Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Mythology Sleep Story

Full transcript

Upon the ramparts of Uruk, where baked bricks still held the warmth of a sun now sinking into the western marshes, a king walked alone above his sleeping city, and his name was Gilgamesh. He was king of Uruk, two-thirds divine and one-third mortal, and the great walls beneath his feet were his own work, raised course upon course of fired clay, beside a channel of the Euphrates. This was the largest city in the world, fifty thousand souls or more dwelt within its shadow, and their fields and orchards spread outward until the land itself seem to belong to the walls that Gilgamesh had built. His is a story of friendship and grief, and of a king who went to the ends of the earth to find a life without end.

the restlessness that came with the blood of gods, and it had no proper outlet. By day he wrestled the young men of Uruk and threw them down in the dust, and by night he could not sleep. His strength was the strength of the flood and the wild bull, and there was no rival in all the land to stand against it. So the strength turned back upon his own people. He took their sons away, to labour upon the walls and the temple, and he left no daughter to her mother, no bride to her betrothed, for the king claimed them as his own.

He was a good king in the old measure, mighty in battle and wise in council, and yet the The very greatness of him lay heavy on the city like a stone that will not be lifted. Consider what a strange burden that is, to be almost a god and still to die. Two parts of Gilgamesh were immortal, and one part was mortal, and it was the mortal part that would in the end have the final word. He did not yet know this. He paced his walls in the failing light, and felt only that he was made for more than the small compass of a single life, and the feeling had no name and no rest.

What could ever teach a king so mighty, the true limit of his own days? That is the question this long story was made to answer. It is the oldest story that has come down to us in written words, pressed into clay in wedge-shaped marks, and buried for more than two thousand years before it was read again. But the beginning of it all lay not in any journey, it lay in a sound rising from the streets below him, from the courtyards and the wells and the doorways of Uruk. It was the sound of a people worn thin, the young men were weary past bearing, and the mothers grieved, and the fathers who had lost their daughters lifted their voices together toward the heavens.

They did not curse the king outright, for he was their king and their glory. They only cried out that this could not go on, that the shepherd should not so devour his own flock, and they asked the great gods who had made Uruk to look down and see what was happening within its walls. And the gods heard. High above, in the bright dwellings that mortals cannot enter, the powers of heaven listened to the complaint that came up from the city, and they did not turn away. They agreed among themselves that the matter was just.

Gilgamesh was their own creation, marvellous and terrible, and they would not unmake him. Yet a thing so restless and so strong could not simply be left to grind the city down. What Gilgamesh needed was not a punishment, but a counterweight, an equal, someone in all the world who could match him strength for strength, and meet him as no mortal could. Where no such person existed, one would have to be made. So the call went out to Aruru, the goddess of making, she whose hands had shaped mankind at the first. The gods spoke to her plainly. She had formed Gilgamesh, now let her form his match.

Let her make a second wild strength to set against the first, so that the two might strive together, and Uruk might have peace. Let this new one be equal to the storm in Gilgamesh, a mirror held up to the king, and let them contend with each other, until at last they left the city to rest. Aruru heard the charge, and she went apart into the silence to fulfill it. In her mind, she conceived an image of Anu, the sky father, the pattern of what a strong being might be. Then she washed her hands and pinched off a piece of clay, as a potter takes what is needed from the riverbank, and she cast it down into the open country far from any wall or gate. There, in the wilderness where no plough had ever turned the soil, she shaped the wild man Enkidu. He came into being whole and grown, and there was nothing of the city in him. His whole body was thick with hair. The hair of his head grew long as a woman's, and fell in heavy locks, and he wore no cloth, and knew no shame, for he had never seen another man. He was innocent of people utterly. He did not know bread when it was set before him, nor beer, nor the warmth of a hearth, nor the name of any king. He knew the grass, and the herd, and the wide grazing lands under the open sky. Among the gazelles he lived, and he was one of them. He ate the grass of the field alongside them, lowering his head as they lowered theirs. He jostled at the crowded water-holes with the wild beasts, and drank his fill where they drank. His heart was glad with the animals in the water, and in the tall grass, and he ran with them, and did not tire, and the wilderness held no fear for him, because he was part of it. He was the oldest wild man in all the tales that have ever been told, the first of that long line of shaggy strangers who live outside the world of walls, and he was made for one purpose that he himself did not know.

He was the weight the gods had set upon the other side of the scale, over against the king of Uruk, and neither man had yet laid eyes upon the other. For a time Enkidu lived so, and no word of him reached the city, but the wilderness he ranged was not empty of men altogether. A hunter came there, a trapper, who set his snares and dug his pits along the game trails, and lived by what the wild lands gave him. One day this hunter came down to the water-hole to see what he had caught, and he found his work undone.

The pits he had dug were filled in with earth. The snares he had woven and hidden were torn out of the ground and cast aside. The animals he should have taken walked free, and among them, at the water's edge, stood a shape he had never seen before. The trapper looked upon Enkidu, and his face went stiff with fear. Here was a man, and yet not a man as he knew men, a creature huge and hairy, who moved among the gazelles as their own kind, and drank shoulder to shoulder with the beasts of the field. Day after day it was the same. Whenever the hunter set a trap, the wild man freed the creature from it and filled the pit and pulled up the snare, so that the hunter could take nothing, and his living was ruined. He grew afraid to go down to the water at all. His heart was heavy, and his face was clouded, and he went home to his father, with the dread of the stranger sitting cold inside him. His father listened, and being an older man, he counselled a hard road rather than a fight.

There was one in the land mightier than any wild thing, he said, and that was Gilgamesh in Uruk. Let the sun go to the city and stand before the king, and tell him plainly what walked in the wilderness. The king would know what should be done. So the trapper made the journey across the grazing lands, and came at last within the great walls, and he was brought before Gilgamesh, and he told the king everything. He spoke of the stranger strong as a shard of the sky's own stone, of the filled pits and the loose animals, the fear that had driven him from his own hunting grounds. Gilgamesh heard him out, and the king was not troubled the way the hunter was troubled. He knew at once what medicine to send against a wildness like that. He did not send spears. He said to the trapper, Go back, and do not go alone. Take with you Shamhat, a woman of the temple, one of those who serve the goddess, and who know the ways by which a wild heart is gentled. Bring her to the water-hole, and let her wait there. When the wild man comes down with the herd to drink, let her put off her garment, and let him see her, and let him come to her.

The beasts that reared him will not know him after that, and the wilderness will loosen its hold, and he will be drawn toward the world of men." So it was done, as the king said. The trapper returned across the plain, and Shamhat went with him, and they came to the drinking place where the animals gathered. For two days they waited by the water, and on the third day the herd came down as it always came, and Enkidu was among them, grazing and drinking, glad and unknowing. Then Shamhat did as she had been sent to do.

She opened her robe and revealed herself, and the wild man, who had never in his life beheld a woman, came near. She was not afraid of his roughness. She welcomed him, and Enkidu forgot the plain, and the herd, and the wide grass. and for six days and seven nights he stayed with her and did not return to the animals. When at last that long spell was over and Enkidu was sated, he rose and turned back toward the gazelles, meaning to run with them as before. But the gazelles saw him coming and they fled. The wild creatures that had been his kin bounded away across the plain, and though he started after them, his legs would not carry him as they once had. His body was slower, something of the animal strength had gone out of him, drained away in those seven nights, and the herd no longer knew him for one of their own. He could not catch them, and he came back to the water-hole, heavy and confused, and sat down at the feet of the woman.

Yet what he had lost in the legs he had gained in another place, he came back and sat, and he listened, and now he understood the words that Shamhat spoke, for a mind had opened in him, where before there had been only the openness of the grass. She looked on him and told him he had grown wise, that he had become beautiful, that he was like a god now, and no longer a beast, to run wild with the herds forever. And Enkidu was content to hear it, because the way back into the wilderness was closed to him, and some deeper part of him had begun to want the way forward instead.

Then Shumhat began to teach him. She divided her own clothing and put half of it upon him, and covered his nakedness, and took him by the hand and led him away from the water-hole as a mother leads a child. She brought him to the herdsman's camp at the edge of the settled land, where men lived among their flocks. There they set food before him, the bread that men eat, and Enkidu did not know what to do with it, for he had only ever fed upon the milk of wild things and the grass of the field. He stared at the loaf and was at a loss. The herdsman watched, and Shamhat spoke to him gently.

"'Eat the bread, Enkidu,' she said, for it is the staff of life. Drink the beer, for it is the custom of the land." So he ate until he was full, and he drank the strong beer, seven cups of it, and his heart grew light, and his face shone. He washed the matted hair from his body, and rubbed himself with oil, and he put on proper clothing, and in that moment the wild man of the plains became a man of the human world. He did not stay long content among the herdsmen. As they talked around the fire, Shamhat told him of Uruk, and of the king who ruled there.

the man mighty beyond all others who took the sons for his labour and the daughters for himself, and who could not be resisted by any in the city. And something in Enkidu answered to that telling. He had been made, though he did not know the reason, to be the equal of exactly such a man. His face darkened, and then set with purpose. He would go to Uruk, he would find this Gilgamesh, and stand before him, and see for himself whether the king was truly the strongest thing that walked, or whether the wilderness had at last sent out one who could look the mightiest of kings in the eye, and not look away.

And so Enkidu came to the city of Uruk, walking the road up from the herdsman's country, the woman beside him, and the settled fields gave way to gardens, and the gardens gave way to the great wall that Gilgamesh had raised. He had never seen a wall, nor a gate, nor a street laid straight between houses of mud-brick. The people of Uruk came out to look at him as he passed, for he was broad and tall, and his shoulders were like the shoulders of the wild ox, and they whispered to one another that here was a man built to the measure of their king, one who might at last be his equal.

Some said he was even the taller of the two. A crowd gathered and followed at his heels, and the closer he drew to the heart of the city, the thicker the press of watchers became. There was a house that night where a marriage was being made, and by the old custom of the city, the king would come first to the bride, before the husband, as was his right and the city's grief. The people had gathered for this. Enkidu came into the open square before the doorway of the marriage house, and there he planted his feet in the road and would go no further.

When Gilgamesh came down through the torchlit street to enter that door, he found the way blocked. A stranger stood in the threshold, a man he had never seen, filling the doorway with his body, and he would not step aside. The two of them faced one another in the narrow place, and neither would give ground. moved to pass, and Enkidu set his foot against the door and barred it. Then they seized each other. They took hold as two bulls take hold, and they wrestled there in the doorway, and the strength of each poured out against the other. They grappled through the threshold and out into the street, and their feet tore at the ground. The doorposts shook with the force of them. The lintel trembled and cracked, and the wall of the house groaned as though it would come down. The people drew back against the houses and watched, and no one dared come between them, for it was a struggle such as the city had never witnessed, two men of more than human strength locked together and neither yielding.

They wrestled long, they turned and heaved, and threw their weight from side to side, and the dust rose about them in the torchlight, and their breath came like the breath of laboring beasts. At the last, Gilgamesh bent his knee to the ground, and set his footing firm, and with all his weight he took Enkidu and threw him down. The wild man fell, and the contest was ended. Yet in the falling there was no shame, and in the winning there was no scorn. Gilgamesh, who had never in his life met a man he could not break, stood over one who had made him strain to the very limit of his power, and his anger went out of him.

Enkidu, lying in the dust, looked up at the one who had thrown him, and he said that there was no other like him in all the land, that Ninsun the wild cow, wife of the deified king Lugalbanda, had borne a son beyond all other men, and that the kingship was his by right. When Gilgamesh turned and reached down his hand, the two of them embraced there in the street, where a moment before they had striven to destroy each other, and they kissed, and they became friends. What had begun as enmity was made, in a single turning, into love.

From that hour they were bound together, and neither would willingly be parted from the and this friendship, born out of a contest in a doorway, became the beating heart of the whole long story that was to follow. For a while the two were content in one another's company, and Gilgamesh, who had been a torment to his city, found in Enkidu a companion who could answer his strength with equal strength and his restlessness with equal restlessness. But contentment did not hold Gilgamesh for long.

The gods share in him was always reaching outward, wanting more than the city could give. He began to speak of a great deed. He said that his name must be set upon something that would outlast him, him, that all men die, and their days are numbered, and whatever they do is only wind, and therefore he would go where a name might be won and made to endure. He would go to the Cedar Forest, far off in the mountains of the living, and cut down its sacred trees, and slay the monster that kept them, so that his fame would stand when his body was dust. Enkidu heard this with a heavy heart, for he had once roamed the wild country near that forest, and he knew what waited there. He told Gilgamesh of the guardian. His name was Humbaba, set over the cedars by the god Enlil to keep them safe, and he was made to be a terror to mortals. His roar was the flood that drowns the land, his mouth was fire, and his breath was death itself. He could hear the wild cattle stir sixty leagues off in his forest, and nothing came near the trees that he did not know of.

To go against such a creature, Enkidu said, was to walk knowingly toward death. His own Lims went slack at the memory of that place, and he begged his friend to think again. The elders of Uruk said the same. When Gilgamesh laid his purpose before the old men of the city, the counsellors who sat in the assembly, they were troubled and counselled him against it. They told him he was young, that his heart carried him too far, that he did not know what he proposed to fight. They reminded him that no one prevails against Humbaba, that the way was long and the guardian without mercy. But Gilgamesh would not be turned.

He laughed at their fear and answered their caution with resolve, and the more they warned him the firmer he set his will. In this refusal to be turned aside, in this hunger to bind his name to some deathless deed, the tragic pattern of his life began to show itself, that vain and endless drive for glory and fame and immortality, which the scholar Kramer would one day name as the very meaning of his story. He did not know where it would lead. He only knew that he could not sit still in Euryk while his days ran out unmarked, and so the elders gave way at last and blessed the journey they could not prevent, and Enkidu, seeing that his friend would go with him or without him, chose to go at his side. They armed themselves for the road. The smiths of Uruk cast great axes for their hands and forged swords and set them with fittings, weapons heavy enough for arms such as theirs, and the elders gave Enkidu charge to guard the king and bring him home again. Then the two of them went out from the city gate and turned their faces toward the mountains, and the long march began.

The way to the Cedar Forest was a journey of many weeks for ordinary men, yet these two crossed it swiftly, striding at such a pace that in three days they covered what would take others a month and a half. They crossed seven mountains one after another, climbing and descending, and with each range the country grew wilder, and the great forest drew nearer. Each evening, when they halted, Gilgamesh performed a right upon the mountain. He dug a well at the foot of the slope and drew fresh water, and he climbed to the summit and poured out fine meal upon the ground as an offering, and he called upon the mountain to bring him a dream. Then he lay down with his chin upon his knees, and sleep came over him.

But the sleep did not rest him. In the deep of the night he would start awake, trembling, and lay hold of Enkidu and ask him whether he had touched him, whether some spirit had passed by, for a dream had shaken him to the bone. On one mountain he dreamed that the two of them stood in a deep gorge, and above them a great mountain toppled and came crashing down, and he was small beneath it. On another night he dreamed that a mountain threw him to the ground and pinned his feet, And then a brightness grew, until it filled the whole sky, and out of the brightness came a man, the fairest in the land, who drew him from under the weight, and gave him water to drink, and set him again upon his feet.

On yet another he saw the heavens roar, and the earth answer with thunder, and daylight fail, and darkness rise and lightning break out and fire come down, and where the fire had fallen it turned to ash. Each time he woke shaking, and each time he told the dream to his friend, and each time Enkidu took the fearful vision and turned it toward hope. The falling mountain, he said, was Humbaba. They would overthrow him and cast his body down upon the plain like a mountain fallen. The brightness that lifted him and the man who gave him water were signs that Shamash, the sun, would stand beside them in their need and would not let them perish.

The thunder and the fire were the battle they would win. So the friend read every terror as a promise of victory, and steadied the king's heart in the small hours when courage runs thinnest, and through it all they called upon Shamash, who had loved Gilgamesh, and set this journey in his heart, and they poured out cool water toward the rising place of the sun, and asked the god to guard them. With every troubled night behind them, the forest stood a little closer, until at last they came to its edge and stood before the green wall of the cedars.

They halted at the border of the forest and marvelled. The trees rose up in ranks past all counting, and their tops were lost in a green height, and a single track ran in, where Humbaba was accustomed to walk. The air was sweet with the resin of the cedar, and a great stillness lay over everything, the stillness of a guarded and sacred place. They took up their axes and struck at the trees, and the sound of the felling went out through the forest. And Humbaba heard it, as he heard all things in his domain, and he came. He came in his fury, and the sight and the sound of him were more terrible than any warning had made them, and Gilgamesh, for all his strength, was struck through with fear, and could not move.

The guardian's face was a coil of terror, his voice a roar that shook the trees, and The king who had laughed at the elders now stood frozen at the edge of the thing he had sought. But in his terror he lifted his voice to Shamash and cried out to the god who had sent him, and Shamash heard him from the sky. The sun god called up the great winds against Humbaba, and they came at his bidding, eight of them together. The north wind and the south wind, the whirlwind and the storm wind, the winds cold and hot, they rose from every quarter of the heavens and fell upon the guardian all at once.

They beat against his face and drove into his eyes and held him fast, so that he could not go forward and could not go back and could not see to strike. The great keeper of the cedars was pinned and blinded by the breath of the sky. Then Humbaba, held helpless, begged for his life. He called out to Gilgamesh and pleaded, and offered him service, offered to be his man, and to fell the trees of the forest for him, and build him whatever he desired, if only the king would spare him, and Gilgamesh, hearing the plea, felt pity move in him, and was near to granting it. But Enkidu stood at his side and would not have it. He warned his friend that a guardian spared would bring their ruin, that Humbaba Loosed would see them never leave the forest alive, that the deed once begun must be finished. He urged the king to strike before the winds released their hold, and so, hardening himself, Gilgamesh lifted his weapon, and between them they struck off the head of Humbaba, and the guardian of the cedars was dead. A hush fell after the killing. They had done what they came to do, and yet something in the doing sat heavily upon them, for the creature they had slain was a sacred thing, appointed by a god to his place, and its blood was on their hands. They cut down the tallest of the cedars, the great tree that Humbaba had kept above all the rest, and they hewed the trunks, and bound the timber, and they brought it out of the mountains to the river.

There they made the cedar into a raft, and floated it down the water toward Uruk, the two of them riding home upon the spoil of their victory. They were triumphant, and their names were made, and still the memory of the guardian's plea and the felling of the holy tree travelled home with them like a shadow riding on the raft. When they came again to Uruk, Gilgamesh laid aside the grime of the road and the forest. He washed his long hair and cleaned his weapons and threw off his soiled garments and put on fresh, and he bound the royal band about his brow, and stood clothed in his beauty.

A king returned in glory to his city, and it was in this hour, when he shone most brightly, that the eyes of a goddess fell upon him. Ishtar looked down upon Gilgamesh, Ishtar the queen of heaven, the great goddess of Uruk whose house was the Ayanna within the walls, the lady of love and of war, whose sign was the lion and the eight-pointed star, and whose light rode the sky as the planet that men watch at evening and at dawn. She beheld his beauty and desired him, and she came to him and made her offer plain.

She bade him be her husband, and give himself to her, and she promised him all that a goddess could pour out upon a mortal man. She would give him a chariot of lapis and gold, with wheels of gold and horns of amber, and storm demons to draw it like mighty mules. She promised that kings and princes and the lords of every land would bow before him and heap their tribute upon him, that his goats would bear triplets and his ewes twins, that his fields would come to harvest in abundance and his herds grow fat beyond all others.

Only let him be hers, and all of it would be his. But Gilgamesh refused her, and he refused her outright, without softness and without fear. He asked her what he would gain by taking her, for he knew the histories of those the goddess had loved before. He named them to her face, the lovers she had taken, and then destroyed, one after another, Each raised up for a season, and then cast down into ruin, or grief, or the shape of a beast. He recalled Dumuzid, her young husband, for whom she had appointed year upon year of weeping.

He told over the others she had loved and broken, and he asked her why his fate should be any different, why he should not be used and discarded, as all of them had been. He would not be another name upon that list. And so he turned the Queen of Heaven away from his door. There was no mortal insult that could wound a goddess as this refusal wounded her. Ishtar had come down in the fullness of her desire and her power, and she had been named a destroyer of those she loved, and sent away empty before her own city. She turned from him in a fury that had nowhere yet to fall, and the peace that Gilgamesh had won by the killing of Humbaba was already, in that moment, beginning to break apart. Yet it is worth telling over the very words he spoke, for the wound she carried up to the heavens was made of names, and each name was a life she had lifted, and then let fall. Gilgamesh did not shout them. He set them before her one by one, the way a man lays out old bones upon a cloth, and he asked her to look upon what her love had made of them. There was the shepherd, he said, who had once kept his flocks upon the plain, and had given her all that a herdsman has to give. Day upon day he heaped the coals for her, and slaughtered the young of his flock in her honour, and he loved her as a man loves the source of his life, and when her heart had turned, she struck him, and she changed him into a wolf.

So the very dogs that had guarded his sheep beside him rose against him, his own herd boys drove him off with stones, and the hounds he had raised from pups tore at his flanks, and the shepherd who had fed her ran howling through the grass in the shape of the thing that hunts the fold. That, said Gilgamesh, was the reward of the man who loved her. There was the gardener, he went on, the keeper of her father's orchard, who brought her baskets heaped with dates, and made her table bright with fruit, so that her eyes shone whenever she came to him. He too she desired, and she came to him and set her hand upon him and bade him be hers. But when he would not answer her as she wished, or when at last her fancy cooled, she laid her hand upon him in another way, and she bent him and changed him into a mole, a small blind creature of the dark earth. And the one who had tended the sunlit trees and known the taste of every ripe thing in the garden was made to burrow forever in the ground, pushing against the very soil he had once turned with love, never again to lift his face to the light.

Such, said Gilgamesh, was the wage of the man who served her. And there was Dumuzid, he said last, the husband of her youth, the one she has remembered to have loved above the others. For him, of all men, she had appointed weeping year upon year, an ache without end, a lament that returns with its own season, as surely as the river rises and falls. Every year the women of the land take up the cry for him, and the morning comes around again like a wound that will not close, and this is the marriage gift the goddess gave to the man she took first to her breast. Gilgamesh named him, and let the naming hang in the air, and asked why his own portion should be any sweeter. If she loved him, he said, she would love him only as she had loved these, and he would not lie down upon that road. The words went into her like cold water into a fire. She had come down clothed in desire and majesty, the Queen of Heaven, patron of the Ianna, whose star crosses the sky at dawn and at dusk. And she had been made to stand and hear the ruin of her lovers counted against her before the walls of her own city. It was not a wound that a goddess could answer where she stood. She wept, and her weeping was terrible in its silence, and she rose from Uruk and went up through the sky to the dwelling of the High Gods, carrying the insult before her, like a lamp that would not go out.

She came to the house of Anu, her father, the sky-god who sits above the other gods, and to Antom her mother beside him, and she poured out her grief and her fury before them. Gilgamesh had heaped abuse upon her, she said. He had told over her foul deeds and her wickedness, he had shamed her in the mouth of his city, and she would not bear it. And then she made her demand. She asked her father for the bull of heaven, that she might send it down against Gilgamesh in his own streets and break his pride in the dust.

If Anu refused her, she said, she would do a thing to make the heavens tremble. She would smash the doorposts of the underworld and shatter its gates. She would break open the barrier between the living and the dead, and she would let the dead come up to devour the living, until the dead outnumbered those who still drew breath. It was no small threat, and the sky god knew it. Anu answered her with a warning. The bull of heaven was a fearful thing, and if he loosed it upon the land, there would follow seven years of empty husks and barren fields, for the beast in its coming would strip the grain and dry the earth.

He asked her whether she had gathered enough into the storehouses of Uruk, whether there was grain heaped high enough to feed the people and fodder enough to keep the cattle through the hungry years that the bull would bring. And Ishtar answered that she had gathered enough, that the granaries were full and the buyers were stocked, that the people and the beasts of Uruk would eat through the famine. So Anu yielded to his daughter, and he gave into her hand the nose-rope of the bull of heaven, and she led it down out of the sky toward the city that had shamed her.

The bull came down upon Uruk, and the land shook under its hooves. It went to the river and drank, and where it drank, the water sank away. It snorted, and at the blast of its breath the ground split open, and a great pit yawned in the earth, and a hundred men of Uruk fell into it, and were lost. It snorted a second time, and a second pit opened, and two hundred more went down, and then three hundred, so that the young men of the city were swallowed by the tearing of the ground beneath their feet.

The bull was a thing of famine and of ruin, and it walked through the streets of Uruk, dealing death with every breath, and the people fled before it and could not stand. But Enkidu and Gilgamesh went out against it, the two who had felled Humbaba in the cedars, and they did not run. Enkidu closed with the beast and seized it. He came at it from behind and took it by the thick of its tail, and he wrestled it and held it fast, and the bull turned and thrashed and flung its foam and its filth, and still he held on.

Then he called to Gilgamesh, and he told him where to strike, between the horns and the nape, at the place where the neck meets the skull, where a sword may find the life. And Gilgamesh came in as a butcher comes, sure and without waste, and he drove his blade into the place that Enkidu had shown him, and the bull of heaven shuddered and fell dead in the streets of Uruk. They cut out its heart, and they offered the heart before Shamash the sun, who had helped them in the forest, bowing down together in the smoke of the offering.

Then Ishtar came up onto the great wall of Uruk, onto the rampart that Gilgamesh was said to have built, and she stood upon it and cried out her grief and her curse over the body of the bull. She lamented the beast her father had given her, and she called down woe upon the man who had killed it, and shamed her twice over. And when Enkidu heard her cursing from the wall, his anger rose in him. He reached down, and tore the right thigh from the bull where it lay, the great haunch of it, and he flung it up at the goddess upon the rampart. He hurled it into her very face, and he shouted up that if he could reach her as he had reached the bull, he would serve her the same, he would drape her arms in its guts. It was a defiance flung at heaven itself, and there was no taking it back.

Ishtar did not answer with thunder. She gathered to her the women of her temple, the courtesans, and the harlots, and the serving women of the Ayanna, and she set them in mourning around the thigh of the Bull of Heaven, and they raised the lament together over the ruin of the beast. And while the women of the goddess wept for the bull, Gilgamesh called the smiths and the craftsman of Uruk, and they marvelled at the horns of the slain thing, each horn a great weight of lapis, thick as a wall and deep as the sea, and he hung them up in his chamber as a trophy and a glory.

He washed his hands in the river, and he and Enkidu rode together through the streets in triumph, and the people of Uruk sang of them, asking who was the most splendid among men and answering that Gilgamesh was most splendid and Enkidu beside him. So the day of the bull ended in feasting, but heaven had been struck in the face, and heaven does not forget. That night, when the feasting was done and the house was quiet, Enkidu lay down and slept, and a dream came to him, and the dream was heavy.

He saw the great gods gathered in council, he saw Anu the sky father, and Aya the wise one who knows the deep, and Shamash of the sun, seated together and speaking low over a matter of judgment. And the matter was this, that two mortals had killed Humbaba, the guardian of the cedars, and had cut down the sacred cedar, and had slain the bull of heaven. For such deeds, said the council, a price must be paid, one of the two must die. Anu who said that the man who stripped the mountains of the cedar should be the one to fall. But Enlil, or the will of the council, turned it another way. Not Gilgamesh, they said, for he was two parts God and only one part man, and the divine in him would not be so easily spent. It was Enkidu who must die. Enkidu, who had come out of the wild grass to be a companion, Enkidu the equal, born in the wrestling, and made a brother in the dust of Uruk. Upon him the sentence fell, and Shamash of the sun rose in the council and spoke against it. Why should Enkidu die? he asked, who had gone at his brother's side, and done only what a friend does. But the others would not be moved, and the word was fixed.

Enkidu woke from the dream with the cold of it upon him, and he told it to Gilgamesh, and the two of them wept, for they understood that the killing in the cedars and the killing in the streets had followed them home after all. Then the bitterness rose in Enkidu, and he began to curse the things that had brought him into the world of men. He turned his face to the great door he had made, the door of cedar he had shaped with his own hands from the wood of the holy forest and set up in a temple as a gift, and he cursed it, that it had no ears to hear him and no mind to know his gift, and that all his labor upon it had come to nothing. Then he cursed the trapper who had first spied him at the watering place among the wild herds, and prayed that the man's snares be emptied and his living taken from him.

And then he cursed Shamhat, the woman who had drawn him out of the wilderness, who had taught him bread and beer, and the ways of the city, and led him at last to Gilgamesh. He wished upon her every hardship, the cold threshold and the empty street, and the drunkards blow, that she who had made him a man should have no rest for the making. But Shamash heard him from the sky, and the sun called down to him and reproved him gently. Why do you curse Shamhat, said the sun, who fed you with the food that is fit for gods, and gave you drink that is fit for kings, who clothed your nakedness in fine cloth, and gave you Gilgamesh for your friend and brother.

Look, said Shamash, at what her hand has brought you. Because of her, you have known a companion who loves you as his own life, who has laid you upon a bed of honor and set you at his left hand, and when you are gone, he will let the people of Uruk weep for you, and will himself put on the matted hair of grief, and wander the wild in your name." And Enkidu heard the sun, and the heat of his anger went out of him. He called back his curse upon Shamhat, and he turned it around, and he blessed her instead, that kings and princes should love her, that the man who leaves her should leave with longing, that she should be honoured and given fine things for the sake of the wild man she had gentled.

So the last strength of his spirit he spent not on cursing but on setting a wrong to rights. Then the sickness came upon Enkidu, and it was not a wound of battle, but a wasting sent down from heaven, and it laid him upon his bed. For twelve days he lay there, and each day the strength that had wrestled the bull and gripped Humbaba drained a little further out of his great limbs. He grew thin and he grew weak, and he called Gilgamesh to him and spoke his fear aloud, that he was not to die gloriously in battle as a hero hopes to die, but slowly and in his bed undone by no sword, and that the man who falls in the fighting is counted more fortunate than he, and as he lay another dream came, and this one was of the place he was going. He dreamed that a being seized him and led him down, and turned him into the likeness of a bird, with feathers upon his arms for a covering, and brought him along the road of no return to the house of dust. There the dead dwell in darkness that has no dawn. They sit clothed like birds in garments of feathers, and dust lies thick upon the door and the bolt, and clay is their bread, and clay is their meat. He saw there the kings of the earth, who had once worn crowns, now sitting humble and stripped, waiting upon the Lords of the Underworld, he saw the High Priests and the Acolytes, the Great and the Anointed, all gathered into the one silent house where rank is forgotten and light does not come. He carried the vision back with him into his waking, and he told it to Gilgamesh, and there was no comfort in it for either of them. So Enkidu declined, day after day, while Gilgamesh sat beside him and could do nothing. The king who had crossed seven mountains and stood before the guardian of the cedars could not turn back this quiet thing that was taking his brother from him. And at the last, upon the bed, with Gilgamesh bending close to hear him, Enkidu breathed out and was still. The equal who had been born in the wrestling match, the friend who had come from the wilderness to be his other self, was gone out of the world, and the king was left alone in a way he had never in his life been alone before. Gilgamesh laid his hand upon the heart of his friend and felt no beating there, and he would not believe it. He covered the face of Enkidu with a veil, as a man veils a bride, and he began to circle the bed, back and forth, back and forth, turning about the still body, like a lioness, who comes to her den and finds her cubs taken.

He called upon Enkidu to rise, and could not wake him. He tore the fine garments from his own body, and cast them down as things unclean. He plucked at his hair, and flung it from him. He commanded all Uruk to weep, the smiths, and the herdsmen, the huntsmen of the steppe, The beasts of the wild that Enkidu had once run among, the paths of the Cedar Forest, the elders of the city, that all should mourn the one who was gone. Yet he would not give the body to the earth. Day upon day he kept it, and would not let it be buried, holding to the hope, against all knowing, that his grief might yet call the breath back.

He kept it until the sign came that no love can argue with, until a worm dropped from the nostril of the one he loved, and then at last he understood that Enkidu was truly and wholly dead, and that no crying of his would undo it. And in that hour a new thing entered into Gilgamesh, colder than the grief, and it did not leave him again, for looking upon the ruin of his friend, he saw his own end written plainly there. If Enkidu, who had been his equal in strength, could be laid so low, and turned into a thing that the worm feeds upon, then he too would come to it, king though he was, with the blood of gods in him.

The certainty of his own dying rose up before him and took hold of him, and it was a fear, unlike any he had met in the forest or the field. He could not sit still under it. He put on the skins of a wild beast, and he let his hair grow long and matted, and he He turned his back upon the walls he had built, and the city that sang his name, and he went out into the wilderness alone, driven before the fear of death, like a leaf before the wind. The wilderness took him in the way it takes all wild things, without welcome and without pity.

Gilgamesh walked where there were no roads, over the high country and the empty plains, and he did not turn his face back toward Uruk. One thought went before him, and would not let him rest. Somewhere beyond the edges of the known world lived a man named Utnapishtim, the one whom the gods had spared, when the great flood came to drown mankind, the one mortal upon whom eternal life had been laid like a gift. If a man born to die had somehow slipped free of dying, then the secret of it was a real thing, kept in a real place, and Gilgamesh meant to find that place, though it cost him every strength he had. So he became a hunter of the passes. In the High Defiles where the mountains fold together, the lions came down to drink and to prowl, and Gilgamesh met them there. He fought them alone, without companions and without the walls of any city at his back.

He looked up once at the moon, standing bright above the ridge-lines, and he prayed to sin, the moon-god, to keep him through the dark hours, for he was afraid now in a way he had never been before, and the fear did not shame him as once it might have. Then he took up his axe and drew the weapon from his belt, and he fell upon the lions like an arrow dropping out of the height of the sky. He killed them, and he did not leave their hides upon the stones. He clothed himself in the skins of the beasts he had slain, and he ate their flesh, and he went on. The king who had worn fine linen in the courts of Uruk, Now walked the world, dressed as the thing he hunted, gaunt and burned by the sun, his hair matted with dust, driven forward by the single wish to learn how a mortal had escaped the house of dust.

The road he followed led at last toward a mountain unlike the others, a mountain that the old knowledge named Mashu. It was the mountain that guards the rising of the sun and the setting of it, the great gate, through which the sun passes out at dawn and home again at dusk. Its two peaks stood up so high that they brushed against the dome of heaven, and its roots went down so deep that they reached into the underworld below. Between the peaks lay the passage of the sun, and this passage was watched.

Gilgamesh came to the foot of the mountain and lifted his eyes, and he saw the guardians standing at the gate. They were the scorpion man and his wife, and no mortal had ever looked upon their like and kept his courage whole. Their bodies flashed with a radiance so terrible that the brightness of them struck fear into any who drew near, and the gleam of them could reach across the mountains. To meet their gaze was to feel that death itself stood watching at the door of the world. Gilgamesh saw them, and the light of their bodies fell upon his face, and for a moment Even he, with the God's blood strong in him, covered his eyes and could not go forward.

Yet the wish in him was stronger than the fear, and after a while he lowered his hand and steadied himself and walked toward the gate. The scorpion man saw him coming and marvelled, called, and he called to his wife. He said that the one who approached them had the flesh of the gods upon his body. The wife looked long, and answered that it was so only in part, that two parts of him were divine, but the third part was the flesh of mortal men. Then the scorpion man raised his voice and called out to Gilgamesh, and he asked him who he was that had come so far over roads where the way is hard, that had crossed rivers whose crossing is difficult, and had made his path to the mountain that no mortal walks.

Why, the guardian asked, had he undertaken this journey, and what was the road that had warn him down to this. Gilgamesh answered him truly. He said that he had come on account of Utnapishtim, his forefather, who was gathered into the company of the gods and given life without end. He told the guardians of the death that would not let him go, of Enkidu, his friend and equal, the companion he had loved, who had been taken from him and turned to Clay. He said that the fear of that same ending walked with him now by day, and lay down with him at night, and that he could not rest until he had found the one man who knew the secret of escaping it, and had asked him how a mortal comes to live forever. He spoke of his grief until the words gave out, and the scorpion man and his wife listened, and were moved by what they heard, and by the divine blood that ran in him.

The scorpion man told him then what lay beyond the gate. The passage through the mountain was the very road the sun takes each night. It ran twelve leagues through the heart of Mashu, in blackness without a single thread of light. when no traveller born of woman had ever gone into it and come out the other side. "'Thick was the darkness there,' he said, and there was no brightness at all, neither at the start of the way nor at its finish. The sun rushed through that tunnel at his rising and his setting, and where the sun went immortal was not meant to follow. Yet But the guardian did not bar the gate, perhaps because of the god in him, perhaps because of the grief in him, the scorpion man drew aside and let Gilgamesh come to the mouth of the passage, and he bid him go safely and keep his heart firm.

And Gilgamesh stepped into the road the sun takes, and the gate of the mountain closed the daylight away behind him. Then the darkness came down upon him whole. He went forward, and could see nothing before his face, and when he looked back, he could see nothing behind. He set himself to run, for the way was long, and he did not wish to spend more of his life in that place than he must. One league he ran, and the blackness was thick around him. Two leagues, and the cold of the mountain pressed against his skin, and the silence was so deep that he could hear only his own breath and the fall of his own feet upon the stone. At the third league, and the fourth, there was no light. At the fifth and the sixth, the darkness held, and there was no dawn in it and no dusk, only the endless middle of the night, through which the sun hurries and does not linger.

He ran on, and the weight of the mountain lay above him and below him, and he was a small living thing moving through the place where no living thing belongs. At the seventh league and the eighth he ran, and still the dark gave nothing back. At the ninth he felt the north wind touch his face, and he took heart from it, though he could see no more than before. At the tenth league the end of the way was drawing near. At the eleventh league he thought that the blackness had grown a little thinner, as the The last hour of night grows thin before the coming of morning, and he was not certain whether his eyes told him true, or whether hope was making light where there was none.

Then at the twelfth league the darkness broke, and Gilgamesh came out of the mountain into the open air, and the light fell upon him, and he stood blinking in the brightness like a man born again into the day. Before him lay a garden, and it was a garden such as no mortal ground has ever grown. It stood beside the sea, and the trees of it bore fruit that was not fruit. Where other trees carry figs and dates, these carried stones of great price. The vine along the boughs hung heavy with clusters of lapis, blue as the evening sky, and the thorns and thistles bore rubies red as coals. There were fruits of carnelian upon the branches and leaves of bright gems, and the whole grove glittered under the sun and sighed in the wind from the water. Gilgamesh walked through the garden of jewels, and did not stop to gather any of it, for the trial of the mountain was behind him now, and ahead of him lay the shore, and beyond the shore stretched a wide and bitter water, the waters of death, and somewhere past that water was the one he had come so far to find.

At the edge of the sea, where the garden gave way to the shore, there stood a tavern, and it was kept by a woman named Siduri. She was of the divine kind, an alewife who dwelt at the world's end and pressed the grape and brewed the beer, and about her stood the vats and the golden vessels of her trade. From her place she saw Gilgamesh coming along the shore, and she did not see a king. She saw a wild and haggard man, wrapped in the hides of beasts, his cheeks hollow, his face burned dark by the sun and worn thin by the long roads, and grief sitting upon his brow like a stranger's mark.

She was afraid of him. She thought he might be a hunter of trouble, a man come to do violence, and she went inside and drew the door shut and climbed to the roof and barred herself away from him. Gilgamesh heard the bolt slide home, and he lifted his head and called up to her. He asked her why she had shut her door at the sight of him, and he warned her that if she would not open it, he would break the bolt and shatter the door. Then he told her who he was, and what had brought him. He was Gilgamesh, he said, who had killed the guardian of the cedar forest, who had struck down the bull of heaven. And Siduri, still upon her Her roof looked down, and asked him why, if all this was so.

His cheeks were so wasted, and his face so cast down, why there was such sorrow in his heart and such weariness in his body, and why he came dressed like a beast wandering the far country. So Gilgamesh told her of Enkidu, he told her of the friend who had been his equal, the companion who had faced every danger at his side, and how death had come for him and laid him low, and how he had watched over the body until he could no longer deny what he saw. He told her that the fear of his own dying had driven him out of his city and across the wilderness, and that he was seeking the road to Utnapishtim, and would she tell him the way.

Siduri heard him out, and when she answered, her voice had grown gentle. She asked him where his running would carry him in the end. The life he was chasing, she told him, he would not find. When the gods made mankind, she said, they kept eternal life in their own hands, and dealt out death to men as the portion that belongs to them. There was no crossing of that boundary, however far a man walked, however many mountains he passed through. This was old wisdom, and she gave it to him plainly, not to wound him, but because it was true.

she did not send him away empty. She saw that he would not be turned, and so she told him of the one who might still help him. Down by the water, she said, there was a ferryman named Urshanabi, the boatman of Utnapishtim, and with him were the things of stone that made the crossing possible. If Urshanabi would take him, then Gilgamesh might pass over the waters of death, and if he would not, then there was no other way, and Gilgamesh must turn back." She pointed him toward the ferryman, and Gilgamesh went down to find him. He found Urshanabi at the shore, and after trouble between them and hard words, the ferryman agreed to carry him across, but the crossing was no ordinary crossing, for the water between the near shore and the far was the water of death, and a single drop of it upon a living hand meant ruin.

Urshanabi sent Gilgamesh into the forest to cut long poles for the punting, many of them, each to be used once and then let go, so that the boat might be pushed forward without any man's hand ever coming near the deadly flood. Gilgamesh took up his axe and cut the poles and brought them down, and they set out upon the still and bitter water. Gilgamesh drove the boat forward with one pole and then cast it away and took up the next, touching the water only through the length of the wood, so that the death in it never once wetted his skin, pole after pole he spent, working the boat across that wide silence, until the poles were gone, and then he stripped off the skins he wore, and raised them upon the mast for a sail, and the last of the way they went before the wind.

Upon the far shore a figure stood watching the strange boat come in. It was Utnapishtim, The Preserver of Life, the man who had outlived the flood and all the generations after it, the only mortal who had never gone down into death. He looked upon the boat and saw a worn and ragged man aboard it, dressed in beast-hides, hollowed out by hardship, and he wondered at the sight of him. When Gilgamesh had come to land, Utnapishtim asked him why his face was so wasted and his heart so heavy, why he had let his strength be spent and his youth be worn away upon so long and cruel a road.

Why, he asked, had a man driven himself to the far edge of the world and crossed the waters that no traveller crosses, chasing after a thing that cannot be laid hold of by chasing. And Gilgamesh stood at last before the one mortal who had never died, the man whose name had drawn him through the lion passes and the mountain of night and the garden of stones and the water of death. He told him again of Enkidu, and of the fear that would not leave him, and then he asked the question he had carried all this way.

He begged Utnapishtim to tell him the secret, to show him how a man might stand outside the reach of death, and how he too might come to live forever. Utnapishtim heard the question and did not answer it at once. He looked long at the worn man before him, and then he told him that there was no secret of the kind that Gilgamesh hoped for, no charm, and no word that a man might learn and so escape his end. He said that nothing stays fixed forever, that the sleeping and the dead are alike as others, that the great river rises and falls, and no flood holds its height, and that the day of a man is set down for him before he knows it.

Then, because Gilgamesh pressed him still, wanting to know how one mortal alone had come to live outside that law, Utnapishtim began to tell him the one story that answered it, the story of the flood. In the far days, he said, in a city called Sharupak upon the bank of the Euphrates, the gods grew troubled by the noise of mankind, and in their counsel they resolved to wipe the whole race from the earth with a great water. They swore themselves to secrecy, each of them bound not to warn the people below.

But Iyer, who is called Enki, the cunning god of the deep waters, would not let all of humankind be lost. He did not break his oath by speaking to a man outright. Instead, he came to the reed wall of Utnapishtim's house and spoke to the wall, so that the words Might fall by chance upon the ear of the man Who slept within. Tear down your house, he said to the reeds, And build a boat, leave your goods, and seek life, Abandon your possessions, and save what breathes. Take up into the vessel the seed of every living thing, And Utnapishtim rose, and did as the whispered voice had bid.

himself drew the plan of the boat upon the ground, and by that drawing Utnapishtim laid out its shape. It was to be square, he said, its length and its breadth and its height all equal, a great sealed cube of timber with its floor spread wide as a full field. He set the whole city to the labour, the little ones carried pitch, and the strong ones brought the rest, and in a handful of days the frame stood up. He fitted it with decks, dividing it within into many levels, and he corked every seam with pitch and bitumen, so that no water might find a way inside.

The timber was laid so thick and so tight that not even the rays of shamash, the sun, could pass between the boards into the dark of the hull. When it was done, he loaded into it his gold and his kin and the beasts of the field and the creatures of the open country and the craftsmen with their skills, and at the appointed tower, he went aboard and sealed the door behind him with pitch. Then the storm came. Utnapishtim told it quietly, without any lifting of his voice, as an old man tells a thing that is long over. At the first light of dawn a black cloud rose out of the horizon, and the god of the storm thundered within it, and the powers of the deep went before it, tearing up the mooring poles of the world. The dikes broke. The land was shattered like a clay pot. The rising water climbed the mountains and reached toward heaven itself. And even the gods, he said, drew back in dismay before what they had loosed. They fled up to the highest heaven and cowered there like dogs against a wall. And the great goddess who who had borne mankind, cried out and grieved that she had spoken for their ruin in the council. For six days and seven nights the wind and the flood went over the earth and flattened all that had stood upon it. And on the seventh day the storm grew still, The sea fell quiet.

Utnapishtim opened a hatch, and the light came in upon his face, and when he looked out over the water, all mankind had gone back to clay, and the surface of the world lay flat and silent as a roof. The boat came to rest at last upon the head of a mountain, and the mountain held it, and would not let it slip back into the water. Utnapishtim waited, and when a stretch of days had passed, he took a dove and set it free. The dove flew out and circled, and found no place to settle, and it came back to him, for the waters still covered the ground. He He waited and sent out a swallow, and the swallow too flew and returned, finding no rest.

Then he sent out a raven, and the raven flew, and saw that the waters had gone down, and it fed and circled and cored, and did not come back to the boat. By this he knew that the earth had risen again from the flood. So he opened the vessel to the four winds, and brought out all that he had kept alive, and upon the mountaintop he set out an offering, and the fragrance of it rose, and the gods drew near to it, hungry, for they had gone long without the gifts of men. There, upon that peak, the matter of his deathlessness was settled.

The chief of the gods was Roth at first, that any of mankind had lived through the flood, until Ea reasoned with him and turned his anger. And then the god took Utnapishtim and his wife by the hand, and made them kneel between them, and touched their brows, and spoke the decree over them. Till this hour, he said, Utnapishtim was a man, from this hour Utnapishtim and his wife shall be as we are, and shall dwell far off, at the mouth of the rivers, and shall not die. So they were carried away to that far place at the edge of the world, and there they had lived through all the ages since.

This," Utnapishtim said, turning back to Gilgamesh, was how one man came to live forever. It was a thing done once, in a council of gods, that would never gather so again for such a cause. It was not a prize set at the end of a road for any brave man to come and take. No god would call an assembly on his account, Wootnappishtim told him, and lay a hand upon his brow, and lift him out of the reach of death. The gift had been given a single time, and would not be given twice. And Gilgamesh, who had crossed the water of death to hear a secret, understood slowly that the answer was that there was no secret at all, and that the one exception to the law of dying only proved how firm the law was. Yet Utnapishtim did not leave him without a trial. He set the king a thing that seemed small beside the felling of Humbaba and the slaying of the Bull of Heaven. If Gilgamesh would master death, let him first master sleep, which is the lesser brother of death. Let him sit and stay awake for six days and seven nights, and not let his eyes close, and then perhaps he might hope to stand against the greater darkness.

Gilgamesh agreed, for it sounded easy to a man who had wrestled monsters. He sat himself down to keep the watch, but he had come a long and grinding way, and his body had gone past its strength, and no sooner had he settled than sleep rolled over him like a mist rolling off the water, and he was gone into it at once, deep and helpless as a child. Utnapishtim looked at him sleeping and said to his wife that here was the strong man who wished never to die, and sleep had felled him with the first breath.

The wife pitied him, and she counseled that they wake him and send him home in peace. But Utnapishtim knew how men are, how they deceive themselves and swear they never faltered. So he bid his wife bake a loaf of bread each day, and set it down by the head of the sleeping king, one loaf for each day that he slept, and to mark the wall beside him. And she baked, and the loaves gathered in a row, while Gilgamesh lay unknowing. The first loaf dried hard as moon. The second went leathery. The third grew damp and soft. The fourth put out a white bloom upon its crust. The fifth turned grey, the sixth was spotted with mould, and the seventh still sat fresh and baking, when Utnapishtim reached out and touched the man and woke him.

Gilgamesh started up, and swore that sleep had barely brushed him, that he had closed his eyes only for a moment. Then Utnapishtim showed him the loaves standing in their row, and bade him count them, and read in their spoiling how the days had gone by over his shut eyes. The stale and the mouldering bread spoke against him, and could not be argued with. Seven loaves, seven days, and he had not felt one of them pass. And the king saw that if he could not hold off sleep for a single week, then he could never hold off the sleep that has no waking, and that death was already sitting in wait for him, not somewhere far along the road, but in his own body, in the very bed where he lay down each night.

The grief of it broke over him. Where shall I go now? he asked, when the thief already has his hand upon me, when death is in my chamber, and wherever I set my foot, there death is also. Utnapishtim had him washed and clothed in clean garments that would stay whole all the way home, and gave him over to Urshanabi to carry back across the water. But as the boat was pushing off, the wife of Utnapishtim spoke on the king's behalf, unwilling that he go away with nothing at all for so long a journey.

and Utnapishtim moved by her, called Gilgamesh back, and told him of a hidden thing, a secret matter of the gods. There grew, he said, at the bottom of the sea, a plant with a thorn upon it, like the thorn of a brier, a plant that would prick the hand that grasped it. took hold of that plant and kept it would have his lost youth given back to him. It could not make a man immortal, but it could turn him young again and roll the years backward off his shoulders. When Gilgamesh heard this, Hope woke in him one more time. He went down to the shore where the sweet water ran deep, and he tied heavy stones to his feet, as the pearl divers do, so that their weight would drag him down. The stones bore him below the surface and down through the cold green water to the very floor of the sea. There he found the plant, and he seized it, and its thorn tore his hands as Utnapishtim had said it would, but he did not let go. He cut away the stones from his feet, and the sea lifted him back up, and he came out onto the land with the plant of youth in his gripping fingers.

He was glad, as he had not been glad since Enkidu was alive. He would not eat of it there in his hunger, he decided. He would carry it home to Uruk. He would give it to the old men of the city and watch the years fall away from them, and he would keep a peace to eat when he himself grew old, so that he might return to the strength of his boyhood. He named the plant to Urshanabi as they went, calling it the flower by which a man wins back his breath of life, and he guarded it close upon the road.

They travelled, and after some way the day grew hot, and Gilgamesh came upon a pool of cool water among the reeds. He set the plant down upon the bank, and went in to bathe, and to rest his worn body in the coolness. And while he was in the water, a serpent came, drawn by the scent of the plant. It slid up out of its hole without a sound, and it took the plant of youth in its mouth, and swallowed it down. As it turned and slipped away, it shed its old skin there upon the ground, sloughing the withered husk of itself, and going off shining and new.

That is why the snake each year casts its skin and is renewed, while men grow old. Gilgamesh came up out of the pool and saw the cast skin lying and the plant gone, and He knew in a single moment that he had lost it, that the last chance was eaten and would not come again. He sat down upon the ground and wept. He had gone to the ends of the earth and down beneath the sea, and he had held youth itself in his torn hands, and now he had nothing. He had not even the thing itself to comfort him, and there was nothing left for him to carry home, but his own mortal self. For a while he sat in that grief. Then, having no other road, he rose and went on. Urshanabi went with him, and the long way turned homeward, over the passes and the plains, back through the country of living men, until at last the the two of them came in sight of Uruk. And when the walls of the city rose before him out of the plain, Gilgamesh stopped, and something in him steadied. He turned to Urshanabi the ferryman, who had left the far shore behind forever, and come with him into the world of men, and he bid him climb upon the great wall, and walk its length, and look at what stood there. Study the foundation, he told him, and handle the brickwork. See how the baked bricks are set, how the courses run true, how the whole vast circuit was laid down long ago and stands yet. One league of city, he said, and one league of orchards, and one league of clay pits, and the ground of the temple of Ishtar. Three leagues and the temple precinct, this is Uruk, and these walls enclose it. Look on the work, he said, and know it was well made. And in that turning toward the wall, the long question of his life was quietly answered, though not in the way he had gone seeking. He had wanted to live forever in his own flesh, and that was denied him, as it is denied to all but the one man of the flood. What he had instead was the city, the ramparts he had raised, the deeds that would be told after him, the name that Clay would keep when his body had gone back to Clay. Here was the whole of the thing that a wise voice long ago tries to teach him, and that he could only learn by walking to the edge of the world and finding it barred.

The story gathers up, in this quiet, the matters that scholars have long named as its heart. Relig speaks of creation and death, of friendship and enmity, of pride and arrogance giving way at last, to humility and to the plain acceptance of failure. Kramer sees in Gilgamesh the tragic figure of man himself, driven by a vain and endless hunger for fame and glory, and life without end, and brought home humbled. The pride that once oppressed Uruk, the friendship with Enkidu that softened and enlarged him, The grief that unmade him, and the hard wisdom that remade him, all of it comes to rest against these baked bricks.

How strange, and how fitting, that a king who wanted above all things to escape being forgotten should be remembered in exactly the way he feared he would not be. He did not keep his breath. No one keeps their breath. The one man of the flood, Utnapishtim, held his by a gift the gods swore never to give again, and even he holds it far off at the mouth of the rivers apart from the living, a survivor rather than a companion. Gilgamesh came home empty-handed of the thing he had crossed the waters of death to find, and yet his name has travelled farther than his feet ever did.

It went out of the old tongue of Sumer, where he was called Bilgamese, into the speech of a card, where he became Gilgamesh. It was pressed into wet clay with the cut end of a reed, and set to bake hard in the sun and in the kiln. It was gathered and ordered, so the tradition holds, by the hand of a scribe named Seen Leckie Unninny, who set the tale on twelve tablets and gave it the opening words that call him the one who saw the deep. This is the quiet answer that the whole journey was circling toward, and it is worth resting in for a moment, before the story lets go of him at last. For the deep that he saw was not, in the end, the far shore, or the hidden plant, or the secret of the gods. It was the plain truth that stands at the centre of every mortal life. The flesh is lent, it is asked back. What a person makes with the borrowed years, the walls they raise, the friends they love, the griefs they carry with dignity, the wisdom they hand on to those who come after. This is the portion that does not go back into the clay.

The city was his answer. He had gone away a man clawing at the sky for a life without land, and he came back a man content to stand on his own ramparts and tell the ferryman beside him, simply, that the work was good. Andrew George has written that Gilgamesh is best understood as a kind of gathering point, a figure to whom many separate stories drifted and clung over the ages, much as tales of a real king in some later land might gather around a single remembered name until the man beneath is hard to find. Whether a living king of that name once walked the streets of Uruk, sometime, as Stephanie Dally has cautioned, in the long span that most scholars set between 2800 and 2500 years before the Common Era, cannot now be said with certainty, the man is uncertain, the story is not, the story has outlasted every empire that ever copied it out.

So let the eye rest one last time on the city itself, since it is the city that endures, and since it is toward the city that this night must gently turn. Picture Uruk as the tablets would have it stand, there on the plain of the two rivers, on the eastern side of a channel of the Euphrates that has since dried and wandered away. Picture the great wall running its full circuit around city and orchards and clay pits, with the sacred ground of Aayana, the House of Heaven, set apart at its heart.

Picture, in the streets below, the ordinary life of the largest gathering of people the world of that age had yet made, water carried, reeds cut, wool spun, grain measured, the low sounds of a city settling toward its own night. All of that striving, all of that glory, all of that restless labor of a king who could not rest, is held now within those baked and quiet walls. And now, let that city begin to move away, not driven off and not lost, only allowed to recede, the way a great and familiar place slips gently behind a traveller who is at last walking home.

Let the ramparts of Uruk stand far behind now, their striving and their grief laid down at last, all the hunger that drove Gilgamesh out to the edge of the world, the fear of the grave that sat in his chest like a stone, and every mile of that long road out and back. Let all of it settle now, far off, behind those walls. It is finished, it was carried well, it asks nothing further of any one this night. There is no need to hold the story any longer now. The names may be let go, one by one, softly, the way faces lit briefly by a small flame are let go into the dark when the flame moves on. Enkidu, who ran with the wild herds before he was made gentle, and who became a brother.

Shamhat, who drew him in from the plain toward the ways of the city, Humbaba among his cedars, Ishtar in her anger on the walls, and the bull of heaven brought down, Minsun, the wise mother who read her son's dreams, and Lugalbanda his father, remembered among the gods, Siduri by her sea, Ushanabi at his pole, Utnapishtim keeping his far and lonely gift, and Gilgamesh himself, home at last on his own ramparts, at peace with the measure that was given him. Let each of them go, gently. They have been held long long enough, and they will keep, as the city keeps, behind the quiet door.

What remains, now that the city has receded, and the names have been set down, is a single small light. See it there, in the darkness, close and steady, a single candle burning with an even flame, does not gutter, and does not lean, it is the last thing awake in a world that has grown wonderfully quiet. There is no wall around it, no journey left in it, no question still asking to be answered. There is only the small warm point of its light, and the wide soft dark all around, and the slow rhythm of an easy breath.

Imagine the walls of Uruk far behind you, their old weight of striving and of grief no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door to the city, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing its restless glory in calm and order. Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out, and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Well sleep deeply and let the ancient stories carry you into the night.