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 mid-stride 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, his 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.
25
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 grandeur, 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 flat 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 slopes 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 dignitaries 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 across 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!