Gilgamesh the King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  30

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It is.”

  “Then I am very far from home indeed.”

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

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

  “Gilgamesh? Is that not the king’s name, in Uruk?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I am not a god,” I told her. “I have a god’s blood in me, but I am mortal.”

  “Ah,” she said.

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

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

  “What I seek lies beyond this place.”

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

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

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

  “And then he died?”

  “You know that too?” I said, startled.

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

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

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

  Fiercely I said, “For you, maybe!”

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

  I shook my head. “You are wrong. How long ago was the Flood? Ziusudra still lives!”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can you show me the way?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Are there wild beasts?” I asked.

  “Lizards. Goats with long horns. Some lions, not many.”

  “And are there demons?”

  “It would not surprise me.”

  “I have encountered their kind before,” I said. “Perhaps they will prefer not to trouble me, since they know I will trouble them if they do.”

  “Perhaps,” said the scorpion-man.

  “Are there streams? Springs?”

  “Very few, until you reach the lower forest. I think there must be water there, since the trees grow so thick.”

  “You have not been that far down?”

  “No,” he said. “Never. No one has been.”

  “That will not be true much longer,” I said, and took my leave of him with warm thanks for his kindnesses. He nodded but did not offer me an embrace. He was still standing at the crest of the pass long after I began my descent; it must have been hours later when I looked up, and saw his misshapen monstrous form outlined against the sky. Nor did he cease watching me after that. I caught sight of him twice more as I made my winding way downward, and then the crest was lost to my view.

  31

  IT WAS A JOURNEY THAT held few delights and many challenges. I do not remember it fondly. For days I was descending the southern face of the mountain, and the heat was intense: the sun, as it climbed, beat against me like a gong that would not be silent. I thought the force of it would blind and deafen me both. The nights were bitter cold, with howling knife-keen winds. The rocks were sharp-edged and loose, and when I stepped on them the wrong way they slid, sending clouds of dry red dust up into my nostrils. Twice I injured my legs in the scramble; more than twice I cut myself by falling; I was constantly plagued by thirst; and furious clouds of stinging insects hovered about my face all the way down the slope, seeking my eyes. For food I had none but the lizards that I caught as they lay sleeping in the sun and the long-legged hopping insects that abounded everywhere. For water I chewed the twigs of the sad gnarled little plants, though their sap burned my mouth. At least I saw no demons. I saw some lions, as dusty and woebegone as I was myself; but they kept far away. I wondered often if I would live to see the end of the descent, and more than once I was certain I would not.