in every aspect. That gate would have been no disgrace to the walls of Uruk. It too was of cedar, trimmed and cut by a master's hand, and framed and joined with high skill. Its pivot and rod were wondrously smooth and its great jamb was superbly fitted.

"A gate of the gods!" Bir-hurturre cried. "A gate put up by Enlil himself!"

"A gate that no Elamite could have built, at any rate," I said, going close to inspect it.

Indeed it was perfection. Not only was it flawlessly built, it was magnificently adorned: carved upon the finely seasoned wood of its face were monsters and serpents and gods and goddesses, in Elamitish designs that I remembered having seen on the shields of the warriors

I slew in my campaigns for Agga of Kish. Mounted high at the top of the gate were three huge horns set close together, much like the massive horns that the Elamites carve and place on the facades of their temples. And down the sides of the wall were inscriptions in the barbaric Elamitish script, which is awkwardly patterned after our own: pictures of beasts, vases, jugs, stars, mountains, and many other things, tumbling together in some sort of declaration indecipherable to me. The carvings were nicely done, but it seemed a foolish way to write, this silly making of pictures.

Then I saw something that angered me, low down on the left hand side of the gate. It was an inscription in the wedge-shaped characters of the Land, clear and unmistakable, saying, Utuřragaba the great craftsman of Nippur built this gate Jbr Zinuba king of kings, king of Hatamti.

"Ah, the traitor!" I exclaimed. "Better that he had stayed in Nippur than to come here and render such excellent service to an Elamite lord." And I lifted my axe to smash the face of the gate.

But Enkidu caught my arm and stayed me. I looked about at him, frowning.

"What is it?"

His eyes were aglow. "The gate is very beautiful, Gilgamesh."

"So it is. But see, here, this writing? A man of my own nation constructed it for our enemies."

"That may be," said Enkidu indifferently. "All the same, beauty is beauty, and ought not to be desecrated. Beauty comes from the gods, does it not? I think you should not shatter the gate. Step aside, brother, and let me force it instead. What does it matter if a traitor built it, so long as his work was righteously accomplished? The gods clearly guided his' hand. Do you not see that?"

It amazed me to hear him reason in this fashion; but I saw the wisdom in his words, which humbled me, and I yielded to him. I wish now that I had not. Enkidu stepped boldly forward and pushed the edge'~of his axe against the bolt, and thrust at the gate with all his strength, so that cords and sinews stood out all over his body. He grunted mightily under the strain and the gate swung open before him; but in that moment he cried out in a strange choking way and dropped his axe, and slapped his left hand to his right arm, which suddenly was dangling down as limp as a length of rope. He fell to his knees, moaning, desperately rubbing his arm.

I knelt beside him. "What is it, friend? What has happened to you?"

In a thick voice he muttered, "There must have been a demon in the gate. Look, I have hurt my arm! All strength is gone from my hand! It is torn within, Gilgamesh. It is ruined, it is useless. Come, see for yourself." And indeed his hand was fearfully cold to the touch, and swung like a dead thing, and the skin looked strangely blotched and mottled. He was trembling as if some ague had come into him. I heard the chattering of his teeth.