So we wove our spells. “All you who would do us harm, whoever you may be, you whose heart conceives our misfortune, whose tongue utters mischief against us, whose lips poison us, in whose footsteps death stands: I ban you!” I cried. “I ban your mouth, I ban your tongue, I ban your glittering eyes, I ban your swift feet, I ban your toiling knees, I ban your laden hands. By these conjurings I bind your hands behind your back. Whether you are a ghost unburied, or a ghost that none cares for, or a ghost with none to make offerings to it, or a ghost that has none to pour libations to it, or a ghost that has no descendants, whatever cause leads you to wander, nevertheless I compel you to remain below. By Ereshkigal and Gugalanna, by Nergal and Namtaru, I conjure you never to pass these gates. By the might of Enlil that is in me—by An and Utu, by Enki and Ninazu, by Allatu, by Irkalla, by Belit-seri, by Apsu, Tiamat, Lahmu, Lahamu—”
That was the chant I chanted. I bound the beings below by every name that they might hold holy, except for one; I did not bind them in the name of Inanna. Though she was the patron goddess of the city, I would not bind them in her name. I knew that such a binding would be of no avail so long as Inanna’s priestess was my enemy.
And because I had not bound them by Inanna’s name, I was not certain that any of my spells would be of value. So I had with me at the ceremony my sacred drum, which the craftsman Ur-nangar had made for me out of the wood of the huluppu-tree. I meant to beat on it in my special way and put myself into my trance in front of all the people of Uruk, a thing I had never done before; and then I would send my spirit down into the tunnel, I would venture even to the gates of the underworld, for when I was in my trance there was no barrier to my roving. In that way I would be able to see for myself whether our spells had truly sealed the passage against those terrible creatures of black smoke and dank musty vapor.
I said to Enkidu, “There should be revelry and dancing while I do this. Give the order: have the musicians strike up.”
Almost at once the sound of trumpets and fifes filled the air. I bent low over my drum and began the slow quiet tapping I knew so well. I felt myself in the presence of the great mystery of mysteries, which is the life beyond life that the gods alone can know. All awareness of the solid world about me faded. There was only my drum and my drumstick, and the steady subtle rhythm of my drumming. It took possession of my soul. It seized me, it lifted me. I saw an aura coming out of the tunnel, rising like flame, cool and blue. There was a buzzing in my ears, a droning, a crackling. I felt a stirring within my body, as though some wild thing were moving about inside me. My breath came fast; my vision dimmed. I was overflowing; a sea was rising out of me and engulfing me.
But then just as the full ecstasy was about to come upon me, and I was making ready to launch myself from my body, there came a shriek from behind me that cut through my soul as an axe cuts through wood, and ripped me from my trance; a shrill harsh outcry, piercing and fierce, over and over.
“Utu! Utu! Utu!”
Gods, what a scream! The unearthly sound jolted me and shook me and stunned me. I went numb and pitched forward, all but insensible, as though I had been struck between the shoulders. Enkidu caught me by the shoulders and held me, or I would have toppled down the tunnel; but my drum and my drumstick fell from my frozen hands. I watched with horror as I saw them disappear into the dark mouth of the nether world.
At once almost without thinking I started to scramble down after them. But Enkidu, still gripping my shoulders, hauled me roughly back and flung me to one side as though I were a sack of barley. “Not you!” he cried angrily. “You must not go into that place, Gilgamesh!” And before I could say or do anything he ran down the steps that led into the earth, and vanished entirely from sight in that black pit.
Dazed, I peered after him. I could not speak. There was an overwhelming silence all about me: the musicians were motionless, the dancers were still. Out of that silence rose a single sound, a muffled sobbing or whimpering that came from a girl of eight or ten years who lay writhing on the ground not far away, held down by one of the priests. It was she who had screamed in that terrible way and had broken my trance; I saw that the beating of my drum must have worked on her soul much as it did on mine, but even more powerfully. The drumming had driven her not into the trance of ecstasy but into a terrible fit, under the force of which her mind had given way. Her convulsions still continued. They were frightful to behold.
And Enkidu? Where was Enkidu? Trembling, I stared into the tunnel, and saw only blackness. I found my voice and called his name, or croaked it, rather, and heard nothing. I called again, more loudly. Silence. Silence. “Enkidu!” I cried, and it was a great wail of pain and loss. I was sure he had been set upon by the minions of Ereshkigal; perhaps they had already carried him off to hell. “Wait!” I shouted. “I’m coming after you!”
“You must not,” said my mother sharply, and suddenly three or four men were at my elbows ready to hold me back. If they had tried to restrain me I would have hurled them over the city wall into the river. But there was no need of that, for just then I heard the sound of a choking cough close by in the tunnel, and Enkidu came slowly up out of it. He was holding my drum and my drumstick in his hand.
He looked ghostly. He was like one who had returned from the dead. All color was gone from his skin: his face seemed bleached, so pale was it. His hair and beard were gray with dust, and his white robe was badly soiled. Great tangles of cobwebs were snarled about his body, and even over his mouth; he was trying to brush at them with his shoulders as he emerged into the light. He stood there a moment dazzled and blinking. There was a look in his eyes of such wildness, such strangeness, that I scarcely knew him to be my friend. Those who had been standing near me backed away. I felt almost like backing away from him myself.
“I have brought back your drum and your drumstick, Gilgamesh,” he said in a voice like cinders and ashes. “They fell a long way: they were beyond the second gate. But I went on my hands and knees until I touched them in the dark.”
I stared at him, appalled. “It was madness. You should not have gone into that tunnel.”
“But you had dropped your drum,” he said, in that same strange whisper. He shivered and rubbed his shoulder against his face again, and coughed and sneezed from the dust. “I had to try to bring it back. I know how important it is to you.”
“But the dangers—the evils—”
Enkidu shrugged. “Here is your drum, Gilgamesh. Here is your drumstick.”
I took them from him. They did not feel right; it was as if they had lost eleven parts out of twelve of their weight. They were so light I thought they might float out of my grasp. Enkidu nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They are different now. I think the god-strength must have gone out of them. It is a terrible place, down there.” He shuddered once more. “I could not see anything. But as I crawled, I felt bones breaking beneath me. Old dry bones. There is a carpet of bones in that tunnel, Gilgamesh. People have gone down into it before me. But I think I may have been the first one to come out.”
Something hung in the air between us like a curtain. The strangeness that had come upon him in that other world now screened his soul from mine. I felt I could not reach him; I felt almost as though I did not know him any longer. A sense of irretrievable loss choked my soul. The Enkidu I had known had vanished. He had been to a place I dared not enter and he had returned with knowledge that I would never be able to comprehend.
“Tell me what you saw there,” I said. “Were there demons?”
“I told you: it was dark. I saw nothing. But I felt their presence. I felt them all around me.” He gestured toward the gaping tunnel. “You should close up that pit, brother, and never open it again. Seal the door, and seal it again and seven times over.”
I thought I would burst with rage, to see him so shattered for the sake of my drum. How could I call back the moment? Cling to the drum lest it fall into that hole, cling to Enkidu lest he go rushing off after it? But all that was engraved forev
er in the book of time. Bitterly I said, “I will seal it, yes. But it is too late, Enkidu! If only you had not gone down there—!”
He smiled a faint wan smile. “I would do it for you again, if I had to. But I hope I will not have to.” Then he came close to me. I could smell the dry smell of the dust and cobwebs that were on him. In a voice like a torch that has gone out he said, “I saw nothing while I was in the underworld because everything was black there. But there was one thing I saw that I saw with my heart and not with my eyes, and it was myself, Gilgamesh, my own body, which the vermin were devouring as though it were an old cloak. Those were my own bones I crawled on in that tunnel. And now I am frightened, old friend. I am very frightened.” He put his arms lightly to my shoulders and gave me a dusty embrace. Gently he said, “I am sorry that your drum has lost its god-strength. I would have brought it back to you as it was, if I could have done it. You know that: I would have brought it back to you as it was.”
26
I THINK IT WAS THE next day that Enkidu’s illness began. He complained that his hand, the one he had injured when forcing the gate in the forest of cedars, felt chilled. An hour or two later he spoke of a stiffness and a soreness in that arm. Then he said he was feverish, and took to his bed.
“It is as it was in my dream,” he said gloomily to me. “The gods have met in council, and they have decreed that I am the one who must die, because you are king.”
“You will not die,” I said with a loving anger in my voice. “No one dies of a soreness in the arm! You must have hurt it again while you were crawling about in that foul tunnel. I have sent for the healers: they will set you aright before nightfall.”
He shook his head. “I tell you I am dying, Gilgamesh.”
It frightened and maddened me to hear him so weary and faint. He was yielding to whatever demon had seized him, and that was not like him. “I will not have it!” I cried. “I will not let you die!” I knelt beside his bed. He was flushed and his forehead was shiny with sweat. Urgently I said, “Brother, I cannot abide losing you. I beg you: speak no more of dying. The healers are on their way, and they will make you well again.”
I watched over him as a lioness watches over her cub. He muttered, he moaned, his eyes were veiled by a film. He said that his head hurt him and his mouth pricked him, his eyes troubled him, his ears were singing. His throat choked him, his neck muscles hurt. His breast, his shoulders, and his loins hurt him; his fingers were cramped; his stomach was inflamed; his bowels were hot. His hands, his feet, and his knees were aching. There was no part of his body that did not trouble him. He lay trembling, gripped by death or the fear of death, and I felt for his sake that fear as well. Seeing him in mortal terror I was reminded of my own mortality, which tormented me like a knife in my flesh. It was the old enemy, and though he was coming to call not on me but on my friend, he could not but awaken my own fear of him. But I was determined: I had already resolved not to yield to death myself, nor would I allow him to have Enkidu.
I did whatever seemed useful. Perhaps it was the presence of the drum in the palace that was afflicting him, I thought, by carrying some taint of the nether world. I did not know, but I would not take the chance. The drum was hateful to me now. I ordered priests to take it outside the city walls and burn it, using such rites as will dispel those spirits. Greatly did I lament its loss, but I would not keep it by me if it made Enkidu ill. So the drum was burned. Yet Enkidu did not recover.
The healers came, the most skilled diviners and exorcists in the city. The first who viewed him was old Namennaduma, the royal baru-priest, the great diviner. His consultation was lengthy; for several hours he studied Enkidu, consulting the omens so that he could make a preliminary diagnosis and prognosis. Then he summoned me to the sickroom and said, “There is great danger.”
“Drive it away, seer, or you will find yourself in danger even greater,” I said.
Namennaduma must have heard such threats before: my harsh words did not seem to trouble him. Calmly he replied, “We will treat him. But we must know more. Tonight we will consult the stars, and tomorrow we will do the divination by sheep’s-liver. And then the treatment can begin.”
“Why wait so long? Do your divining today!”
“Today is not auspicious,” the baru-priest said. “It is an unlucky time of the month, and the moon is unfavorable.” I could not argue with that. So off he went to study the stars, and into the room came the azu, the water-knower, the man of medicines. This doctor touched his hand to Enkidu’s breast and to his cheek, and nodded and scowled, and took certain powders from his pouch. Then he said to me, as though I were some sort of azu myself, “We will give him the powder of anadishsha and the ground seeds of duashbur, mixed into beer and water. That will cool the fever. And for his pain, the lees of the dried vine and the oil of the pine tree, made into a poultice. And to help him sleep, the powdered seeds of nigmi, and an extract of the roots and trunk of arina, combined with myrrh and thyme, in beer.”
Hope made my breath come short. “And will he be healed, then?” I asked.
With some irritation the water-knower replied, “He will be in less pain, and his fever will relent. Healing must come afterward, if it comes at all.”
That night Enkidu slept only a little, and I none at all.
In the morning Namennaduma returned. His face was grim, but he refused to speak of what he had learned in the stars, and when I commanded him to tell me he simply peered at me as if I were a madman. “It is not a simple prognosis,” he said, and shrugged. “We must do the liver-divination now.”
A statue of the healing-god Ninib, son of Enlil, was brought into the room. A small white sheep was tethered in front of it. I stared at that little sad-eyed animal as though it held the power of life and death over Enkidu itself. Namennaduma performed prayers and purifications and libations, and slaughtered the sheep. Then with brisk swift strokes he cut open its belly and drew forth the steaming liver, which he examined with the skill of his sixty years of this art. He studied the position it had held within the belly of the sheep—“the palace of the liver,” he called it—and then he pored over the liver itself, its lobes and veins, its curves and indentations, its little fingerlike projections. At length he looked up at me and said, “The shanu is double and so is the niru. That is an evil omen, king.”
“Find a better one,” I said.
“See, king, this: there is a lump of flesh at the bottom of the na.”
I felt my anger rising. “So? What of it?”
Namennaduma grew uneasy. He sensed the stirring and heating of my wrath, and knew what it could mean for him. But if I had hoped to frighten him into finding an answer that would comfort me, I did not succeed. Straightaway he replied, “It means that a curse lies on the sick one. He will die.”
His voice fell upon my ears like mallets. Now I was enraged. There was thunder in my brain. I came close to striking him. “We will all die!” I roared. “But not yet, not so soon! A curse on you, for your foul omens! Look again, baru-priest! Find the true truth!”
“Shall I deceive you with the words you prefer to hear, then?”
He delivered those blunt words in so quiet and unflinching a tone that my fury at once went from me: I realized I was in the presence of a man of strength and majesty, who would not bend the truth of his art even if it were to cost him his life. I brought myself into check and when I could speak in a normal voice again I said, “The truth is what I want. I have no liking for the truth you offer me: but at the least I admire the way you tell it. You are a man of honor, Namennaduma.”
“I am an old man. If I anger you and you slay me, what is that to me? But I will not lie to please you.”
“Are all the omens bad?” I asked, speaking softly, cajolingly, almost begging him.
“They are not good. But he is a man of immense strength. That may yet save him, if we follow the right procedures. I promise nothing: but there is a chance. It is a very small chance, king.”
“Do
what can be done. Save him.”
The baru-priest laid his hand gently on my arm. “You understand it is forbidden to physicians to treat one whose case is hopeless. That is a defiance of the gods: we may not do it.”
“I’m aware of that. But you have just said there is a chance to save him.”
“A very small one. Another diviner might say the case is hopeless, and refuse to continue. I tell you this, king, because I want you to remember that there are perils in going against the wishes of the gods.”
With an impatient sigh I said, “So there are. Now call in the exorcist and the water-knower, and set them to the task of healing my brother!”
And so they went to their work.
An army of healers surrounded Enkidu’s bed. Some busied themselves with sacrifices and libations, pouring out milk, beer, wine, bread, fruit, enough to feed a legion of gods, and killing any number of lambs and goats and suckling pigs. While that was going on the ashiptu, the exorcist, began his incantations. “Seven are they, seven are they, in the Ocean Deep seven are they,” he chanted. “Ashakku unto the man, bringing fever. Namtaru unto the man, bringing disease. The evil spirit Utukku unto the man, against his neck. The evil demon Alu unto the man, against his breast. The evil ghost Ekimmu unto the man, against his belly. The evil devil Gallu unto the man, against his hand. The evil god Ilu unto the man, against his foot. Seven are they; evil are they. These seven together have seized upon him: they devour his body like a consuming fire. Against them I will conjure.”
As he chanted, I paced the room, counting my steps a thousand times from wall to wall. I felt the god closing his fist on Enkidu: it was an agony for me. He lay with clouded eyes and thickened breath, scarcely seeming to understand what was taking place. The rituals proceeded for hours. When the healers left, I remained by the beside. “Brother?” I murmured. “Brother, do you hear me?” He heard nothing. “The gods have chosen to spare my life, but you are the price I must pay! Is that it? Is that it? Ah, it is too much, Enkidu!” He said nothing. I began to speak the words of the great lamentation over him, slowly, haltingly, but I got no more than a little way. It was too soon to speak those words for Enkidu: I could not do it. “Brother, will you go from me?” I asked. “Will I ever see you again?” He did not hear me; he was lost in a fevered dream.