Time passes quickly in the company of a true friend.

One day, Gilagamesh said to Enkidu, “We must trek to the Cedar Forest, where the demon Humbaba dwells. Then we shall kill him and drive evil from the world.”

Enkidu sighed, and when Gilgamesh looked into his eyes he could see that his friend had cried.

Gilgamesh asked, “Why, true friend, do you sigh, what is it that makes you cry?”

Enkidu answered, “True friend, my scream catches in the throat, my arms weaken. I knew that place when I was young, when I roamed the wilds with the antelope and deer. The forest is never ending, spreading farther than the mind can imagine. Who would dare venture there?”

Gilgamesh spoke: “True friend, even if the forest is everlasting, I have to enter it, scale its heights, cut down a cedar tree that towers high enough to make a whirlwind when it crashes to earth.”

Enkidu objected, “How can any man dare defile the Cedar Forest, scared to the Earth God, forbidden to men, guarded by the demon Humbaba?”

“We must not journey to the monster’s lair to fight: his breath is fire, his voice thunder, his jaws death!”

“In the Forest, every sound comes to his ears like a spirit whispering of doomed men. Who of men—who of the gods—could defeat him, when he was set down as forest guardian by the Earth God himself, to kill by fear?”

Gilgamesh countered, “Why true friend, do you cower like a woman? Your words are so unworthy as to pain my soul. We are not gods—to us mortals heaven is forever barred. Only the gods may enter eternity.

“The days of our lives are few, our achievements carried off on the wind into the face of Time. Why then be afraid? Death must come, so why not summon your old courage, the courage of the doomed?

“If I perish in the demon-haunted forest, won’t you be ashamed when people say, ‘Gilgamesh died a warrior, battling Humbaba, and where was Enkidu? Why, he was safe at home!’

“You were weaned in the high wild places, have killed lions and wolves with your bare hands. You are battletested and bravery is yours.

“If you do not accompany me, I will fell the mighty tree, I will kill Humbaba, I will place my name on the River of Time—I shall etch my honor in men’s minds forever.”

As indicated by the nature of Enkidu’s wild existence, travelling with dear and antelope and slaying lions and wolves, he represents hunting man, the primal type that developed as a creature of the grasslands, not the forest. The great fear of the forest comes from the leopard and other solitary predators that dwell there, and who preyed upon prototypical man, the pre-human apes that lived a semi-arboreal existence. Once Man left the forest for the grassland he would only return as a refugee, hounded out of his preferred habitat by more powerful peoples, and driven back into the abode of the leopard, and other jungle cats, all creatures of the night feared by man on a visceral level, which have served as the basis for man’s night terrors—and even the highly evolved vampire legendry—throughout time. The wolf and the lion were like man, social beasts of prey. The leopard, the lone killer, was a stealthier and more greatly feared creature which, moreover, preferred primates as prey, representing Man’s deepest fears.

All these fears of the primal world, of the dark forest that man escaped in the process of gaining possession of tools and fire, are expressed by Enkidu, the recently domesticated Wildman. Conversely, Gilgamesh makes the case of the civilized man, who has come to view nature as a great beast to be broken to his will. Even though the wild places of the world remain as symbolic of the gods in heaven and their myriad wills, Gilgamesh, as the archetype of the striving man, is intent on overcoming these natural obstacles, even if it means destroying his own faith in the supernatural order.