Gilgamesh, Who Saw the Deep

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, two-thirds god, oppresses his own city, so the gods make him an equal: Enkidu, the wild man of the steppe, tamed into humanity by a woman in seven days. They fight in a doorway, and the fight becomes the great friendship of ancient literature.

Together they kill Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and then the Bull of Heaven, sent by Ishtar after Gilgamesh answers her marriage proposal with a recitation of what happened to her previous lovers. Two wardens of the gods, dead. The bill arrives in a dream: one of the two must die, and it is Enkidu, twelve days of fever, while his friend watches.

Gilgamesh sits by the body six days and seven nights, until a worm falls from its nose. Then he puts on a lion skin and walks off the map, through the sun’s tunnel, past the alewife who tells him to go home and love his family (true, kind, wasted), across the Waters of Death, to Utnapishtim, the Flood survivor, the one man made immortal. The old man tells him the whole story of the deluge, then sets a test: stay awake six nights. Gilgamesh sleeps instantly, and seven loaves in seven states of staleness date the failure.

The consolation prize, a plant of renewed youth from the seafloor, is stolen by a snake while he bathes, which is why snakes shed their skins and men do not. And the epic ends where it began, word for word: inspect the wall of Uruk, is it not good brick? The wall, the city, the story itself, that is the immortality. You are holding it.