Gilgamesh the King

"Wine!" I called. "Bring wine for Enkidu!"

The wine warmed him, and his shivering ceased; but his hand remained lame, though we heated it and rubbed it for hours. Indeed he did not begin to recover the use of it for many days, nor was it ever fully the same again. That was a sad thing, that such a hero as Enkidu should lose a part of his strength, especially when it had been for the sake of preserving something of beauty. What was worse, the fear of Huwawa returned to him when he injured himself, for he was convinced that the demon had put a curse on the gate; now he drew back, unwilling to pass through the gate that he himself had opened for us.

It grieved me that he felt fear again, and that our comrades should see him in such a state. But he would not go through the gate, and I could hardly leave him behind. So we made camp in that place and stayed there some time, until he ceased to writhe in anguish and said he felt the power of his hand returning. Even then he was reluctant to go forward. He sat in dismal bleak silence, lost in brooding. Fear was upon him like a dreadful bird of night that clung with terrible talons to his shoulder. I went to him and said, "Come, dear friend, it is time to move on."

He shook his head. "Go without me, Gilgamesh!"

Sharply I said, "It makes me ache to hear you speak like a weakling. Have we traveled so far, and come through so many dangers, only to turn back at the gate?"

Just as sharply he replied, "When did I ask you to turn back?'

"No, you never did."

"Then go on without me!"

"That I will not do. Nor am I willing to go back empty-handed to Uruk."

"If that is so, you leave me no choice. Must I come with you, then? Am I to be swept along by whatever you wish?"

"I would not force you," I said in no little distress. "But we are brothers, Enkidu. We should face all perils side by side."

He gave me a bitterjaundiced look. "We should, should we? And if I am unwilling?"

I stared. "This is not like you."

"No," he said gloomily, with a sigh. "This is not like me. But what can I do? What can we do? When I hurt my hand a great terror entered me, Gilgamesh. I am afraid. Do you understand that word?

I am aj3aid, Gfigamesh! There was a look in his eyes I had never seen there before: terror, shame, self-reproach, anger, fifty somber things gleaming there at once. His face was glossy with sweat. He looked around as if fearing that the others had overheard us. In a low anguished voice he said, "What can we do?"

I shook my head. "There is a way. Here: stand close by me, take hold of my robe. My strength will go into you. Your weakness will pass. The trembling will leave your hand. And then let us go down into the forest together. Will you do that?"

He hesitated. Then he said, "Do you think I am a coward, Gilgamesh?"

"No. You are no coward, Enkidu."

"You called me a weakling."

"I said it pained me to hear you speak like a weakling. It is because you are not a weakling that it pained me. Do you understand that, brother?"

"I understand."

"Come, then. Let me heal you."

"Can you do that?"

"I think I can."

"Do it, then."

He came to me and stood close; he reached for my robe and held it a moment; then I embraced him so tightly that my arms quivered. After a moment he grasped me with equal strength. We did not speak, but I could feel his fear leaving him. I could feel his courage returning. He seemed to be becoming Enkidu again, and I knew that he would journey onward with me into the forest.

"Go," I said. "Make yourself ready. Huwawa awaits us. The heat of combat will warm your blood and strengthen your resolve. I think there is no demon that can harm us, if we stand side by side. But if we fall in the struggle, why, we will leave a name that will last forever."

He listened without replying. After a time he nodded and rose and touched his hand to mine, and trampled out our campfire, and went off to oil his weapons. In the morning we passed through the gate and into the forest of cedars, not in any foolhardy way, but with boldness and determination.

It was an awesome place. It was almost like a temple: I felt the presence of gods all about me, though I did not know which gods they were. The cedars were the loftiest trees I had ever seen, rising like spears into the heavens, with clear open space between them; but so dense were their crowns that the sunlight could scarcely penetrate the cover they made. It was a green and silent world, cool, full of delight. Ahead of us lay a single mountain, beyond doubt an abode of the gods, a fitting throne for the highest of them. But also about us lay the presence of Huwawa: we felt him, and we saw the traces of him, for there were certain zones of the forest where the underground gases and fires had broken through, and that was the mark of the demon.

Yet there was no immediate sign of him. We went deeper, until darkness halted us. As the sun began to descend I dug a well and made the water-offering, and scattered three handfuls of fine meal before the mountain, and asked the gods of the mountain to send me a favorable dream. Then I lay down beside Enkidu and entrusted myself to sleep.

In the middle hour of the night I woke suddenly, and sat bolt upright, utterly awake. By the smouldering light of our fire I saw Enkidu's gleaming eyes.

"What troubles you, brother?"

"Was it you that awakened me?"

"Not I," he said. "You must have had a dream."

"A dream, yes. Yes."

"Tell me."

I looked inward and saw the mists lying heavy on my mind, like thick white fleece; but behind them I caught sight of my dream, or of some part of it. We were crossing a deep gorge of the cedar mountain, Enkidu and I, in that dream; against the great bulk of the mountain we seemed no larger than the little black flies that buzz among the swamp-reeds; and then the mountain heaved like a ship tossed on the bosom of the sea and began to fall. That was all I could remember. I told the dream to Enkidu, hoping he would be able to read it for me; but he shrugged and said it was an unfinished vision, and urged me to return to it. I doubted I would sleep again that night, but I was wrong, for as soon as I closed my eyes I was dreaming once more. And it was the same dream: the mountain was toppling upon me. A rumbling rockslide swept my feet from under me, and a terrible light glared and blazed intolerably. But then a man appeared, or a god, I think, of such grace and beauty as is not found in this world. He pulled me out from under the mountain and gave me water to drink, and my heart took comfort; he raised me and set my feet on the ground.

I woke Enkidu and told him my second dream. He said at once, "It is a favorable dream, it is an excellent dream. The mountain you saw, my friend, is Huwawa. Even if he falls on us, we will defeat him, do you see? The gods stand by you: tomorrow we will seize him. We will kill him. We will cast his body on the plain." "You sound very certain of that." "I am certain," he said. "Now sleep again, brother. Sleep." Once more we slept. This time the cedar mountain devised a dream for Enkidu, and not a cheering one: cold rain-showers fell upon him, and he huddled and shivered like the mountain barley in a winter storm. I heard him cry out, and awakened, and he told me his dream. We did not search for its meaning. There are times when it is best not to probe a dream too deeply. One more time in that dreamthronged night,I let my chin rest upon my knees and gave myself up to sleep; and yet again I dreamed, and again I woke amazed from it, startled, trembling.

"Another?" Enkidu asked.

"Look how I shake!" I whispered. "What awakened me? Did some god pass by? Why is my flesh so numb?" "Tell me, did you dream again?"

"Yes. I dreamed a third dream, more frightful even than the others." "Tell it."

"What did we eat, that gave us such dreams tonight?"

"Until you tell it, it will burden your soul."

"Yes. Yes," I said. But still I held back from it, though its horrendous images still blazed in my mind. He was right: one must tell dreams, one must bring them into the light, or they will bore your soul like maggots. After a moment I took a deep breath and said, speaking in a slow halting way, "This is what it was. The day was calm, the air was still. And then suddenly the heavens shrieked, the earth cried out in booming roars. Daylight failed; darkness came. Lightning flashed, and fires blazed on the horizon. The clouds grew heavy and death came raining down from them. Then the brightness vanished. The fire went out, and everything about us was turned to ashes."

Enkidu shivered. "I think we should not sleep again tonight," he said.

"But the dream? What of the dream?"

"Come, rise, walk with me, brother. Forget the dream."

"Forget it? How?"

"It is only a dream, Gilgamesh."

I looked at him, puzzled. Then I smiled. "When the omens are favorable, you say the dream is excellent. When the omens are grim, you say it is only a dream. Do you not see-"

"I see that the morning is near," he said. "Come, walk with me in the forest. We have heavy work to do at dawn."

Yes, I thought. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the dream did not bear close inspection. The morning would bring great challenges: we needed all our courage about us.

By first light I roused my men. We donned our breastplates and swords and grasped our axes, and set out down the slope into the valley that lay before the cedar-covered mountain. This was the place, said Enkidu, where he had encountered Huwawa that other time he had been here. The demon had risen up without warning from the ground, he said: he had been lucky to escape.

"Today," I said, "it will be Huwawa who is lucky to escape. And when we have done with him, we will see to these Elamites who build walls around a forest, eh, brother?" And I laughed. It felt good to be going to war. No matter that our enemy was a demon. No matter that my last dream and Enkidu's had been full of dark omens. There is a joy in going to war: there is poetry in it, there is music. It is what we were meant to do on this world, those of us who are warriors. You will not understand this, you who sit at home in cities and grow fat. But true warfare is not mere mindless destruction: it is the setting to rights of those things which must be set to rights, and that is a holy task.

As we went forward I felt a rumbling in the earth, distant but unmistakable. It seemed perhaps as though one of the horn-crowned gods might be stirring and walking to and fro down there. That gave me some pause. I will do battle against demons with a glad heart, but what hope is there in contending against the gods? I prayed to Lugalbanda that I was mistaken, that the far-off underground thundering that I felt did not portend the anger of Enlil. Let it merely be Huwawa awakening, I prayed. Let it be just the demon, and not the god.

Behind me I heard my men murmuring uneasily. "What is this demon like?" asked one, and another said, "Dragon's fangs, lion's face," and another said, "He roars like the whirlwind," and yet another said, "Feet with claws, eyes of death." I looked back at them and laughed out loud and cried, "Yes, go on, frighten yourselves! Make him really awesome! Three heads, ten arms!" And I cupped my hand to my lips and called into the mist-shrouded forest, "Huwawa! Come! Come, Huwawa!"

The earth trembled again, more vehemently.

I rushed onward, Enkidu beside me and the others keeping close pace just behind. There was a single great cedar that stood like a mast before us, higher than all the others, and I thought, this is the way to summon Huwawa. So I unslung my axe and set to work at it with all my might, and Enkidu worked on its other side, cutting the lesser notch to guide it in its falling. I felt a great heat entering the air, which was strange, this still being the coolest part of the morning. A third time there were tremors beneath my feet. Something was awakening, no question of it, something vast and fierce, hot and furious. In the distance I saw the treetops swaying. I heard the tearing and crackling of branches. With stroke upon stroke we cut away at that great cedar, until it was on the verge of toppling.

Then to my horror I became aware of the droning and buzzing that told me the god-presence was surging within me. My fit was coming upon me as surely as though I had drummed it into wakefulness. Not now, I begged desperately. Not now! But it would have been easier to hold back the eight winds. The veins of my neck swelled up and beat with a hard pulsation. My eyeballs throbbed as if they meant to leap from their sockets. My hands tingled. Each stroke of the axe against the wood sent fire through my veins.

"Chop, brother, chop!" Enkidu called from the far side of the cedar. He did not understand what was happening to me. "We have it, now. Another four strokes-three-"

I felt ecstasy and terror both at once. The air about me was blue and sizzling. A river of black water was rising from the earth. A golden aura surrounded everything I could see. The god was seizing my mind.

The earth shook and bucked and heaved wildly. I called out to Lugalbanda three times.

Then I heard Enkidu's voice roaring above all the confusion: "Huwawa! Huwawa! Huwawa!"

The demon came, but I did not see him just then. The blackness overtook me; the god swallowed me up.

WHEN NEXT I perceived anything that made sense to me I found myself lying on the ground with my head in Enkidu's lap. He was rubbing my forehead and shoulders, which was most soothing. I ached everywhere, but most especially in my face and neck. The great cedar was down; indeed, most of the trees around us were toppled or partly toppled, as if half the forest had been thrown over in the earthquake. Dark fissures furrowed the ground in a dozen places. Directly in front of us the earth had split wide open and a horrendous column of smoke, black with fiery streaks in it, was belching forth straight up to the sky, making a noise like that of the bellowing of the Bull of Heaven upon the last day of the world.

"What is that thing?" I said to Enkidu, pointing at the roaring column of smoke.

"It is Huwawa," he said.

"That? Is Huwawa nothing but smoke and flame?"

"That is the form he has taken today."

"Did he have another form, that time you were here?"

"He is a demon," said Enkidu with a shrug. "Demons take whatever appearance they please. He is afraid to strike, for he feels the god in you. He hovers there, pouring himself forth. This is the moment to slay him."

"Help me to my feet."

He lifted me as though I were a child, and set me aright. I felt dizzy, and swayed, but he steadied me, and then the dizziness passed. I planted my feet on the ground. The e~frth beneath me was thrumming from the force of the outrush of Huwawa from his subterranean lair, but otherwise it was firm again. Whatever had stirred down there before the quake, whether it had been horned Enlil or only his minion Huwawa, was no longer troubling the pillars and foundations that uphold the world.

I stepped forward and looked upon Huwawa.

It was difficult to get close. The air in the vicinity of that smoky column was foul and oily, and lay upon my lungs like something slimy. My head pounded, and not only from the aftermath of my fit. I bethought me of the time of which they tell when Lugalbanda, traveling in these eastern parts, was overcome by a smoke-demon much like this on the slopes of Mount Hurum, and was left for dead by his comrades. "We must be careful," I told the others, "to keep the demon-stuff from entering into our nostrils." We cut apart the hems of our robes and wrapped them over our faces, and took care to breathe the smallest of breaths while we peered into that noxious smoke.

The crevice that had opened in the earth to release Huwawa was not large: I could span the width of it between my two hands. Out of it, though, the demon came boiling upward with enormous force. I looked, trying to see the face and eyes, but I saw nothing but smoke. I cried out, "I conjure you, Huwawa, show yourself as you are!" But still I saw nothing but smoke.

Enkidu said, "How can we slay him, if he is only smoke?"

"By drowning him," I replied. "And by smothering him."

I pointed toward the side, where the earthquake had set free some underground spring. A little rivulet now was running toward the bottom of the valley: the water was warm, from the breath of the god beneath the earth, I suppose, and steam was rising from it. We drew ourselves together and formed a plan. I put thirty of my men to work digging a channel to guide the stream sideways toward the mouth through which Huwawa raged into the air; and I assigned the others the task of trimming the trunk of the great cedar, cutting a length about twice the length of a man from it and giving it the form of a pointed stake. We worked swiftly, lest the demon take on its solid form and attack us; but the god-presence in me still seemed to hold it at bay. To be certain of safety I set three men at work chanting and making signs without pause.

When we were ready I called out, "Huwawa? Do you hear my voice, demon? It is Gilgamesh king of Uruk who slays you now!"

I looked to Enkidu, and for an instant, I tell you in truth, I felt fear and doubt. It is no little thing to slay a demon who is in the service of Enlil. Also I wondered after all whether there was need to slay him-whether it might not be sufficient only to seal his hole and leave him bound in there. I tell you my heart was moved with compassion for the demon. Does that sound strange? But it is what I felt.

Enkidu, who knew my soul as he did his own, saw me waver.

He said to me, "Hurry, now, Gilgamesh! This is no moment for hesitating. The demon must die, brother, if you have any hope of leaving this place. There is no arguing it. Spare him and you will never make it back to your own city and to the mother who bore you. He will block the mountain road against you. He will make the pathways impassable."

I saw the wisdom of that. I raised my hand and gave the signal.

In that moment my men chopped an opening in the earthen dam that they had built across the rivulet, and let its waters pour forth into the new channel that ran toward Huwawa's blowhole. I watched the cascade of steaming water flow swiftly to its home: and when it reached the crevice and tumbled in, there arose such a wailing and howling from the depths that I could scarcely believe it. A white jet of hot cloud rose up in the heart of the black cloud, and I heard thunder and roaring. The ground trembled as though it would begin to heave and upsurge all over again. But it held fast. The crevice drank the stream, and the stream poured onward, giving it all it could drink. The red sparks dimmed within the black column; the foul smoke wavered and came in choked spurts. "Now," I said, and we raised the cedar stake.

I bore the brunt of the weight, though Enkidu with his one good hand offered more force than any other man could have provided whole and healthy, and seven or eight of my other men ran alongside us, giving support. We carried that tremendous stake at a dead trot until we were poised over the smoking hole, as close to it as we could manage, with our eyes running tears and our faces red from holding our breaths; and then we rose up on the tips of our feet and we thrust the stake forward and downward and rammed it into the opening.

We leaped back, thinking the earth might erupt. But no: the demon was weakened or drowned by the water, and he could not force the wooden plug. I saw some coiling strands of smoke break from the earth a little distance away; but then they were gone, and we heard nothing more.

All was deathly still. The blaze and the glory that had been Huwawa was quenched. There was no smoke, there was no fire, only the afterstench that stained the air and assailed our nostrils, and even that was quickly beginning to dissipate in the cool sweet cedar forest. I think they will say of Enkidu and me, when the tellings and retellings of the story begin to change it as these stories always are changed with time, that we rushed upon Huwawa and cut off his head; for the harpers of the days to come will not understand how we could slay a demon with nothing more than a dammed stream and a sharpened stake. So be it; but that was what we did, whatever they may tell you when I am not here to testify to the truth.

"He is dead," I said. "Come, let us purify the site, and get ourselves onward."

We cut cedar boughs and laid them over the demon's tomb, and made the offerings, and said the words. Afterward we chose fifty fine cedar logs to bring back with us to Uruk, and we stripped them and loaded them; and when we were done with that, we returned to the wall that the Elamites had built and scattered it apart as though it had been made of straws, though for beauty's sake we left intact the splendorous gate that the traitor Utu-ragaba had fashioned for the mountain king.

When we were taking our leave of the place, a hundred Elamitish warriors came upon us, and asked us in the name of their king why we were trespassing here. To which I replied that we were not trespassing at all, but merely coming to gather a little wood for our temple, which had required us to slay the demon of the place. They found this insolent of me. "Who are you, man?" their leader demanded.

"Who am I?" I asked of Enkidu. "Tell him."

"Why, you are Gilgamegh king of Uruk, greatest of heroes, the wild bull who plunders the mountains as he pleases: Gilgamesh the king, Gilgamesh the god. And I am Enkidu your brother." He clapped his belly and laughed and said to the Elamite, "Do you know the name of Gilgamesh, fellow?" But the Elamites were already in flight. We followed after them and slew about half, and let the others go, so that they could bring word back to their king that it was unwise to build walls about the forest of cedars. I think he came to see the wisdom of that, for I heard no more of such walls, nor of Huwawa the dreadful, and in years afterward we had all the cedar we required from that forest without hindrance.

IT WAS a triumphant time. We marched into Uruk as joyous as though we had conquered six kingdoms. There was a kind of madness in our pride, I think, but I think it was a pardonable pride. One does not kill a demon every day, after all.

So we celebrated our exploits in the Land of Cedars and our safe return with feasting and laughter. But there was a touch of discord at the outset of that night of glorious revelry, and there was another before it ended.

As we approached the city walls in late afternoon with our booty the Royal Gate swung open, and through it rode a welcoming party of many chariots, led by Zabardi-bunugga. Trumpets sounded, banners waved; I heard my name shouted over and over. We halted and waited. Zabardi-bunugga, riding up to me, hailed me with upraised hands and presented me with the bundle of barley-sheaves that is the customary salute to a returning king. He made his thanksgiving offering for my safety, and then together we poured out a libation to the divine ones. Good loyal flat-faced Zabardi-bunugga: what a worthy prince!

When these ceremonies were done we embraced in a less formal way. He nodded graciously also to Enkidu, and smiled his greetings to Bir-hurturre. If there was any envy about Zabardi-bunugga because he had not taken part in our grand adventure, I did not see it. I told him how the journey had gone; but he already knew that, for runners had gone ahead bearing news of our victory. Then I asked how things had fared in Uruk during my absence, and a shadow passed across his eyes, and he looked away as he said, "The city prospers, O Gilgamesh."

It was not hard to perceive the uneasiness about him, the hesitation, the discomfort. I said, "Does it, in all truth?"

In a restless way he replied, "May I ride with you into the city?"

I beckoned him into my chariot. He glanced toward Enkidu, who rode beside me; but I shrugged as though to say, whatever you have to say to me, it is fitting that my brother hear it as well. Which

Zabardi-bunugga understood without my needing to say it. Lightly he stepped up into the chariot, and Enkidu gave the signal for the procession to continue through the city's great gate.

"Well?" I said. "There is trouble, is there? Tell me."

In a low voice Zabardi-bunugga said, "The goddess stirs. I think there is danger, Gilgamesh." "How so?"

"She broods. She frets. She feels that you have cast her into eclipse, that you overreach yourself. She says that you ignore her, that you fail to consult her, that you go your own way as though this is not at all the city oflnanna, but has become only the city of Gilgamesh."

"I am king," I said. "I bear the burden."

"She would remind you, I think, that you are king by grace of the goddess."

"So I am, and I never forget it. But she must remember that she is not the goddess, but only the goddess' voice." Then I laughed. "Do you think I speak blasphemy, Zabardi-bunugga? No. No. It is the truth: we must all remember it. The goddess speaks through her; but she is only a priestess. And I bear the burden of the city each day." As we came near the gate of the city I said, "What evidence do you have of this wrath of hers?"

"I have it from my father, who says she visited him in the temple of An to consult ancient tablets, writings from the time of Enmerkar, the annals of your grandfather's reign, the record of his dealings with the priestess of his time. She has been to the archives of the priests of Enlil also. And several times she summoned the assembly of elders to meet with her while you were away."

Lightly I said, "Perhaps she is writing a book of history, eh?"

"I think not, Gilgamesh. She seeks ways of bringing you in check: she looks for precedent, she searches for trustworthy strategies."

"Do you merely suspect this or do you know?"

"It is certain knowledge. She has been speaking out, and many have heard her. Your journey angered her. She said so to your mother, to my father Gungunum, to some of the assembly of elders, even to her acolytes: she made no secret of her fury. She says it was presumptuous of you to undertake the venture without first seeking her blessing."

"Ah, was it? But we needed the cedar. The Elamites had built a wall in the forest. It was not only a sacred quest, Zabardi-bunugga: it was a war. Decisions concerning warfare lie in the province of the king."

"She sees it otherwise, I think."

"I will educate her, then."

"Be wary. She is a troublesome woman."

I laid my hand upon his wrist and smiled. "You tell me nothing new, old friend, when you tell me that. But I will be on my guard. And you have my thanks."

We rode through the gate. I turned from him and lifted my shield high, so that it caught the last glow of the waning day and sent lances of golden light into the crowd that lined the grand processional highway. Half the city had turned out to welcome me. "Gilgamesh!" they cried, till their voices were hoarse. "Gilgamesh! Gi!gamesh!" And they used the word that means divine, which is not used ordinarily of a king while he still lives. "Gilgamesh the god! Gilgamesh the god!" I felt abashed; but only a little, for it would have been folly to deny the godhood within me.

Zabardi-bunugga's warnings had darkened my homecoming somewhat. But I had not been greatly surprised to hear them: Inanna had been quiescent too long, and I had for some while been expecting difficulties from her. Well, we would see; but I chose not to brood on these matters just now. It was the night of my homecoming; it was the night of my triumph.

At the palace I oiled and polished my weapons and put them in their storehouse, and said the laying-to-rest prayers over them. Then I went to the palace baths and opened my braid so that my hair streamed down my back, and the handmaidens rinsed the grime of the journey from it. Afterward I chose to leave my hair loose and long. I wrapped a fine fringed cloak about me and fastened a scarlet sash at my middle and even put on my royal tiara, which I did not wear often. When all that was done I called my fifty heroes about me, and Enkidu, and we gathered in the great hall of the palace for a feast of roasted calves and lambs, and cakes of flour mixed with honey, and beer both of the strong and the mild kinds, and royal palm-wine, the thickest and the richest in the Land. We even drank the wine made of grapes, which we bring in from the territories in the north, dark purple stuff that makes the soul soar upward. We sang and told tales of the warriors of old, and we stripped and wrestled by firelight, and we enjoyed the maidens of the palace until we felt sated; and then we bathed and dressed ourselves in our finery again and paraded out into the town, playing on fifes and trumpets and clapping our hands as we strutted about. Ah, it was a fine time, a splendid time! I will never know another like it.

In the silver-gray hours of the dawn slumbering heroes lay sprawled in heaps all about the palace, snoring forth their wine. I felt no need of sleep; and so I went to bathe at the palace fountain. Enkidu was with me. His robes reeked of drink and the juice of meat, and I suppose mine must have been no better. Bits of straw and charred twigs from the fire were in our beards and hair. But the cool fresh water refreshed and cleansed us as though it were a font of the gods. As I emerged I looked about me for a slave to bring us clean robes, and I caught sight of a slender figure at the far side of the courtyard, a woman, wearing an ashen-hued robe of some thin shimmering fabric, and a shawl pulled up around her face so that her features could not be seen. She appeared to be heading in my direction.

"You, there!" I called. "Come here and do us a service, will you?"

She turned to me and lowered the shawl, and I saw her face. But I did not believe what I saw.

"Gilgamesh?" she said softly.

My breath went from me in astonishment. This could only be some apparition. "A demon!" I whispered. "Look, Enkidu, she wears Inanna's face! It must be Lilitu come to haunt us, or is it the ghost Utukku?" Fear and awe struck me like the clangor of a brazen bell, and I shuddered, and groped in my discarded clothes for the little amulet of the goddess that the young priestess Inanna had given me so long ago.

In the same soft voice she said, "Have no fear, Gilgamesh. I am Inanna."

"Here? In the palace? The priestess never leaves the temple to see the king: she calls the king to wait on her in her own domain."

"This night it is I who comes to you," she said. She was close beside me, now, and it seemed to me she was telling the truth: if this was some demon, it had more skill at mimicry than any demon I knew. And what demon, anyway, would dare to put on the guise of the goddess within the walls of the goddess' own city? Yet I could not understand the presence of Inanna in the palace precinct. It was not right. It was not done. My loins grew cold and there was a chill at the back of my neck, and I picked up my robe and draped it about me, soiled and sweaty though it was. Enkidu was staring at her as though she were some ravening beast of the fields, all fangs and teeth, making ready to spring.

I said hoarsely, "What do you want with me?"

"Some words. Only some words."

My throat was dry, my lips were cracking. "Speak, then!"

"What I have to say, I would rather say in privacy."

I glanced at Enkidu, who was scowling now. It displeased me to send him away; but I knew Inanna well enough to realize she would not be moved on this point. Sadly I said, "I ask you to leave us, friend."

"Must I go?"

"This time you must," I said, and slowly he went from the courtyard, looking back several times, as if he feared the priestess would pounce on me the moment he was gone.

She said then, "I saw you from the temple portico, when you paraded through the town this evening with your heroes. You have never looked more beautiful, Gilgamesh. You were as radiant as a god."

"The joy of my victory put that glow upon me. We slew the demon; we obtained the wood; we cast down the wall the Elamites had raised."

"So I have heard. It was a wondrous victory. You are a hero beyond compare: they will sing of you in ages yet to come."

I stared into her eyes. At this hour, by this pale gray dawn-light, they seemed a color I had never seen before, darker even than black.

I studied the flawless arches of her eyebrows; I made scrutiny of her fine straight nose and the fullness of her lips. There was heat coming from her, but it was a cold heat. I could not tell whether she stood before me as goddess or as woman; the two seemed mixed in her even more than usual. I thought of the warnings I had had from Zabardi-bunugga, and I knew from what he had said that she was my enemy; but she did not appear to be an enemy at this moment.

"Why are you here, Inanna?"

"I could not help myself. When I saw you in the evening I said, I will go to him when his feast is done, I will come to him before the dawn comes, I will offer myself."

"Offer yourself?. What are you saying?"

Her eyes were shining strangely, like silvery suns rising at midnight. "Marry me, Gilgamesh. Be my husband." I was altogether dumbfounded at that.

In a halting way I said, "But it is not the proper season, Inanna! The new year festival is still some months away, and-"

"I am not speaking now of the Sacred Marriage," she said crisply. "I speak of the marriage between man and wife, who live under the same roof, and bring forth children, and grow old together in the manner of husbands and wives."

Had she spoken in the language of the people of the moon I could not have been more bewildered.

"But such a thing is impossible," I said, when I found the use of my tongue again. "The king-the priestess-never since the founding of the city-never in all the time of the Land-"

"I have spoken with the goddess. She gives consent. It can be done. I know that it is new and strange. But it can be done." She took a step toward me, and put her hands to my hands. "Hear me, Gilgamesh. Be lily husband, give me the gift of the seed of your body, not one night out of the year but every night. Be my husband and I will be your wife. Listen, I will bring splendid gifts to you: I will harness for you a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold, with wheels of gold, and brazen horns. You will have storm-demons to draw it for you, in place of mules. Our dwelling will be fragrant of cedars, and when you enter it, the threshold and dais will kiss your feet."

"Inanna-"

There was no halting her. As though chanting in a trance she went on: "Kings and lords and princes will bow down before you! All the yield of mountains and plains will they bring you as tribute! Your goats will bear triplets, your sheep will drop twins! The ass that carries burdens for you will outrun the swiftest of mules; your chariots will prevail in every race; your oxen will be without rivals, if only you let me bring my blessings upon you, Gilgamesh!" "The people would not allow it," I said numbly.

"The people! The people!" Her face became harsh and dark; her eyes turned cold. "The people could not prevent us!" Her grip on my hand grew tighter: I imagined I could feel my bones moving about. In a low strange tone she said, "The gods are angered with you, Gilgamesh, for the killing of Huwawa. Do you know that? They mean to take revenge on you." "It is not so, Inanna."

"Ah, do you walk with the gods as I walk with the gods? I tell you, Enlil grieves for the guardian of his forest. They will have a blood-price from you for the death. They will make you grieve as Enlil grieves. But I can shield you from that. I can intercede. Give yourself to me, Gilgamesh! Take me as your wife! I am your only hope of peace."

Her words fell upon me like an icy torrent that knew no mercy. I wanted to run from her; I wanted to bury my head in some soft dark place and sleep. All this was madness. Marry her? There was no way that could be. I thought for a wild moment of what it would be like to share her bed night after night, to feel the fire of her breath against my cheek, to taste the sweetness of her mouth. Yes, of course, what man would refuse such joys? But marriage? To the priestess, to the goddess? She could not marry; I could not marry her. Even if the city would permit it-and the city would not, the city would rise up instantly against us and give our corpses to the wolves-I could not bear it. To go humbly to the temple with my wedding gifts, kneeling before my own wife because she was also the goddess, the Queen of Heaven-no, no, it would be my ruin. I am the king. The king must not kneel. I shook my head as though to sweep away a gathering fog that grew thick in my spirit. I began to understand the truth. Her scheme became clear to me: a compound of greed and lust and envy. Her aim was to ensnare me in her trap, and bring me down. If she could not break the power of the king any other way, she would break him through marriage. Because she was a goddess she would make me kneel for her as no man, certainly no king, ever kneels to his wife. The people would laugh at me in the streets. The dogs themselves would howl at my heels. But I would not let her make me subservient to her. I would not let her buy me into this slavery with her body. And all her talk of the anger of gods, which she alone could avert from me-no, that must be some silly lie meant to frighten me. I would not let myself be threatened, either.

As these things became clear to me, a hot rage rose in me like fire on a summer mountain. Perhaps it was from having been awake all the night, perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was some dark floating demon of the dawn air that entered into my spirit; or maybe it was simply that I was full of the overweening pride that came of my victory over Huwawa; but I grew intemperately fierce. I pulled my hand free of hers and loomed high above her and cried, "You are my only hope, you say? What hope do you offer me, except the hope of pain and humiliation? What could I expect, if I were so foolish as to take you in marriage? You bring only peril and torment." The angry words poured from me. I would not and could not halt. "What are you? A brazier that goes out in the cold. A back door which keeps out neither wind nor rain. A leaky waterskin that wets its bearer. A sandal that trips its wearer?"

She gaped at me, amazed, as I had been amazed when she had come to me with this talk of marriage.

I went on and on. "What are you? A shoe that pinches its owner's foot. A stone that falls from a parapet. Pitch that defiles the hand, a palace that collapses on its inhabitants, a turban that does not cover the head. Marry you? Marry you? Ah, Inanna, Inanna, what folly, what madness!"

"Gilgamesh-"

"Where is there any hope for a man who falls into Inanna's snare? The gardener Ishullanu-I know that story. He came to you with baskets of dates, and you looked at him and smiled your smile, and said, 'Ishullanu, come close to me, let me enjoy you, touch me here and touch me there.' And he shrank back in terror of you, saying, 'What do you want with me? I am only a gardener. You will freeze me as the frosts freeze the young rushes.' And when you heard that you changed him into a mole and cast him down to tunnel in the earth."

She said, astounded, "Gilgamesh, that is only a tale of the goddess! That was not my doing, but the goddess' long ago!"

"It is all the same. You are the goddess, the goddess is you. Her sins are yours. Her crimes are yours. What has befallen the lovers of Inanna? The shepherd who heaped up meal-cakes for you, and slaughtered the tender kids: he wearied you and you struck him and turned him into a wolf, and now his own herd-boys drive him away, and his own dogs bite his thighs-" "A fable, Gilgamesh, a story!"

"The lion you loved: seven pits you dug for him, and seven more. The bird of many colors: you broke his wing, and he sits in the grove now, crying, 'My wing, my wing!' The stallion so noble ~ battle: you ordained the whip and the spur and the thong for him~ and made him gallop seven leagues, and ordered him to drink from muddied water-"

"Are you mad? What are you saying? These are old tales the harpers tell, tales of the goddess!"

I suppose I was in a kind of madness. But I would not relent. "Have you ever kept faith with one of your lovers? And will you not treat me as you treated them?" She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came forth, and into her silence I said, "What of Dumuzi? Tell me of him! You sent him down into hell."

"Why do you throw ancient fables in my face? Why do you keep reproaching me with things that have nothing to do with me?"

I ignored her. I was in a madness. "Not Dumuzi the god," I said. "Dumuzi the king, who ruled in this city, and died before his years. Yes, tell me of Dumuzi! Dumuzi the god, Dumuzi the king, Inanna the goddess, Inanna the priestess-it is all the same. Every child knows the tale. She snares him and uses him and has her triumph over him. You will not do that with me." Then I caught my breath and wiped my brow and in another voice entirely said, very coldly, "This is the royal palace. You have no business being here. Go. Go.t"

She reached for words and again no words came, only little wrathful stammering sounds. She gaped and stammered and backed away, her eyes hot, her face flaming. At the door she halted a moment and gave me a long chilling look. Then she said in a quiet calm voice that seemed to rise from the depths of the nether world, "You will suffer, Gilgamesh. That I promise. You will feel pain beyond any pain you have ever imagined. So the goddess pledges." And she was gone.

THAT YEAR at the time of the new year festival the heat of the summer did not break, the moist wind called the Cheat did not blow from the south, and there was no sign of rain in the northern sky. These things gave me great fear, but I kept my uneasiness to myself, saying nothing even to Enkidu. After all, there had been other dry autumns in the past, and the rains had always come sooner or later. If this year it was later rather than sooner, nevertheless they would come. Or so I believed: so I hoped. But my fear was great, for I knew that I nanna was my enemy.

On the night of the ceremony of the Sacred Marriage she and I stood face to face for the first time since the visit she had paid to the palace that time at dawn. But when I came to the long chamber of the temple to greet her, her eyes were like polished stones, and she greeted me with the silence of a stone, and when I said, "Hail, Inanna," she did not reply, as Inanna must, with the words, "Hail, royal husband, fountain of life." I knew then that a doom had come to lie upon Uruk, a doom of her making.

I did not know what to do. We performed the showing-forth on the temple portico, we carried out the rites of the barley and honey, we went to the bedchamber and stood before the bed of ebony inlaid with ivory and gold. All this while she said not a single word to me, but I knew from her eyes that her hatred for me was unabated. The handmaiden-priestesses took her beads and breastplates from her, and lifted the latch of her loin-covering, and left her naked before me, and uncovered my body to her, and went from the room. She was as beautiful as ever, but yet there was no glow of desire upon her: her nipples were soft, her skin did not have the sheen of fleshly fire. This was not the Inanna I had known so long, the woman of unquenchable passion. She stood beside the bed with folded arms and said, "You may stay here or not, as you wish. But you will not have me tonight."

"It is the night of the Sacred Marriage. I am the god. You are the goddess."

"I will not have the king of Uruk enter my body this night. The wrath of Enlil falls upon Uruk and its king. The Bull of Heaven will be loosed."

"Will you destroy your own people?"

"I will destroy your arrogance," she said. "I have gone to my knees before Father Enlil-I, the goddess! Father, I said, turn loose the Bull of Heaven to bring down Gilgamesh for me, for Gilgamesh has scorned me. And I said to Enlil that if he did not do this thing, I would smash the door of the nether world and shatter its bolts, I would throw open the gate of hell and raise up the dead to devour the food of the living, and the hosts of the dead in the world would be greater than the number of the living. He yielded to me: he said he would loose the Bull."

"Out of anger at me, you bring down years of drought upon Uruk? The people will starve!"

"There is grain in my warehouses, Gilgamesh. The people have paid their tithes to the goddess, and I have stored grain enough to last through seven years of seedless husks. I have fodder set aside for the cattle. When the hunger strikes, Inanna will be ready to aid her people. But you will already have fallen, Gilgamesh. They will have cast you from your high place, for bringing the wrath of the gods upon them." Her voice was very calm. She stood naked before me as if it was nothing at all to reveal her body, as if she were only a statue of herself, or I a eunuch. I looked at her and there was nothing I could say or do. If the goddess did not embrace the god in the Sacred Marriage there would be no rain; but how could I force her? It would have been worse, if I had forced her. She told me again, "You may stay or not, as you wish." But I had no wish to spend the night shivering in the cold gale of her wrath. I gathered my splendid kingly robes and draped them about me and made my way from the temple in sorrow and in fear.

In the palace I found Enkidu with three concubines, celebrating the night of the Sacred Marriage in his own way. Rivers of dark wine ran across the floor and half-eaten joints of roasted meat were on the table. In great surprise he said, "Why are you back so soon, Gilgamesh?"

"Let me be, brother. This is a sad night for Uruk."

He did not seem to hear me. "Are you done with your goddess so soon? Why, then, have a goddess or two of mine!" And he laughed; but his laughter died away in a moment, when he saw the wintry bleakness of my face. He shook himself free of the girls who were twined all over him, and came to me and put his hands on my shoulders, and said, "What is this, brother? Tell me what has happened!"

I told him; and he said, "If this Bull of hers is to be set loose in the city, why, we will have to catch it and put it back in its pen, will we not? Is that not so, Gilgamesh? How can we allow a wild bull to run free in Uruk?" And he laughed again, and threw his arms around me in his great bearish embrace. For the first time that evening my heart rose, and I thought, perhaps we will withstand this: perhaps we can contend successfully with her, Enkidu and I.

But there was no rain. Day upon day the sky was a sheet of brilliant blue in which Utu's great eye stared remorselessly down on u~. The scorching wind was a knife slicing into the earth, hurling aloft the dry mud of the riverbanks and the sand of the gray and yellow desert beyond. Suffocating dust-clouds fell upon us like shrouds. The barley withered in the fields. The fronds of the palms grew black with dust, and drooped like the wings of crippled birds. Thunder came, and lightning, and dreadful flares of light covered the land like a cloth; but the storms were dry storms, and still there was no rain. Enlil was our enemy. Inanna was our enemy. An ignored us. Utu would not hear us. The people gathered in the streets and cried out, "Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where is the rain?" and what could I tell them, what could I tell them?

Then far to the east the earth shook and the hills roared and there came such a belching of flame and foul gas as to make the outpouring of Huwawa seem like a sweet gentle breeze. I had an army of a thousand men in that territory, searching out the places where the Elamites were descending to our domain, and of those thousand men scarce half returned to Uruk. "It was the Bull of Heaven breaking loose," they told me. "The sky grew dark and black smoke arose, and there was a landslide that roared, and we saw the Bull in the air over our heads. Three times he snorted; and with his first snort he slew a hundred men, and a hundred more with the second, and with the third snort two hundred more. The earth shook, the hills roared, the Bull of Heaven breathed foulness upon us. The smell of it is in our nostrils still. And now the Bull marches upon Uruk." What was I to do? Where could I turn?

"It is the Bull," the people cried. "The Bull is upon us!"

"The Bull still grazes in the temple pasture," I said. "All will be well. These tribulations soon shall end."

And I looked toward the blazing sky, and said inwardly to Lu galbanda, Father,.~ther, go to Enlil, ask him ~r rain. But there was no rain.

Inanna kept to her temple. She accepted no petitions, she per formed no rites. When the people gathered before the White Platform and begged for mercy, she sent her maidens out with word that they had come to the wrong place, that they should go to Gilgamesh for mercy, for it was Gilgamesh who had brought this evil upon the land. Again, they came to me. But what could I tell them? What could I do?

The wind grew more fierce. A story arose in the town that this wind that blew was the wind of the nether world, a demon-wind that carried the seeds of death and decay up to us out of the House of Dust and Darkness. I said it was not. It was whispered in the town that there was a curse upon the wells, and they soon would fill with blood, so that the vineyards and palm groves would run red with it. I told them it would not happen. The rumor spread in the town that an army of locusts was flying toward us out of the north, and soon the sky would darken under their wings. They will not come, I said.

I gave the people grain from my storehouses. I provided fodder for the cattle. But there was not enough, not nearly enough. It is not the province of the king to provide the grain in time of drought and famine; it is the province oflnanna. And Inanna withheld herself from the people, and withheld her grain. Nor did the people hate her for it: she let it be known in the town that Uruk must first be purified, and then she would open her granaries to the needy. They understood. I understood. She meant to bring me down.

And at the last she loosed the Bull within the confines of the city. I mean the bull that grazed in the temple pasture, the one that embodied in himself the might and majesty of the gods. For twenty thousand years, or twice twenty, there have been bulls in the pasture of Inanna's temple, great bulls, mighty bulls, giant bulls without equal in the Land; they grow fat and huge on the grain of the temple offerings, and wear garlands of fresh flowers in every season of the land, and heifers are brought to them daily for their pleasure, and when they die-for they do die, even they, these bulls who play the part of the Bull of Heaven-they are buried in the temple grounds with rites worthy of a god. I cannot tell you how many bulls have been buried there in the years of Uruk, but I think that if that pasture were to be ploughed, the ploughman would turn up a sea of horns.

Never once does the bull leave the pasture of the temple, once he has taken up residence there. Guards are posted night and day to see that that does not happen; and though he snort like Enlil himself, and paw the ground and crash with all his force against the gate, he cannot go free. But on the holy midwinter day, when the drought stood at its worst and the sky was gray with swirling dust and those of us whose senses were most keen could smell the reek of the deadly black outpourings that were rushing into the air from the vents of the Rebel Lands far to the east-on that day when calamity was already rife in Uruk, Inanna turned loose the Bull of Heaven into the streets of the city.

The outcry of grief and terror that arose was like nothing that had ever been heard in Uruk before. I think that cry must have resounded in Kish; I think they must have heard it in Nippur; perhaps even in the Elamite lands they looked up and said, "What is that awful cry out of the west?"

In my palace I trembled with dismay and woe. It seemed to me now that I must go to Inanna, and kneel to her, and yield to her, and deliver up the city to her; for otherwise the people all would perish, or else I would be cast down from my high place. It had begun to seem to me that I must after all be responsible for this ruin that had come upon Uruk, that it was I and not Inanna who had brought these evils to the city, even as she was saying. Perhaps the gods were indeed taking their vengeance for the death of Huwawa.

Perhaps I had erred in refusing to make the priestess my queen.

Perhaps-perhaps-perhaps

I had never known such despair as on that day when Inanna's bull pranced and snorted in the streets of Uruk. It was Enkidu who lifted me from it. He found me grieving in the palace, and drew me up and embraced me and said, "Come, brother, why do you weep?

Deliverance is at hand!"

"Do you not know that the Bull of Heaven is loose in the city?"

I asked him.

"Yes, Gilgamesh, yes, the bull is loose! And this is our moment.

Can we turn back the dry winds? Can we call rain from the heavens?

Can we turn sand into water? No, no, no, none of those things can we do: but we can kill a bull, brother. We can surely kill a bull.

Now at last Inanna has poured all of her fury into a single vessel.

Let us go out there, Gilgamesh: let us break that vessel." His eyes were glittering with excitement. His body throbbed with strength.

I took heart from his vigor. I smiled for the first time in I cannot tell you how many days, and I embraced him until he grunted with the force of my embrace. "Come, brother," he said, and we went out into the dry and dusty streets to seek the Bull of Heaven.

It was the noon hour. The streets were empty in that terrible heat. But I did not need to ask the way to the bull. Its presence announced itself in the city like the heat of a heated anvil: I felt the red glow of it hot against my cheeks. As did Enkidu, in whom the wisdom of the wilderness still lived. He held his face to the wind, he flared his nostrils wide, he turned his head so that his ears gathered in all sounds; and he pointed, and we went forward. In the district known as the Lion we saw the dung of the bull fresh in the streets, with a golden aura about it, and 131ue-headed flies buzzing above it but not daring to touch it. In the district known as the Reed we found the carts of ú the merchants overturned, and their merchandise strewn in the path, for the bull had come this way. And in the district known as the Hive, where the streets press close upon one another and there is scarcely room to walk, we saw bricks ripped loose from the buildings where the bull had run between them.

A little while on, we came upon something worse: the cobble stones stained bright with blood, the sounds of bitter sobbing and wailing, and a man and a woman standing like statues, blank-eyed. The man held a child's broken body in his arms. A boy, I think, four or five years old, who must have darted into the bull's path. I prayed that Enlil had granted the child a swift death; but what mercy would the god grant the mother and the father? As we ran past, the woman recognized us. Without saying a word she held her hand out toward me, as though to beg me, O king, give me back my son. I could not do that for her. I could give her nothing to ease her sorrow but the blood of the bull, and I did not think that would be enough.

This little death, I thought, must be tallied to Inanna's account. Is that how she serves her people, by killing their innocent children with her furious vengeful beast?

Enkidu and I sped onward, grim-faced, intent. A few moments more and we turned into the great open space known as the Place of Ningal: and there we came upon the bull himself, prancing wildly like a playful calf.

He was white-all the bulls of the temple are white-and he was huge, and his eyes were rimmed with red, and his horns were long and sharp as spears, but they curved in a strange wicked way almost like the frame of a lyre. I saw splashes of the child's blood on the hooves of his forelegs, and on his pastern. When we came upon him he smelled our sweat, and halted and turned and glared at us out of eyes that blazed like coals; and he snorted, he stamped, he lowered his head, he seemed to be making ready to charge. Enkidu looked at me, and I at Enkidu. Together we had slain elephants and we had slain lions and we had slain wolves. We had even slain a demon that came belching out of the ground like a column of fire. But we had never slain a bull, and this was a bull enjoying the first heady measure of freedom after too long a captivity. He was full of his own power, and the power of Father Enlil was in him besides; for I did not doubt that this bull was the Bull of Heaven today, just as at certain times Inanna the priestess is Inanna the goddess, and the king of Uruk is Dumuzi the god of the fields. So we caught our breaths and we made ready to meet his thrust, knowing it would not be an easy combat.

I beckoned him with my hand. "Come to us," I said, whispering it, making my voice seductive. "Come here. Come. Come. Come. I am Gilgamesh: this is Enkidu my brother."

The bull stamped. The bull snorted. The bull lifted his great head and tossed his horns. And then he charged, running with great grace and majesty. He appeared almost to float as he came across the worn brick pavement of the Place of Ningal.

Enkidu, laughing, cried out to me, "What sport this will be, brother! Play him! Play him, brother! We have nothing to fear!"

He ran to one side, and I to the other. The bull stopped in midstride and pivoted and whirled and charged again, and halted a second time and pivoted and whirled, kicking up dust. He seemed almost to frown as we darted back and forth around him, laughing, slapping each other on the shoulders. The bull cast his foam in our faces and brushed us with the thick of his tail. But he could not run us down; he could not bring us to earth.

Five times the bull charged, and five times we skipped past him, until he was angry and perplexed. Then he charged once more, feinting with demonic intelligence and feinting again, changing his course as lithely as any dancing-boy of the temple, going now this way, now that. Fiercely he sprang at Enkidu with lowered horns, and I feared that my brother would be gored: but no, as the bull drew near Enkidu reached out and clamped one hand to each of his horns and swung himself up in a single swift leap, twisting in midair so that when he landed he was astride the bull's back, still grasping the horns.

Now began such a combat as I think the world had never seen before. Enkidu atop the Bull of Heaven grappled with him by the horns, twisting his head this way and that. The bull in rage reared high on his hind legs to throw him off, but could not do it. I stood before them watching in joy and delight. It seemed to me that my friend must now have fully recovered the strength of his hand, for he held so tight against so great a power; but even if he were not fully recovered, hi~ strength was still sufficient to maintain his grip. The bull could not rid himself of Enkidu. He roared, he stamped, he hurled flecks of spittle about, and still Enkidu held on. Enkidu turned all his enormous strength to the breaking of the bull, forcing him into weariness, making him lower his mighty head. I heard Enkidu's booming laughter, and rejoiced; I saw Enkidu's massive arms bulging with the strain, and took pleasure in the sight. I watched the bull grow sullen and downcast. But then the combat took a different turn. The bull, having rested a moment, summoned new strength, and plunged and leaped and plunged and leaped again, striving with renewed ferocity to hurl Enkidu to the ground. I feared for him; but Enkidu showed no fear at all. He clung, he held, he twisted the great head from side to side; once again he forced the bull's muzzle toward the ground.

"Now, brother!" Enkidu called. "Strike, strike now! Thrust in your sword!"

It was the moment. I rushed forward and took the hilt of my sword in both my hands, and rose to my greatest height, and drove the sword downward. I thrust it in between the nape and the horns, forcing it deep. The bull made a sound like the sound of the going out of the sea when the tide is dwindling, and a film came over the blazing fury of his eyes. For a moment he stood entirely still, and then his legs turned to water beneath him. As he fell, Enkidu sprang clear, landing beside me, and we laughed and embraced and rested a little time beside the dying bull until he was dead. Then we cut out his heart and made an offering of it on the spot to Utu of the sun.

When that was done I looked about me, and when I looked toward the west, toward the rampart of the city, I saw figures upon the wall. I touched Enkidu's arm and pointed. "It is your goddess," he said.

In truth it was. Inanna and her handmaidens were on the wall. She must have watched the battle with the bull; I could feel the heat and the force of her wrath even at this distance. I cupped my hands and called out to her, "See, priestess! We have slain your bull: the rains soon will come, I think!"

"Woe to you," she replied in a voice like a voice out of hell. And to her maidens and the other onlookers she cried, "Woe to Gilgamesh! Woe to him who dares to hold me in contempt! Woe to the slayer of the Bull of Heaven!"

To which Enkidu cried back, "And woe to you, croaking bird of doom! Here: I make my offering to you!"

Boldly he ripped loose the private parts of the dead bull and flung them with all his might, so that the bloody flesh landed on the rampart almost at her feet. He laughed his rumbling laugh and called to her, "There, goddess! Does that appease you? If I could get hold of you, I'd drape you in the bull's own guts!" At that blasphemy she cursed us again, both Enkidu and me; and the women beside her on the wall, the priestesses, the handmaidens, the temple courtesans, the votaries of all sorts who had come with her to see us destroyed by the bull that now lay dead at our feet, set up a great wailing and a lamentation.

I WOULD not even let her have the carcass of the bull to bury at the temple grounds: I meant to deny her everything. I summoned the butchers and had the meat cut into strips and given freely to the dogs of the town, to show my contempt for Inanna and her bull. But the horns of the bull I took for myself. I turned them over to my craftsmen and my armorers, who were wonderstruck by the length of the horns, and their thickness. I commanded them to plate the horns with lapis lazuli to a thickness of two fingers, for I meant to hang them on the wall of the palace. So great were they that they had a capacity of six measures of oil: I filled them with the finest of ointments, and then I poured the oil out at the shrine of Lugalbanda, in honor of the god my father who had brought me this triumph.

When all this was done we washed our hands in the waters of the river and rode together through the streets of Uruk to the palace. The people crept forth one by one from their houses to see us, and after the first had come out the others took heart, until a great multitude lined our path. Heroes and warriors of Uruk were there, and girls playing lyres, and many more. Boastfulness took hold of me, and I called out to them, "Who is the most glorious of the heroes? Who is the greatest among men?" They called back, "Gilgamesh is the most glorious of the heroes! Gilgamesh is the greatest among men!" Why should I not have been boastful? Inanna had set loose the Bull of Heaven; and I had slain it-Enkidu and I. Did we not have the right to boast?

There was feasting and celebration at the palace that night. We sang and danced and drank until.we could revel no more, and we went to our beds. In that night the wind called the Cheat began to blow; and the air grew soft and moist. Before morning the first rain that had fallen all that winter began to fall upon Uruk.

That day was the peak of my glory. That day was the height of my triumph. I felt that there was nothing I could not achieve. I had increased the wealth of my city and made it preeminent in the land;

I had slain Huwawa; I had slain the Bull of Heaven; I had brought rain to Uruk; I had been a good shepherd to my people. Nevertheless after that day I knew little joy and much sadness, which I suppose is the lot that the gods had intended for me even while they permitted me my moments of triumph. That is the way of life: there is gran deur, and there is sorrow, and we learn in time that the darkness follows upon the light whether or not we choose to have it that way.

In the morning Enkidu came to me, looking somber and weary, as though some great darkness of the soul had visited him while he slept. I said, "Why is it you carry yourself so mournfully, brother, when the bull lies dead and the rains have come to Uruk?" He sat down by the side of my couch and sighed and said, "My friend, why are the great gods in council?" I did not understand; but then he said, "I have had a dream that lies heavy on me, brother. Shall I tell you my dream?"

He had dreamed that the gods were sitting in their council-chamber: An was there, and Enlil, and heavenly Utu, and the wise Enki. And Sky-father An said to Enlil, "They have killed the Bull of Heaven, and they have killed Huwawa also. Therefore one of the two must die: let it be the one who stripped the cedar from the mountains."

Then Enlil spoke up and said, "No, Gilgamesh must not die, for he is king. It is Enkidu who must die." At this Utu raised his voice to declare, "They sought my protection when they went to slay Huwawa, and I granted it. When they slew the Bull, they made an offering of his heart to me. They have done no wrong. Enkidu is innocent: why should he die?" Which enraged Enlil, and he turned angrily to heavenly Utu, saying, "You speak of them as though they are your comrades! But sins have been committed; and Enkidu is the one who must die." And so the argument raged until Enkidu awakened.

I was quiet for a time when he had finished, and I kept my face a mask. Such a dire dream! It filled me with fear. I did not want him to see that. I did not want to face that fear myself. Fear gives dreams power they might otherwise not have. I resolved to let this dream have no power, to sweep it aside as one would sweep aside a dry reed.

At length I said, "I think you ought not take this too close to heart, brother. Often the true meaning of a dream is less obvious than it seems."

Enkidu stared in a dismal way at the floor. "A dream portending death is a dream portending death," he said sulkily. "All the sages will agree on that. I am a dead man already, Gilgamesh."

I thought that was nonsense, and I told him so. I said he was not dead so long as he lived, and he looked full of life to me. I said also that it is folly to take any dream so literally that you let it govern your waking life. I will not pretend that I fully believed that, even as I said it: I know as well as anyone~that dreams are whispered into our souls at night by the gods, and that they often carry messages worth heeding. But I found nothing in this dream that Enkidu might do well to heed, and much that would be harmful if brooded upon. And so I urged him to put all gloomy thoughts behind him and go about his business as if he had heard nothing but the chattering of birds in his dream, or the murmuring of the winds.

That seemed to hearten him. Gradually his face brightened, and he nodded and said, "Yes, perhaps I take this thing too seriously."

"Too seriously by half, Enkidu."

"Yes. Yes. It is my great fault. But you always bring me back to my right senses, old friend." He smiled and gripped my arm. Then, rising, he dropped into a wrestler's crouch and beckoned to me.

"Come: what do you say to a little sport to lighten the day?"

"A fine idea!" I answered. I laughed to see him turn less doleful. For an hour we wrestled, and then we bathed; and then it was time for me to attend to the meeting of the assembly. By midday I had put Enkidu's dream behind me, and I think so had he. For a moment it had darkened our lives; but it had passed like a shadow across the ground. Or so I believed.

A few days later, as an act of thanksgiving for the lifting of the

Bull of Heaven from the city, I decreed that we would perform the rite of purification known as the Closing of the Gate. That was something which had not been done in Uruk for so long that not even the oldest priests remembered the exact details of it. I set six scholars to work for three days searching through the library of the Temple of An for an account of the rite, and the best they could find was a tablet written in such an antique way that they could hardly make out the picture-writing it bore. "Never mind," I said. "I will ask Lugalbanda for guidance. He will show me what must be done."

I meant to make certain that the passageway which runs downward from Uruk into the nether world was properly sealed, since Inanna had threatened to open it as part of the loosing of the Bull of Heaven. In her wrath she could actually have done some harm to the gate, so that evil spirits or perhaps the ghosts of the dead might be able to drift up through it into the city. So I must be sure the gate is shut, I thought, and I devised a rite intended to accomplish that. I drew the procedure out of the hazy memories of the oldest priests and the writing on that ancient tablet and my own sense of what would be fitting. It was a proper rite, I think. Yet if I had it to do over again, I would let the gate of hell stand open for a thousand years, rather than have what happened that day befall me.

The gate is one of the oldest structures in Uruk-some say even older than the White Platform, and that, of course, was built by the gods themselves. The gate lies a hundred twenty paces east of the White Platform. It is nothing more than a ring of weather-beaten kiln-baked bricks of a very old-fashioned shape, surrounding a stout round door of flaked and rusted copper that lies fiat on the ground, like a trapdoor. A ring is set in the middle of that door, fashioned of some black metal that no one can identify. Two or three strong men pulling on that ring with all their might can raise the door out of the ground. When the door is lifted it reveals a dark hole that is the mouth of a tunnel, scarcely wider than the shoulders of a sturdy man, which slopeg down under the earth. If one goes down into it one comes after a short time to a second gate which is nothing more than some metal bars mounted from floor to ceiling of the tunnel like the bars of a cage. On the far side of that the angle of the tunnel's descent becomes much steeper, and if one were mad enough to follow it one would come eventually to the first of the seven walls of the underworld itself. Each of those walls has its gate; the demon Neti, gatekeeper of the nether world, guards them; and behind the seventh wall is the lair of Ereshkigal, Queen of Hell, sister of Inanna. Until the ill-starred day when I chose to do the rite of the Closing of the Gate no one had passed through that gate for thousands of years. The last to do it, so far as I knew, was the goddess Inanna long ago, when she made her unhappy descent into hell to challenge the power of Ereshkigal. Since then the dread tunnel surely had gone unentered. Although we pull the door from the ground once every twelve years for the rite known as the Opening of the Gate, in which we cast libations into the tunnel to propitiate Ereshkigal and her demon hordes, no one in his right mind would step as much as half a stride across its threshold.

We commenced the Closing of the Gate at the noon hour sharp, when it is the middle of the night in the nether world and I thought it likely most of the demons would be at rest. The day was warm and bright, though it had rained in the dark hours. Enkidu was at my side, and my mother Ninsun just behind me; arrayed in a circle about me were the chief priests of all the temples of the city and the high members of the royal court. The only great personage of Uruk who did not attend was Inanna. She remained brooding behind the walls of the temple I had built for her. Beyond the circle of dignœtaries were lesser priests by the double dozen, and hundreds of musicians ready to make a fierce outcry with drums and fifes and trumpets if spirits should begin coming forth through the gate when we opened it. And behind them were all the common citizens of Uruk.

I nodded to Enkidu. He put his left hand to the ring in the door, and I my right, and we lifted it. Though it was said to be a mighty task to raise that door, we pulled it from the ground as easily as if it had been a feather. Out of the pit came the stale, sour odor of old air. My hands were cold. My face was set hard and tight. I felt the chill of death coming from the nether world. I stared downward, but I saw nothing but darkness after the first few steps.

I held my spirit tautly in check. There are some places that arouse such fear we dare not think of the peril; we act without giving thought, for to think is to be lost. That was how I acted then. I gave the signal, and we began the ceremony.

The rite that I had devised began with an offering of aromatic barley seed, which I tossed into the opening myself. If any dark beings were lurking just within the tunnel, perhaps they would busy themselves down there quarreling over the barley, and would not emerge even though the gateway was open. Then the priests of An and Enlil and Utu and Enki came forward and made libations of honey, milk, beer, wine, and oil. That insured us the good will of the high gods. A small child, the daughter of a priest, led a white sheep forth, and I sacrificed it with one quick clean stroke of my blade at a sacrificial stand that Enkidu had erected at the edge of the passageway. Blood of a startling brightness spurted as if from a fountain and ran down along the little creature's slender white throat, and it quivered and sighed and looked at me sadly and died. That was intended as a gift to the gatekeeper Neti, so that he would prevent spirits and demons from emerging into our world. I drew a band of the blood across my forehead and another down my left cheek as a protection for myself.

When these things were done, the priests and I knelt at the rim of the tunnel and chanted spells of sealing, to weave a band of magic acrosg the opening as our final line of defense. I knew that neither the lower gate nor the trapdoor would have any real effect on a spirit that was determined to come forth. The gate and the door were useful merely in keeping living folk from straying into the underworld; but it was by incantations alone that the dwellers beneath could be made to stay where they belonged.

I was frightened. What man would not be, however brave a face he offered to the world? The nether world itself stood open before me. I heard the black waters of its hidden rivers lapping at unseen shores. The pungent acrid smoke of its deadly vapors rose and coiled like hungry serpents about me. But yet, fearful though I was, I was excited also, and filled with a high boldness of purpose. For I was Gilgamesh who had said, even as a boy, Death, I will conquer you! Death, you are no match for me!

So we wove our spells. "All you who would do us harm, whoever you may be, you whose heart conceives our misforttme, whose tongue utters mischief against us, whose lips poison us, in whose footsteps death stands: I ban you!" I cried. "I ban your mouth, I ban your tongue, I ban your glittering eyes, I ban your swift feet, I ban your toiling knees, I ban your laden hands. By these conjurings I bind your hands behind your back. Whether you are a ghost unburied, or a ghost that none cares for, or a ghost with none to make offerings to it, or a ghost that has none to pour libations to it, or a ghost that has no descendants, whatever cause leads you to wander, nevertheless

I compel you to remain below. By Ereshkigal and Gugalanna, by

Nergal and Namtaru, I conjure you never to pass these gates. By the might of Enlil that is in me-by An and Utu, by Enki and

Ninazu, by Allatu, by Irkalla, by Belit-seri, by Apsu, Tiamat, Lahmu,

Lahamu-"

That was the chant I chanted. I bound the beings below by every name that they might hold holy, except for one; I did not bind them in the name of Inanna. Though she was the patron goddess of the city, I would not bind them in her name. I knew that such a binding would be of no avail so long as Inanna's priestess was my enemy.

And because I had not bound them by Inanna's name, I was not certain that any of my spells would be of value. So I had with me at the ceremony my sacred drum, which the craftsman Ur-nangar had made for me out of the wood of the huluppu-tree. I meant to beat on it in my special way and put myself into my trance in front of all the people of Uruk, a thing I had never done before; and then I would send my spirit down into the tunnel, I would venture even to 'the gates of the underworld, for when I was in my trance there was no barrier to my roving. In that way I would be able to see for myself whether our spells had truly sealed the passage against those terrible creatures of black smoke and dank musty vapor.

I said to Enkidu, "There should be revelry and dancing while I do this. Give the order: have the musicians strike up."

Almost at once the sound of trumpets and fifes filled the air. I bent low over my drum and began the slow quiet tapping I knew so well. I felt myself in the presence of the great mystery of mysteries, which is the life beyond life that the gods alone can know. All awareness of the solid world about me faded. There was only my drum and my drumstick, and the steady subtle rhythm of my drumming. It took possession of my soul. It seized me, it lifted me. I saw an aura coming out of the tunnel, rising like flame, cool and blue. There was a buzzing in my ears, a droning, a crackling. I felt a stirring within my body, as though some wild thing were moving about inside me. My breath came fast; my vision dimmed. I was overflowing; a sea was rising out of me and engulfing me.

But then just as the full ecstasy was about to come upon me, and I was making ready to launch myself from my body, there came a shriek from behind me that cut through my soul as an axe cuts through wood, and ripped me from my trance; a shrill harsh outcry, piercing and fierce, over and over. "Utu.t Utu.t Utu.t''

Gods, what a scream! The unearthly sound jolted me and shook me and stunned me. I went numb and pitched forward, all but insensible, as though I had been struck between the shoulders. Enkidu caught me by the shoulders and held me, or I would have toppled down the tunnel; but my drum and my drumstick fell from my frozen hands. I watched with horror as I saw them disappear into the dark mouth of the nether world.

At once almost without thinking I started to scramble down after them. But Enkidu, still gripping my shoulders, hauled me roughly back and flung me to one side as though I were a sack of barley. "Not you!" he cried angrily. "You must not go into that place, Gilgamesh!" And before I could say or do anything he ran down the steps that led into the earth, and vanished entirely from sight in that black pit.

Dazed, I peered after him. I could not speak. There was an overwhelming silence all about me: the musicians were motionless, the dancers were still. Out of that silence rose a single sound, a muffled sobbing or whimpering that came from a girl of eight or ten years who lay writhing on the ground not far away, held down by one of the priests. It was she who had screamed in that terrible way and had broken my trance; I saw that the beating of my drum must have worked on her soul much as it did on mine, but even more powerfully. The drumming had driven her not into the trance of ecstasy but into a terrible fit, under the force of which her mind had given way. Her convulsions still continued. They were frightful to behold.

And Enkidu?'Where was Enkidu? Trembling, I stared into the tunnel, and saw only blackness. I found my voice and called his name, or croaked it, rather, and heard nothing. I called again, more loudly. Silence. Silence. "Enkidu.t'' I cried, and it was a great wail of pain and loss. I was sure he had been set upon by the minions of Ereshkigal; perhaps they had already carried him off to hell. "Wait!" I shouted. "I'm coming after you!"

"You must not," said my mother sharply, and suddenly three or four men were at my elbows ready to hold me back. If they had tried to restrain me I would have hurled them over the city wall into the river. But there was no need of that, for just then I heard the sound of a choking cough close by in the tunnel, and Enkidu came slowly up out of it. He was holding my drum and my drumstick in his hand.

He looked ghostly. He was like one who had returned from the dead. All color was gone from his skin: his face seemed bleached, so pale was it. His hair and beard were gray with dust, and his white robe was badly soiled. Great tangles of cobwebs were snarled about his body, and even over his mouth; he was trying to brush at them with his shoulders as he emerged into the light. He stood there a moment dazzled and blinking. There was a look in his eyes of such wildness, such strangeness, that I scarcely knew him to be my friend. Those who had been standing near me backed away. I felt almost like backing away from him myself.

"I have brought back your drum and your drumstick, Gilgamesh," he said in a voice like cinders and ashes. "They fell a long way: they were beyond the second gate. But I went on my hands and knees until I touched them in the dark."

I stared at him, appalled. "It was madness. You should not have gone into that tunnel."

"But you had dropped your drum," he said, in that same strange whisper. He shivered and rubbed his shoulder against his face again, and coughed and sneezed from the dust. "I had to try to bring it back. I know how important it is to you." "But the dangers-the evils-"

Enkidu shrugged. "Here is your drum, Gilgamesh. Here is your drumstick."

I took them from him. They did not feel right; it was as if they had lost eleven parts out of twelve of their weight. They were so light I thought they might float out of my grasp. Enkidu nodded~ "Yes," he said. "They are different now. I think the god-strength must have gone out of them. It is a terrible place, down there." He shuddered once more. "I could not see anything. But as I crawled, I felt bones breaking beneath me. Old dry bones. There is a carpet of bones in that tunnel, Gilgamesh. People have gone down into it before me. But I think I may have been the first one to come out."

Something hung in the air between us like a curtain. The strange ness that had come upon him in that other world now screened his soul from mine. I felt I could not reach him; I felt almost as though

I did not know him any longer. A sense of irretrievable loss choked my soul. The Enkidu I had known had vanished. He had been to a place I dared not enter and he had returned with knowledge that I would never be able to comprehend.

"Tell me what you saw there," I said. "Were there demons?"

"I told you: it was dark. I saw nothing. But I felt their presence.

I felt them all around me." He gestured toward the gaping tunnel.

"You should close up that pit, brother, and never open it again. Seal the door, and seal it again and seven times over."

I thought I would burst with rage, to see him so shattered for the sake of my drum. How could I call back the moment? Cling to the drum lest it fall into that hole, cling to Enkidu lest he go rushing off after it? But all that was engraved forever in the book of time.

Bitterly I said, "I will seal it, yes. But it is too late, Enkidu! If only you had not gone down there-!"

He smiled a faint wan smile. "I would do it for you again, if I had to. But I hope I will not have to." Then he came close to me. I could smell the dry smell of the dust and cobwebs that were on him. In a voice like a torch that has gone out he said, "I saw nothing while I was in the underworld because everything was black there. But there was one thing I saw that I saw with my heart and not with my eyes, and it was myself, Gilgamesh, my own body, which the vermin were devouring as though it were an old cloak. Those were my own bones I crawled on in that tunnel. And now I am frightened, old friend. I am very frightened." He put his arms lightly to my shoulders and gave me a dusty embrace. Gently he said, "I am sorry that your drum has lost its god-strength. I would have brought it back to you as it was, if I could have done it. You know that: I would have brought it back to you as it was."

I THINK it was the next day that Enkidu's illness began. He complained that his hand, the one he had injured when forcing the gate in the forest of cedars, felt chilled. An hour or two later he spoke of a stiffness and a soreness in that arm. Then he said he was feverish, and took to his bed.

"It is as it was in my dream," he said gloomily to me. "The gods have met in council, and they have decreed that I am the one who must die, because you are king."

"You will not die," I said with a loving anger in my voice. "No one dies of a soreness in the arm! You must have hurt it again while you were crawling about in that foul tunnel. I have sent for the healers: they will set you aright before nightfall."

He shook his head. "I tell you I am dying, Gilgamesh."

It frightened and maddened me to hear him so weary and faint. He was yielding to whatever demon had seized him, and that was not like him. "I will not have it!" I cried. "I will not let you die!" I knelt beside his bed. He was flushed and his forehead was shiny with sweat. Urgently I said, "Brother, I cannot abide losing you. I beg you: speak no more of dying. The healers are on their way, and they will make you well again."

I watched over him as a lioness watches over her cub. He muttered, he moaned, his eyes were veiled by a film. He said that his head hurt him and his mouth pricked him, his eyes troubled him, his ears were singing. His throat choked him, his neck muscles hurt. His breast, his shoulders, and his loins hurt him; his fingers were cramped; his stomach was inflamed; his bowels were hot. His hands, his feet, and his knees were aching. There was no part of his body that did not trouble him. He lay trembling, gripped by death or the fear of death, and I felt for his sake that f~ar as well. Seeing him in mortal terror

I was reminded of my own mortality, which tormented me like a knife in my flesh. It was the old enemy, and though he was coming to call not on me but on my friend, he could not but awaken my own fear of him. But I was determined: I had already resolved not to yield to death myself, nor would I allow him to have Enkidu.

I did whatever seemed useful. Perhaps it was the presence of the drum in the palace that was afflicting him, I thought, by carrying some taint of the nether world. I did not know, but I would not take the chance. The drum was hateful to me now. I ordered priests to take it outside the city walls and burn it, using such rites as will dispel those spirits. Greatly did I lament its loss, but I would not keep it by me if it made Enkidu ill. So the drum was burned. Yet

Enkidu did not recover.

The healers came, the most skilled diviners and exorcists in the city. The first who viewed him was old Namennaduma, the royal baru-priest, the great diviner. His consultation was lengthy; for sev eral hours he studied Enkidu, consulting the omens so that he could make a preliminary diagnosis and prognosis. Then he summoned me to the sickroom and said, "There is great danger."

"Drive it away, seer, or you will find yourself in danger even greater," I said.

Namennaduma must have heard such threats before: my harsh words did not seem to trouble him. Calmly he replied, "We will treat him. But we must know more. Tonight we will consult the stars, and tomorrow we will do the divination by sheep's-liver. And then the treatment can begin."

"Why wait so long? Do your divining today!"

"Today is not auspicious," the baru-priest said. "It is an unlucky time of the month, and the moon is unfavorable." I could not argue with that. So off he went to study the stars, and into the room came the azu, the water-knower, the man of medicines. This doctor touched his hand to Enkidu's breast and to his cheek, and nodded and scowled, and took certain powders from his pouch. Then he said to me, as though I were some sort ofazu myself, "We will give him the powder of anadishsha and the ground seeds of duashbur, mixed into beer and water. That will cool the fever. And for his pain, the lees of the dried vine and the oil of the pine tree, made into a poultice. And to help him sleep, the powdered seeds of nigmi, and an extract of the roots and trunk of arina, combined with myrrh and thyme, in beer."

Hope made my breath come short. "And will he be healed, then?" I asked.

With some irritation the water-knower replied, "He will be in less pain, and his fever will relent. Healing must come afterward, if it comes at all."

That night Enkidu slept only a little, and I none at all.

In the morning Namennaduma returned. His face was grim, but he refused to speak of what he had learned in the stars, and when I commanded him to tell me he simply peered at me as if I were a madman. "It is not a simple prognosis," he said, and shrugged. "We must do the liver-divination now."

A statue of the healing-god Ninib, son of Enlil, was brought into the room. A small white sheep was tethered in front of it. I stared at that little sad-eyed animal as though it held the power of life and death over Enkidu itself. Namennaduma performed prayers and purifications and libations, and slaughtered the sheep. Then with brisk swift strokes he cut open its belly and drew forth the steaming liver, which he examined with the skill of his sixty years of this art. He studied the position it had held within the belly of the sheep-"the palace of the liver," he called it-and then he pored over the liver itself, its lobes and veins, its curves and indentations, its little fingerlike projections. At length he looked up at me and said, "The shanu is double and so is the niru. That is an evil omen, king."

"Find a better one," I said.

"See, king, this: there is a lump of flesh at the bottom of the na."

I felt my anger rising. "So? What of it?"

Namennaduma grew uneasy. He sensed the stirring and heating of my wrath, and knew what it could mean for him. But if I had hoped to frighten him into fnding an answer that would comfort me, I did not succeed. Straightaway he replied, "It means that a curse lies on the sick one. He will die."

His voice fell upon my ears like mallets. Now I was enraged.

There was thunder in my brain. I came close to striking him. "We will all die!" I roared. "But not yet, not so soon! A curse on you, for your foul omens! Look again, baru-priest! Find the true truth!"

"Shall I deceive you with the words you prefer to hear, then?"

He delivered those blunt words in so quiet and unflinching a tone that my fury at once went from me: I realized I was in the presence of a man of strength and majesty, who would not bend the truth of his art even if it were to cost him his life. I brought myself into check and when I could speak in a normal voice again I said, "The truth is what I want. I have no liking for the truth you offer me: but at the least I admire the way you tell it. You are a man of honor,

Namennaduma."

"I am an old man. If I anger you and you slay me, what is that to me? But I will not lie to please you."

"Are all the omens bad?" I asked, speaking softly, cajolingly, almost begging him.

"They are not good. But he is a man of immense strength. That may yet save him, if we follow the right procedures. I promise nothing: but there is a chance. It is a very small chance, king."

"Do what can be done. Save him."

The baru-priest laid his hand gently on my arm. "You understand it is forbidden to physicians to treat one whose case is hopeless. That is a defiance of the gods: we may not do it."

"I'm aware of that. But you have just said there is a chance to save him."

"A very small one. Another diviner might say the case is hopeless, and refuse to continue. I tell you this, king, because I want you to remember that there are perils in going against the wishes of the gods."

With an impatient sigh I said, "So there are. Now call in the exorcist and the water-knower, and set them to the task of healing my brother!"

And so they went to their work.

An army of healers surrounded Enkidu's bed. Some busied themselves with sacrifices and libations, pouring out milk, beer, wine, bread, fruit, enough to feed a legion of gods, and killing any number of lambs and goats and suckling pigs. While that was going on the ashiptu, the exorcist, began his incantations. "Seven are they, seven are they, in the Ocean Deep seven are they," he chanted. "Ashakku unto the man, bringing fever. Namtaru unto the man, bringing disease. The evil spirit Utukku unto the man, against his neck. The evil demon Alu unto the man, against his breast. The evil ghost Ekimmu unto the man, against his belly. The evil devil Gallu unto the man, against his hand. The evil god Ilu unto the man, against his foot. Seven are they; evil are they. These seven together have seized upon him: they devour his body like a consuming fire. Against them I will conjure."

As he chanted, I paced the room, counting my steps a thousand times from wall to wall. I felt the god closing his fist on Enkidu: it was an agony for me. He lay with clouded eyes and thickened breath, scarcely seeming to understand what was taking place. The rituals proceeded for hours. When the healers left, I remained by the beside. "Brother?" I murmured. "Brother, do you hear me?" He heard nothing. "The gods have chosen to spare my life, but you are the price I must pay! Is that it? Is that it? Ah, it is too much, Enkidu!" He said nothing. I began to speak the words of the great lamentation over him, slowly, haltingly, but I got no more than a little way. It was too soon to speak those words for Enkidu: I could not do it. "Brother, will you go from me?" I asked. "Will I ever see you again?" He did not hear me; he was lost in a fevered dream.

During the night he awakened and began to speak. His voice was clear and his mind seemed clear, but he showed no sign of knowing that I was there. He spoke of that time he had hurt his hand in the forest of cedars, in order to spare the beautiful gate; and he said aloud that if he had known then that any such affliction as this would come upon him as a result, he would have raised his axe and split that gate like a curtain of reeds. Then he spoke bitterly of the trapper Kuninda, who had discovered him on the steppe. "I call curses down on him, for putting me in the hands of the city people!" Enkidu cried, in a hoarse crazed way that frightened me. "Let him lose all his wealth! Let the beasts he would trap escape from his snares! Let him be denied the joy of his heart!" He was silent a time, calmer, and I thought he had returned to sleep. But suddenly he sat up and raved again, this time speaking of the sacred harlot Abisimti: "I curse the woman too!" He had been wild and simple, he said, and she had forced him to see things as men see them. He had not felt sorrow, or loneliness, or the fear of death, until she had caused him to understand that such things existed. Even the joy she had brought him was tainted, said Enkidu: for now that he was dying he felt a stabbing pain at the thought of the loss of that joy. But for her he would have remained ignorant and innocent. Bitterly he said, "Let this be her doom for all time to come: she will wander the streets forever! Let her stand in the shadow of the wall! Let drunken men strike her and use her foully!" He rolled over toward the wall, coughing, growling, muttering. Then once more he subsided.

I waited, fearful that the next he would curse would be Gilgamesh. I dreaded that, even if his mind was in disarray. But he did not curse me. When next he opened his eyes he looked straight at me and said, in his normal voice, "Why, brother, is it the middle of the night?"

"I think it is."

"The fever is easing, perhaps. Have I been dreaming?"

"Dreaming, yes, and raving, and talking aloud. But the medicines must be having their effect."

"Raving? What sort of things have I said?"

I told him that he had spoken of the gate at which he had injured himself, and of the trapper, and of the harlot Abisimti, and that he had cursed them all, for leading him to this pass.

He nodded. His brow darkened. For a troubled moment he did not speak. Then he said, "And did I curse you too, brother?"

Shaking my head I answered, "No. Not me."

His relief was immense. "Ah. Ah. How afraid I was that I might have done it!"

"You did not."

"But if I had, it would have been the fever speaking, not Enkidu. You know that."

"Yes. I know that."

He smiled. "I have been too harsh, brother. It was not the gate's fault that I hurt 'myself. Nor Ku-ninda's, that I was snared. Nor Abisimti's. Is it possible to call back curses, do you think?" "I think it can be done, brother."

"Then I call back mine. If it were not for the trapper and the woman, I would never have known you. I'd not have learned to eat bread fit for gods, and drink the wine of kings. I'd not have been clothed with noble garments, and had glorious Gilgamesh for my brother. So let the trapper prosper. Yes, and the woman, why, let no man scorn her. Let kings and princes and nobles love her, and heap up carnelian and lapis and gold for her, and forsake their wives for her. Let her enter into the presence of the gods. There! I call back my curses!" He looked at me strangely and in a different voice said, "Gilgamesh, am I going to die soon?"

"You will not. The healers are doing their work on you. A little while longer, and you will be your old self again."

"Ah. Ah. How good it will be to rise from this bed, and run and hunt beside you, brother! A little while longer, you say?"

"Just a little while." What else could I say? Why not let him have an hour of peace amid his pain? And hope was rising in me for his return to health. "Sleep now, Enkidu. Rest. Rest."

He nodded and closed his eyes. I watched him nearly until dawn, when I fell asleep myself. I was awakened by the healers returning, bringing beasts for the morning sacrifices. Quickly I looked toward Enkidu. He had not sustained the night's recovery. He seemed feverish again, and wandering in delirium. But I suppose there will be many relapses, I told myself, before this thing is lifted from him.

That day they did the divination by oil-bubble and water, gathering around in a little circle to observe the patterns the oil made as it floated in the cup. "Look," said one, "the oil sinks and rises again!" And another said, "It moves in an easterly direction. It disperses and covers the cup." I did not trouble to ask what these omens meant. I had become certain of Enkidu's restoration.

They performed the incantation of Eridu on him. The priests fashioned a figure of Enkidu out of dough, and sprinkled the water of the incantation on it: water the life-giver, water the all-cleansing. By prayer and ritual they drew a demon from him into a pot of water, which they broke, spilling the demon into the fireplace. They took another demon out in a piece of string, which they tied in knots. They peeled an onion, throwing the peels one by one into the fire, demon after demon. There were many more such spells.

Meanwhile the physician went about his work also, setting out his potions of cassia and myrtle and asafoetida and thyme, his bark of willow and fig and pear, his ground turtle-shell and powdered snake-skin, and the rest. Both salt and saltpeter figured in his healing draughts, and beer and wine, and honey, and milk. I noticed the exorcists looking sourly toward the doctor as he mixed his medicines, and he at them: no doubt there is some rivalry between them, each thinking that he alone is the true worker of the cure. But I know that one is useless without the other. The medicines ease pain and make swellings go down and soothe the chilled brow, but unless the demons be driven out as well, what good are the potions? It is the demons who bring the sickness in the first place.

Because I knew that the illness of Enkidu came by decree of the gods, to punish us for our pride in killing Huwawa and destroying the Bull of Heaven, I felt I should take the medicines too. Perhaps the same disease lurked in me as in Enkidu, though I had been spared its effects by divine command; and perhaps Enkidu would not be rid of his affliction until I too had been purified. So whatever potion Enkidu drank I swallowed also, and foul-tasting stuff it was, most of it. I gagged and choked and retched over it, but I drank it all down, though often it left me dizzy the better part of an hour afterward. Did I achieve anything by doing that? Who knows? The ways of the gods are beyond our comprehension. The thoughts of a god are like deep waters: who can fathom them?

Some days Enkidu seemed stronger. Some days he seemed weaker. For three days running he lay with his eyes closed, moaning and making no sense. Then he awakened and sent for me. He looked pale and strange. The fever had ravaged his flesh: he was hollowcheeked and his skin hung loosely on his frame. He stared at me. His eyes were dark glowing stars ablaze in the caverns of his face. Suddenly I saw the unmistakable hand of death resting on his shoulder, and I wanted to weep.

I felt utterly helpless. I the son of divine Lugalbanda, I the king, I the hero, I the god: for all my power, helpless. Helpless.

He said, "I dreamed again last night, Gilgamesh."

"Tell me."

His voice was calm. He spoke as though he were twelve thousand leagues away. "I heard the heavens moan," he said, "and I heard the earth respond. I stood alone and there was an awful being before me. His face was as dark as that of the black bird of the storm, and his talons were the talons of an eagle. He seized me and held me fast in his claws: I was crushed up against him, and I was smothering. Then he changed me, brother, he turned my arms to wings covered with feathers like a bird's. He looked at me, and led me away, down to the House of Darkness, down to the dwelling of Ereshkigal the queen of hell: along the road from which there is no way back, down to the house which no one leaves. He took me into that dark place where the dwellers sit in darkness, and have dust for their bread and clay for their meat."

I stared at him. I could say nothing.

"I saw the dead ones. They are clad like birds, with wings for garments. They see no light, they dwell in darkness. I went into the House of Dust and and I saw the kings of the earth, Gilgamesh, the masters, the high rulers, and they were without their crowns. They were waiting on the demons like servants, bringing them baked meats, pouring cool water from the waterskins. I saw the priests and priestesses, the seers, the chanters, all the holy ones: what good had their holiness done them? They were servants." His eyes were hard and glittering, like gleaming bits of obsidian. "Do you know who I saw? I saw Etana of Kish, who flew in heaven: there he was, down below! I saw gods there: they had horns on their crowns, they were preceded by thunder as they walked. And I saw Ereshkigal the queen of hell, and her recorder Belit-seri, who knelt down before her, marking the tally of the dead on a tablet. When she saw me she lifted her head and said, "Who has brought this one here?" Then I awoke, and I felt like a man who wanders alone in a terrible wasteland, or like one who has been arrested and seized and whose heart pounds with fright. O brother, brother, let some god come to your gate, and strike out my name and write his own in its place!"

I was all pain, everywhere in my soul, and I think in my breast also, as I listened to this. I said, "I will pray to the great gods for you. It is a dire dream."

"I will die soon, Gilgamesh. You will be alone again."

What could I say? What could I do? Sorrow froze me. Alone again, yes. I had not forgotten those days of bleakness before the coming of my friend and brother. Alone again, as I had been before. Those words were like a knell to all my joy. I was chilled; I had no strength.

He said, "How strange it will be for you, brother. You will journey here and you will journey there, and the time will come when you turn to me to say, Enkidu, do you see the elephant in the marsh, Enkidu, shall we scale that city's walls? And I will not answer you. I will not be beside you. You will have to do those things without me."

There was a hand at my throat. "It will be very strange, yes." He sat up a little way and turned his head toward me. "Your eyes look different today. Are you crying? I don't think I've ever seen you cry before, brother." He smiled. "I feel very little pain now."

I nodded. I knew why that was. Sorrow bent me like a weight of stone.

Then the smile faded and in a harsh somber voice he said, "Do you know what I regret most, brother, apart from leaving you to be alone? I regret that because of the curse of the great goddess I must die in this shameful way, in my bed, wasting slowly away. The man who falls in battle dies a happy death: but I must die in shame."

That did not matter to me as it did to him. The thing that I struggled with then had nothing to do with such delicate matters as shame and pride. I was already bereaved while he still lived; I suffered his loss. It made no difference to me how or where that loss had been inflicted.

"Death is death, however it may come," I said, shrugging.

"I would have had it come in a different way," said Enkidu.

I could say nothing. He was in the grip of death and we both knew it, and words would not alter anything now. The baru-priest Namennaduma had known it from the first, and had tried to tell me, but in my blindness I would not see the truth. Enkidu's death had come to him; and Gilgamesh the king was helpless against it.

HE LINGERED eleven days more. His suffering increased each day, until I could barely bring myself to look upon him. But I stayed by his side until the end.

At dawn on the twelfth day I saw his life leave him. At the last moment it seemed to me in the darkness that there was a faint red haze about him; the haze rose and drifted away, and all was dark. That was how I knew he was dead. I sat in silence, feeling the solitude come rolling in upon me. At first I did not weep, though I remember thinking that the wild ass and the gazelle must be weeping, now. All the wild creatures of the steppes were mourning Enkidu, I thought: even the bear, even the hyena, even the panther. The paths in the forests where he used to dwell would weep for him. The rivers, the streams, the hills.

I reached out and touched him. Was he growing cold already? I could not tell. He seemed merely to be sleeping, but I knew this was not sleep. The fevers that had burned through him had left their mark on his features in these twelve days, making him gaunt and shrunken; but now he looked almost like his old self, calm, his face at ease. I put my hand to his heart. I could not feel it beating. I rose and drew the linen bedcloth over him, tenderly, as a husband might veil his bride. But I knew that this was no veil, it was a shroud. And then I wept. The tears came slowly at first, tears being very odd to me: I made a little sniveling sound, I felt a warmth at the corners of my eyes, my lips clamped themselves tight together. After a moment of this it was easier. Some dam within me broke, and my grief came freely. I paced back and forth before the couch like a lioness who has been deprived of her cubs. I tore at my hair. I ripped at my fine robes and flung them down as though they were unclean. I raged, I stormed, I roared. No one dared approach me. I was left alone with my terrible grief. I stayed beside the body all that day, and another, and another after that, until I saw that the servants of Ereshkigal were claiming him. I knew then that I had to give him up for burial.

Therefore I gathered myself together. There was much that I needed to do.

The parting-ritual, first. I went to the cabinet where such things are kept and brought forth a table made from elammaqu-wood, upon which I set a bowl oflapis and a bowl of carnelian. Into one I poured curds, into the other I poured honey; and I carried the table to the terrace of Utu and put it out into the sunlight as an offering. I said the proper words. When I spoke the great lamentation now it was without faltering.

Then I called the elders of Uruk to me. They knew, of course, what had happened, and they wore the colors of mourning on their arms. They looked somber, but it was only on account of my loss, not for any loss of their own: Enkidu had meant nothing to them. That angered me some, that they had not perceived Enkidu's virtues as I had perceived them. But they were only ordinary men: how could they have known, how could they have understood anything. They were ill at ease, seeing how great my grief was. They did not expect that of me, precisely because I was not an ordinary man. They had thought of me as a being beyond mere mortal things like grief: a god dwelling among them, or some such thing. Probably I had done much to foster that belief. But now my eyes were rimmed with red, my face was pale and swollen. They could not comprehend such a show of humanity in me. Gilgamesh the king, Gilgamesh the god-well, yes, but I was also Gilgamesh the man. I had suffered greatly in the splendid isolation of my kingship, though no one about me had realized that I suffered; and then I had found a friend; and now that friend had been stolen from me by the demons. Therefore I wept. What did they expect?

I said, "I weep for my friend Enkidu. He was the axe at my side, the dagger in my belt, the shield I held before me. He was my brother. The loss is great. The pain cuts deep."

"All Uruk mourns your brother," they told me. "The warriors weep. The people in the streets weep. The ploughmen and the harvesters weep, Gilgamesh." But their words rang hollow to me. It was the old story: they were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear.

"We will bury him as though he had been a king," I said, so they would better comprehend what Enkidu had been.

They looked startled at that, thinking perhaps that I might have it in mind to send my household staff, or even a few of the elders themselves, into the grave to keep Enkidu company. But I had no such thought. I understood death better now than I had on that day when the household of Lugalbanda had gone one by one under the earth into his tomb; I saw no merit in causing other brothers to weep, and sons and wives, for Enkidu's sake. So I told them only to prepare for a ceremony of great splendor.

I called out the finest of the city's craftsmen, the coppersmiths, the goldsmiths, the lapidaries. I ordered them to make a statue of my friend-the body of gold, the breast of lapis. I had the grave-makers dig a shaft in the open place beside the White Platform and line its walls with bricks of baked clay. I gathered together Enkidu's weapons and the skins of the animals he had slain, to be buried with him; and also I provided rich treasure to be put beside him, cups and rings and alabaster goblets and jewels and such.

I went to each temple in turn and formally asked the high priest to take part in the burial of Enkidu. The one temple that I did not visit was the one that I had built for the goddess. In truth it was proper and necessary for Inanna to be present at the funeral of any great man of Uruk; but I did not want her there. I held her responsible for Enkidu's death: I was certain she had called his doom down upon him with her curses, in her anger at my overshadowing her power in the city. I would not have her at the funeral of the friend she had ripped from me; I would not give her the chance to gloat over the great wound she had inflicted on me. Let her stay huddled in her temple, I thought. No one but her handmaidens had seen her since the day of the loosing of the Bull of Heaven. That was how I preferred it to be.

But it was not how she preferred it to be. On the day of the funeral I led the march from the palace to the grave-shaft, weeping all the while, and stood beside the priests and my mother as we made the sacrifices of oxen and goats and poured out the libations of milk and honey. The hunter Ku-ninda was with me; the sacred harlot Abisimti was with me also. They had known Enkidu even longer than I, and they mourned him nearly as deeply. Abisimti's eyes were reddened with weeping, her garments were torn; Ku-ninda, stark and silent, stood with clenched fists and lips clamped tight, holding back fierce sorrow. I had them both aid me in performing the rites. Just as we were coming to the point in the service where the pure cool water is poured as a refreshment for the dead man as he goes to the House of Dust and Darkness, there was a stirring behind me, and I turned and saw Inanna amidst a little group of her priestesses.

She looked more like hell's queen than heaven's. Her face was painted ghostly white, and her eyelids and even her lips were blackened with kohl. She wore a dark stark robe falling straight from her shoulders and her only ornament was a dagger of polished green stone that dangled between her breasts from a lanyard of woven straw about her neck. Her priestesses were clad in the same fashion.

The ceremony came to a halt. There was a hard crackling silence all about me.

She looked toward me in the coldest hatred and said, "A funeral, Gilgamesh, without asking the consent of the goddess?"

"I do as I please today. He was my friend."

"Inanna still rules, nevertheless.'

My glance rested unwaveringly on her eyes. I returned hatred for hatred, frost for frost. In clear measured tones I said, "I will bury my friend without Inanna's help. Go back to your temple." "I speak for the goddess in Uruk."

"And I am king in Uruk. I speak for the gods." I raised my arm and swept it about broadly. "See, the priests of An and Enlil are here, and the priests of Enki, and the priests of Utu. The gods have given their blessing to the laying to rest of Enkidu. If the goddess is absent today, well, it does not matter so much, I think."

She glared at me and for a long moment did not speak, did not even vent breath. She seemed to be swelling up; I thought she would explode. The fury in her face was awesome.

Then she said, "Beware, Gilgamesh! Your defiance goes beyond the bounds. You have seen already what my curse can do: I would not want to place it on the king of Uruk. But I will if I must, Gilgamesh. I will if I must."

In a low cold voice I replied, "You beware also, priestess! Your curse may be dangerous, but so is my sword. I tell you, take yourself away from here this moment, or I will make a libation to Enkidu's shade with your blood. I tell you: before everyone, Inanna, I will split your belly open."

It was a frightful moment. Had anyone ever spoken to the priestess of the goddess in such a way? I was swept by an excitement that was almost like a high drunkenness. I felt giddy. My breath came in quick hard gusts; my heart hammered at the cage of my ribs.

She stared. "Are you mad?"

I put my hand to the hilt of my sword. "I will if I must, Inanna. I will if I must. Go, now."

I think I would have slain her in front of all Uruk, if she had defied me then. I think she knew that, too. For she gave me one final glare, like the cold fiery glare of that serpent whose eyes breathe poison. But I did not fall; I did not flinch; I returned her glare, fire for fire, chill for chill. And then at last she swung about and went sweeping back with her women toward her temple.

When she was out of sight I let my arms hang limp and my breath come soft, for I was strung tight as a bow. When I was calm again I turned to the priest who still held the beaker of water and said, "Come, let us continue."

He handed me the water, and I poured it out into the grave, and said the words. Afterward I pulled my headband off, and tore my garments, and broke my bracelets and my necklace. My body ached in twenty places; there was a pressure against my eyes, and a heaviness in my breast, and the hand at my throat had tightened until I could scarcely breathe. This was the end of the rite: now Enkidu's journey into darkness was complete and I had no way to hide from my bereavement. He was gone. I was alone. The pain rose up within me like a fountain and flooded me. I threw myself on the ground and wept for Enkidu for the last time. Then it was done. I grew calm; I lay still; after a while I arose, saying nothing to anyone. With my own hands I sealed the shaft with bricks, and the other priests covered it over with earth.

I returned to the palace alone. I sat in silence all that day in my innermost chamber, seeing no one. I listened to hear Enkidu's laughter tumbling in torrents through the halls. Silence. I listened for the sound of his hands slapping against the door to summon me. Silence. I thought of going out to hunt, and imagined myself turning to him to take a javelin from him: he would not be beside me. I felt a hunger for him that I knew could never be eased. Why, I wondered, had I been singled out for such a loss? Because I was king? Because my life had gone only from triumph to triumph, and the gods themselves were jealous of me? Perhaps I had been given Enkidu only so that he might be taken away; perhaps this was all the design of the gods, to let me taste happiness so that I could learn the true taste of grief afterward.

I was alone. Well, I had been alone before. But it seemed to me, that day of the burial of my friend, that I had never been alone in the way that I was alone now.

THEY SAY that all wounds heal in time. I suppose they do, in one way or another, though often they leave thick raised scars in their place. One day flowed into another and I waited for the scars to form over the place where Enkidu had been ripped away. I wandered the halls of my palace and did not hear his laughter, and I did not see his great burly form swaggering about the terraces, and I thought that soon I would become accustomed to his absence; but that did not seem to happen. Every day I was reminded by some little thing that he was no longer here.

I could not bear it. I had to take myself away from Uruk. Wherever I looked in Uruk I saw the shadow of Enkidu falling across the streets. I heard the echoes of Enkidu's voice in the jabber of the crowds. There was no place to hide from memory. It was a kind of madness, I think: a pain beyond reason. It invaded every corner of my soul and rendered everything meaningless that once had mattered to me. At first what gnawed at me and ached in my gut was only the loss of Enkidu, but then I came to see that the real source of my pain lay even deeper: it was not so much the death of Enkidu that tormented me, as it was my awareness of the fact of death itself. For I knew that I would, in time, reconcile myself even to the departure of Enkidu: I was not so great a fool as to think that wound would never heal. But how could I reconcile myself to the loss of all the world? How could I reconcile myself to the loss of myself?. Again and again in my life I had begun to wrestle with that question, and had stepped aside from it; but the death of Enkidu raised it once more, and this time it could not be avoided. Death will come, Gil gamesh, even for you. That is the thing I saw in the air before my face, the black mocking mask of death. And the knowledge of the inevitability of that death robbed my life of all its joy.

As on that day of the funeral of my father Lugalbanda long ago I fell into such a sharp terror of dying that I could hardly breathe. I sat upon my high throne, thinking, Enkidu has died and shuffles about now within that place of dust, cloaked like a bird in gloomy feathers, making his evening meal out of cold clay. And soon enough I must go to that dark place too. One day a king in a grand palace, the next a mournful creature flapping his wings in the dust-was that the fate that awaited me? I remembered how as a boy I had vowed to conquer death. Death, you are no match for me.t So I had boasted. I was too proud to die; death was an affront I could not bear, and I would deny death his sway over me. But could that be? Death had defeated Enkidu; beyond any doubt death would come for Gilgamesh as well, in his proper time. And the certainty of that drained all strength from me. I did not want to be king any longer. I did not want to perform the sacrifices and pour out the libations and repair the canals and lead my troops in war. Why go to such trouble, when our lives are like the lives of the little green flies that buzz about for a few hours at twilight and then perish? What sense is there in striving so hard? We are given friends and then the friends soon are taken away: better not to have had the friend at all, I thought. And, thinking in that fashion, I came to see all human action as without value or purpose. Flies, flies, buzzing flies: we are nothing more than that, I told myself. Death is the gods' great joke upon us. What sense in being a king? King of the flies? I would be king no longer. I would flee this city, and go out into the wilderness.

Thus it was the fear of death that drove me from Uruk. I could not be king any longer: I was an empty man. Under the shadow of the dread of death I went forth alone out of the city.

I told no one where I was going. I did not know that myself. I did not even say that I was leaving at all. I appointed no regent; I left no instructions for what was to be done in my absence. It was a madness that was upon me. Between midnight and dawn I slipped away, taking no more with me than the little I had carried that time I had fled to Kish when I was a boy.

Despair governed me. Woe lay heavy on my every thought. Fear nestled like a venomous serpent behind my breastbone. My hair was unkempt: I had not allowed it to be cut since the first day of Enkidu's illness. My only garments were a lion's rough hide and a peasant's sandals: I renounced my elegant robes and cloaks and all of that. I think no one seeing me depart would have recognized me as Gilgamesh the king, so wild and frightful did I look. I scarcely would have known me myself, I think.

So did I wander dismally off into the steppe, following no plan, seeking no path, hoping only to find some place where I might elude the hounds of death.

I could not tell you now what route I took. I think I began by going east toward Elam, into that green wilderness where Enkidu first was found, as though I believed I might discover another one just like him out there. But soon I turned north to the land they call Uri, and then I may have swung around to the west where the Martu people dwell, and after that I do not know. I paid no heed to the rising of the sun, or to its setting. I was in a madness. I walked by day or by night, and slept wherever I chose, or did not sleep at all; and I walked without knowing where I was nor where I had been. I am sure, at least, that I was at all times outside the boundaries of the Land. Several times I think I came up against the walls of the world, and looked out into the places that are beyond the compass of the earth. Maybe I went into those places; I do not know. I was in a madness.

I felt fear of things I had never feared before. One night in a mountain pass where the air was cold and thin and stung the nostrils, the smell came to me of lions: a bitter smell, sour and keen. IfI had been Gilgamesh, and had had Enkidu beside me, we would have run up the rocks even though it was dark and hunted those lions for their skins, and made cloaks out of them before we slept. But Enkidu was dead and I was not Gilgamesh: I was no one, I was mad. Fear came over me and made me tremble. I raised my eyes to the moon, which hung like a great white lamp above the sharp peaks, and cried out to Nanna the god, "Protect me, I beg you, for I am afraid." Those words, I am afi~aid, sounded strange to me even as I said them: there was that much of Gilgamesh still alive within me. I am a~aid. Had I ever spoken those words before? I had been afraid of death, yes, I suppose. But to be afraid of lions? Nanna took pity on me. He caused me to fall into a deep sleep despite my fear. I dreamed of gardens and orchards; and when the morning light woke me I saw the lions all around me, rejoicing in life. I felt no fear now. I took my axe in my hand; I drew my dirk from my belt; I ran among those lions like an arrow speeding from the bow, and struck at them and scattered them and killed more than one. That was better than cowering and snuffling in fear. But I was a madman still.

In another place where the trees were thick and squat and had leaves like sharp little awls I saw the Imdugud-bird perched on a branch with her heavy red talons digging deep into the wood. Or rather the Imdugud-bird saw me, and knew me, and called out, "Where are you going, son of Lugalbanda?" "Is that you, Imdugud-bird?"

She spread her wings, which are like the wings of a great eagle, and preened her head, which is the head of a lioness. Her eyes sparkled as though they were encrusted with jewels. I knew her for what she was.

I said, "I am in terror of death, Imdugud. I am looking for a place where death cannot find me."

She laughed. Her laughter is like the laughter of a lioness, soft and frightful. "Death found Enkidu. Death found Dumuzi. Death found the hero Lugalbanda. Why do you think death will not find Gilgamesh?"

"Two-thirds of me is god, one-third is human."

She laughed again, more harshly, a cackling laugh. "Then twothirds of you will live, and one-third will die!"

"You mock me, Imdugud. Why be so cruel?" I held out my hands to her. "What harm have I done to you, that you should mock me? Is it because I drove you from the huluppu-tree? That tree was Inanna's. It was my duty then to serve Inanna. I asked you gently; I asked you well. Help me, Imdugud."

My words seemed to reach her soul. Quietly she said, "How can I help you, son of Lugalbanda?"

"Tell me where I can go that death will not find me."

"Death comes to all mortals, son of Lugalbanda."

"To all, without exception?"

"Without exception," she said. Then she was silent a time; and then she said, "Indeed there has been one exception. It is one of which you are aware."

My heart began to race. Urgently I said, "One who is exempt from dying? I cannot think. Tell me. Tell me!"

"In your madness and your despair you have forgotten the hero of the Flood."

"Ziusudra! Yes!"

"He dwells eternally in the land of Dilmun. Have you forgotten that, Gilgamesh?"

I quivered with excitement. It was like a sudden fever. I saw there might be a hope.

Eagerly I cried, "And if I go to him, Imdugud? What then? Will he share the secret of life with me, if I ask him?"

I heard the mocking cackle again, "If you ask him? If you ask him? If you ask him?" Her voice was less like a lioness' now, and more like that of some huge strange crow. She fluttered her great wings. "Ask! Ask! Ask!"

"Tell me the way, Imdugud!"

"Ask! Only ask!"

Now it was becoming harder for me to see her: the air grew thick and the dark needles of the tree seemed to be closing about her. Nor could I hear her easily any longer: her words were losing themselves in the sound of the beating of her wings and the snorting of her laughter.

"Imdugud?" I cried.

"Ask! Ask! Ask!"

There was a sharp cracking sound. The branch fell suddenly from the tree, as branches will do when the season has been very dry. It landed almost at my feet; I leaped back barely in time. When I looked up again I saw no sign of the Imdugud-bird against the pale blue-white sky.

ZIUSUDRA. YES, I knew the tale. Who has not heard it?

This is how the harper Ur-kununna sang it to me, when I was a child in the palace of Lugalbanda:

A time came long ago when the gods grew weary of mankind. The uproar, the clamor, that rose to heaven out of the Land was annoying to them. It was Enlil who was angriest, exclaiming, "How can I sleep, when they make so much noise?" And he sent a famine to destroy us. For six years there was no rain. Grains of salt rose from the earth and covered the fields, and the crops perished. People ate their own daughters; one house devoured another. But the wise and compassionate Enki took pity on us, and caused the drought to end.

A second time the anger of Enlil grew hot against mankind, and he hurled plagues upon us; and a second time the mercy of Enki brought us relief. Those who had fallen ill recovered, and new children were born to those who had lost theirs. Once more the world teemed with people, and our noise went up to heaven like the bellowing of a wild' bull. Yet again did the rage of Enlil arise. "This clamor is intolerable to me," said Enlil to the gods meeting in council; and before them all he vowed to destroy the world in a vast flood.

But the lord of floods is Enki the wise, who dwells in the great abyss. The making of the deluge therefore was given into Enki's hands; and because Enki loves mankind, he saw to it that the destruction would not be total. There was at that time in the ancient city of Shuruppak a king named Ziusudra, a man of great virtue and piousness. By night Enki came to this king in a dream, and whispered to him, "Leave your house~ Build a ship! Abandon your kingdom and save your life!" He told Ziusudra to make his ship as wide as it was long, and to make a roof over it that was as sturdy as the vault that covers the abyss of the ocean; and he was to take the seed of all living things on board the ship when the great flood came.

Ziusudra said to the god, "I will do your bidding, my lord. But what am I to tell the people and the elders of the city when they see me making ready to depart?"

To which Enki made this sly response: "Go to them and say to them that you have learned that Enlil has come to hate you, and you cannot live in Shuruppak any longer, or set your foot in any territory where Enlil rules. Therefore you are taking refuge in the great deep, to dwell with your lord Enki. But when you are gone, tell them, Enlil will shower down abundance on the people of Shuruppak: the choicest birds, the finest fishes, a rain of wheat. Tell them that, Ziusudra."

So at the coming of dawn the king gathered his household about himself and gave the order for the building of the ship. All of them took part in the toil, even the small children, who carried the baskets of pitch. On the fifth day Ziusudra laid the keel and the ribs. The walls were a hundred twenty cubits in height, and the sides of the deck were a hundred twenty cubits in length, and the floor was the size of a field. He built six decks, and divided the interior into nine sections with sturdy bulkheads between. He drove in the waterplugs where they belonged, he had a supply of punting-poles laid aside. The caulking alone required a whole measure of oil. Every day he slaughtered bullocks and sheep for the workmen, and gave them wine both red and white as though it were river water, so that they might feast as they did on the day of the new year. On the seventh day the ship was finished.

The launching was a difficult one: they had to shift the ballast about until the ship sat deep in the water. Then the king loaded all his gold and all his silver into her and put on board all the people of his household and all his craftsmen, and also animals of every kind, bringing them two by two, both the tame beasts of the pastures and the wild creatures of the field. The hour of the downpour would soon be at hand, he knew.

The sky darkened and the wind began to blow. Ziusudra went on board the ship himself and battened down her hatches. At dawn a black cloud appeared on the horizon; there was thunder, and a terrible wind. The gods rose up against the world, and lightning flashed: the torches of the gods, setting the world ablaze with their flashing. Tempests roared, and the rains came sweeping down. And the Land was shattered like a pot that has been tossed against a wall.

All day long the storm-winds blew out of the south, growing more terrible the longer they raged. The flood-waters gathered their force and fell on the Land like a conquering army. There was no daylight; no one could see anything; the crests of the mountains were submerged. The gods themselves became fearful of the deluge and shrank back, ascending into the loftiest heaven, the heaven of the Sky-father. There they cowered like dogs, crouching against the outer bulwark. Inanna the Queen of Heaven wept and cried out like a woman in childbirth to see her people tumbling into the sea. The gods wept with her. Humbled and frightened by the forces they had let loose, they sat bowed and trembling, and they wept.

Six days and six nights the wind blew and the tempest and the rain swept the land. On the seventh day the storm abated: the floodwaters no longer rose, the turbulent sea became still. Ziusudra opened the hatch of his ship and came out on deck. What he beheld struck him to his knees with terror. All was still. But he could see no land, only water stretching in every direction to the horizon. In awe and fear he covered his head and wept, for he knew that all mankind had returned to clay except those he had saved aboard his ship, and he saw that the world and everything that was in it had perished.

He sailed on and on in that great expanse of sea, seeking a coast; and in time he saw the dark massive slopes of Mount Nisir standing above the water. He went toward it; and there the ship came to rest. She held fast and could not budge. Three days, four days, five days, six, the ship rested against the side of the mountain. On the seventh, Ziusudra set free a dove; but she found no resting place, and returned. He loosed a swallow; but the swallow had nowhere to alight, and she too came back. Then Ziusudra let a raven loose. The bird flew high and far, and saw that the waters had begun to retreat: he flew about in a wide circle, he found something to eat, he cawed, flew off, and did not return to the ship. Then Ziusudra opened all the hatches to the four winds and the sunlight. He went out onto mountain, and poured a libation, and set out seven holy vessels and seven more, and he burned cane and cedarwood and myrtle to the gods who had spared him. The gods smelled the savor of the sacrifice, and they came to enjoy it. Inanna was one of those who came, clad in all the jewels of heaven. And she cried, "Yes, come, O ye gods! Let all of you come. But let Enlil not come, for he is the one who brought this deluge on my people!"

Nevertheless Enlil came. He looked about in fury and demanded to know how it had come to pass that some human souls had escaped destruction. "You should ask that of Enki," said Ninurta, the warrior, the god of wells and canals. And Enki stepped forward, and said boldly to Enlil, "It was a senseless thing to bring on this deluge. In your wrath you destroyed the sinner and the innocent alike. It was too much. It was far too much. If you had sent a wolf to punish the evil ones, or a lion, or even another famine, or a pestilence-yes, that might have been sufficient. But not this terrible flood! Now mankind is gone, Enlil, and all the world is drowned. Only this ship and its people survive. And that has happened only because Ziusudra the wise king saw the plans of the gods in a dream, and took action to save himself and his people. Go to him, Enlil. Speak with him. Forgive him. Show him your love."

Enlil's heart was moved by compassion. He had seen the devastation worked by the flood, and sorrow overwhelmed him. So he went on board the ship of Ziusudra. He took the king by one hand and the king's wife by the other, and drew them to his side, and touched their foreheads to bless them. And Enlil said, "You have been mortal, but you are mortal no longer. Henceforth you shall be like gods, and live far away from mankind, at the mouth of the rivers, in the golden land of Dilmun."

Thus were Ziusudra and his wife rewarded. There in the land of Dilmun they live to this day, eternal, unfiying, those two by whose faith and perseverance the world was reborn in the days when Enlil sent the Flood to scour mankind to destruction.

Such was the tale I heard from the harper Ur-Kununna, when I was a child in the palace of Lugalbanda.

I WANDERED on, in misery and madness; but now my wandering had a purpose, mad and miserable though it might be. I could not tell you how many months it was I marched, nor across what steppes and valleys and plains. Sometimes the sun hung before me like a vast angry eye of white fire, sending up shimmering heat-waves that dizzied me as I plodded toward it; and sometimes the sun was pale and low on the horizon behind me, or to my left. I could not tell you which directions those were. I found rivers and swam them; I doubt that they were either of the Two Rivers of the Land. I crossed swamps and places where the moist sand was like muck beneath me. I crossed dunes and dry wastes. I made my way through thickets of thorny canes that slashed me like vengeful enemies. I fed on the flesh of hares and boars and beavers and gazelles, and where there were none of those I ate the meat of lions and jackals and wolves, and when I found no animals of any kind I ate roots and nuts and berries; and where there was nothing at all to eat, I ate nothing at all, and it did not matter to me. Divine strength was in me. Divine purpose was upon me.

I came in time to a mountain that I knew must be the one called Mashu, which eyery da'y keeps watch over the rising and the setting of the sun. I knew it to be Mashu because its twin summits reached to the vault of heaven and its breasts reached down to the gates of the nether world. There is only one mountain like that on the earth. They say that scorpion-men guard its gate, creatures that are half man and half monster, with arching tails of many joints that hold a fatal sting. So fearsome are these scorpion-men, so it is said, that the radiance of their eyes is terrifying; a splendor comes from them that gleams like fire in the cliffs; their glance alone strikes death. Perhaps it is so. I saw no scorpion-men when I made my ascent of Mashu. Or rather, I encountered some poor sad things that were monstrous enough, though far from terrifying, and it may be that others, hearing of them at second or third report, have construed them into frightful monsters. It is often that way with travelers' tales, I suspect.

But I will not deny that I felt a tremor of fear when I met the first of these creatures as I came up the middle of Mashu to the flattened place that lies between the two peaks. It must have been watching me some time before I spied it, standing on high ground well above me, its arms folded calmly.

By Enlil, it was strange to behold! I suppose it was more a man than anything else, but its skin was dark and hard and horny where I could see it, much like the crust of some scuttling sea-creature, or, yes, like the hard covering of a scorpion. I came at once to a halt when I saw it, remembering what I had heard of the guardians of this mountain and their lethal gaze. I flung my arm quickly across my eyes and looked down. My heart leaped in dismay.

In a language much like that of the desert folk, the scorpioncreature said, "You have nothing to fear from me, stranger. 'We get few enough visitors here: it would be a pity to murder them."

Those words steadied me. I grew calm, and I lowered my arm and stared at the creature unafraid. "Is this the mountain called Mashu?" I asked. "It is."

"Then I am very far from home indeed."

"Where is your home, and why have you left it?"

"I am of Uruk the city," I replied, "and Gilgamesh is my name. And I have left my home because I seek something that cannot be found there."

"Gilgamesh? Is that not the king's name, in Uruk?"

"How do you know that, in these far-off mountains?"

"Ah, my friend, everyone knows Gilgamesh the king, who is two parts a god and one part mortal! Is there a happier man on earth than he?"

"I think there must be," I said. Slowly I walked up the rockstrewn path until I stood on a level with the scorpion-creature. I said in a quiet way, "You should know that I am Gilgamesh the king. Or was, for I have left my kingship a long way behind me." We studied each other, face to face, neither of us, I suppose, quite knowing what to make of the other. My terror of the creature was altogether gone, though the strangeness of its skin awakened shivers in me. Whether the scorpion-being was part demon, or merely some pitiful thing deformed at birth, I could not tell you: but its eyes, staring out from that horror of a face, were sad gentle eyes, and I have never seen any demon whose eyes were sad and gentle.

After a time the creature turned, beckoning me to follow, and in a slow clumsy hobbling way it went around the curve of the hill to a little hut made of fiat rocks and twisted boughs. There was a second scorpion-being there, a woman even more hideous than the other, with thick yellowish skin that rose in jagged crests and ridges like a heavy armor. Had the scorpion-man somehow managed to find a mate who shared his affliction? Or was this woman his sister, who had had the deformity from the same blood? I never learned which. Perhaps she was mate and sister both: the gods grant that those two do not engender a race of their sort upon our world! Hideous though she was, she was kindly, and fell to work at once brewing a sort of tea of tree-needles and ground nuts to offer me. The hour was late, the air was thin, the day was growing cold. Stars could be seen against the dismal gray of the afternoon sky.

The man-creature said, "This wanderer is Gilgamesh king of Uruk, whose body is of the flesh of the gods."

"Ah," she said, as unsurprised as if he had told her, "This is the goatherd Kish-udul," or "This is the fisherman Ur-shuhadak." She poured the tea into a crude black clay beaker and handed it to me. "Even if he is a god, he will want something warm to drink," she said.

"I am not a god," I told her. "I have a god's blood in me, but I am mortal."

"Ah," she said.

The other said, "He has come here seeking something, but he has not told me what it is."

The woman shrugged. "He will not find it here, whatever it may be." And to me she said, "There is nothing here at all. This is a bleak and empty place."

"What I seek lies beyond this place."

Again she shrugged, and sipped her tea in silence. It seemed that she did not care why I was here, or what I sought. Well, why should she care? What was Gilgamesh and his pain to her? Here she lived in this terrible place, in this loathsome body, and if a wandering sorrowful king came along one cold gray afternoon in search of mysteries and fantasies, what was that to her? I studied her closely for a time. Her face was all folds and crevices, monstrous and repellent. But I saw that her eyes were soft and warm within that hideous shell, tender eyes, a woman's eyes. It was as though she had been attacked and devoured whole by something ghastly and strange, and now peered out from within its husk.

But the other had more curiosity. "What is it you search for, Gilgamesh?" he asked.

"In Uruk," I said, "a stranger came to me-Enkidu was his name-and we fell into a friendship that held us with a bond stronger than any bond I know, stronger even than the bond between lover and beloved. He was my friend. He and I endured all manner of hardships together, and we loved each other dearly." "And then he died?"

"You know that too?" I said, startled.

"I know nothing. But I see your grief like a black cloud about you."

"I wept for him day and night. I would not even give him up for burial, until I saw that it had to be done. Perhaps I thought that if I wept enough, my friend would come back to life. But he did not. And since he died my own life has been empty. Since he died I have wandered in the wilderness like a hunter. No: like a madman. I see nothing awaiting me but death, and the knowledge of that death drains my life of all life. Death is my enemy." I looked the scorpionman close in the eyes. "I mean to vanquish death!" I cried.

"We all must die," said the woman in a dull downcast way. "It comes none too soon."

Fiercely I said, "For you, maybe!"

"It comes, whether we want it to or not. I say, better to accept it than to do battle against it. It is a battle no one can win."

I shook my head. "You are wrong. How long ago was the Flood?

Ziusudra still lives!"

"By special favor of the gods," she said. "He is the only one. That will not happen again."

Her words were cold water in my face. "Are you sure? How can you know that?"

The scorpion-man put out his hand to me. It felt rough as wood against my skin. "Gently, gently, friend. You grow too excited; you will give yourself a fever. If the gods chose once upon a time to spare Ziusudra, what is that to you?"

"More than a trifle," I said. "Tell me this: How far is it from here to the land of Dilmun?"

"A very great distance, I think. You must go over the crest of the mountain, and down the difficult far side to the sea, and then-"

"Can you show me the way?"

"I can tell you what I know. But what I know is that no one has ever reached Dilmun from here, and no one ever will. The far side of the mountain is the darkest wilderness. You will die of the heat and thirst. You will tumble into ravines. Or you will be eaten by beasts. Or you will be lost in the darkness, and starve."

"Only point out the way to me, and I will find Dilmun."

"And what then, Gilgamesh?" the scorpion-man asked calmly.

I said, "I mean to seek out Ziusudra. I have questions to ask him, about death, about life. He has lived hundreds of years, or perhaps it is thousands: he must know the secrets of all things. He will tell me how death may be vanquished."

Both the creatures looked at me, and their eyes were pitying, as though I were the monstrosity and not they. But they said nothing. The woman offered me more tea. The man arose and hobbled to the back of his hut and brought me a kind of bread made from some wild seed of the mountain. It tasted like baked sand, but I ate the whole piece.

After a long while he said, "No man of woman born has crossed the wilderness that lies ahead of you, so far as I have ever heard, and I have lived here a long while. But I wish you well, Gilgamesh. In the morning I will take you to the crest and show you the way; and may the gods guide you in safety toward the sea."

He sounded as though he were talking to a child who against all reason must have his way. There was sadness in his voice, and some anger also, and resignation. It was clear that he felt I would only come to grief. Well, that was a reasonable thing to believe; and he had seen what lay beyond the mountain pass and I had not. It did not matter. I had no dread of coming to grief, for I had come to grief already, and it was my purpose now to move onward into the land that lies beyond grief. For that I must reach Dilmun, and speak with ancient Ziusudra, and if I must make that journey in sorrow and pain, in peril, in cold or in heat, sighing or weeping, so be it. I slept that night on the floor of the scorpion-creatures' hut, listening to the rasping dry scratchy sounds of their breathing. When dawn came they fed me, tea again and cakes of sandy meal, and as the sun burst upon us between the peaks of Mashu the scorpion-man said, "Come. I will show you the way." Together we clambered to the crest of the pass. I looked down into a bowl of tumbled jagged rocks the color of baked bricks, stretching downward as far as I could see. To the right and to the left lay wilderness: small twisted snag-armed trees in the higher reaches, a dense black forest farther down. It looked like a place from which all presence of the gods had been withdrawn.

"Are there wild beasts?" I asked.

"Lizards. Goats with long horns. Some lions, not many."