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.