“Brother of my heart,” said Enkidu to Gilgamesh, “overnight I had a frightening dream. I dreamt of our offense to the gods, that they held conclave and The Sky said, ‘They slew The Bull of Heaven, killed Humbaba, who no longer keeps watch over the Cedar Forest. One of them must die.’
"Then The Lord of Winds, his son, said, ‘Enkidu, not Gilgamesh, must die.’”
Enkidu was stricken ill and lay in his bed, a sickness in his heart, his eyes like tearful springs. To Gilgamesh he spoke, “Brother of my heart, they take me away. To you I shall not return. I will squat [1] with the sunken dead, a ghost in the cities of dust.”
Hearing this, Gilgamesh cried, his cheeks like rivulets of pain. He spoke, “Brother of My heart, you have been a practical man, but now speak nonsense. Your dream may be favorable. Fear has set your lips to fluttering like fly wings.”
Enkidu responded, solemnly, “This last night, another dream I had. Heaven roiled, the earth groaned and I stood upon a shadowed plain. A beast appeared above me, with an awful-faced lion’s head, a lion’s paws, the wings and talons of the eagle. It seized me by the hair. [2] I strove to resist but in a single stroke of the paw I was upended like a raft—upon me he leaped, grinding my bones like a trampling bull. [3]
"I cried, ‘Gilgamesh, save me!’
"Skulking in fear, you came not to your brother’s side.
“At the touch of the beast, feathers [4] sprouted upon my arms, which he bound behind me as he forced me down into the underworld, the halls of darkness and death, the cities of dust, the home of Death, where all who enter never rise again to taste of sweet life. There we squat, the dead, in the dark, dirt our food, clay our drink. Though feathered like birds, we never see dawn streak the sky…on door and bolt dust is caked, ages deep.
“As I entered, all around me were heaped crowns, proud kings who had ruled on earth, who had set roast meet out for the gods, offered cool water and sweet cakes for the dead. There squatted beside the kings, those who had advised them in these things, priests, clerics, prophets, exorcists, the animated and the dull-witted, all the same.
“Here even was the Primal King, and with him The Protector of Wild Beasts.
“Here too was The Lady of the Great Earth and her consort, Nergal, who casts forth plague and stirs up war.
“Kneeling before the dread Queen of Death was her scribe, Lady of the Desert, reading from the tablets upon which each of the living’s death is inscribed.
“When the queen gazed upon me, her eyes glowered and she asked, cruelly, “Who has brought this one to squat in my eternal shadow?”
Notes
1. The dead squat because the poor squat upon their haunches as the well-to-do recline on mats, stools, chairs and thrones.
2. Enkidu being seized by the hair by a beast representing the powers of Humbaba and The Bull of Heaven, with the eagle attributes of the gods, is an indication that he is being punished for being a wild man in a domesticated world, for being an interloper, for helping Gilgamesh defy the natural order and the supernatural order. He is a scapegoat and a warning for those men who would listen to their wild side.
3. His trampling is certainly revenge for his part in slaying The Bull of Heaven.
4. One flies like a bird, swiftly into the underworld, as birds are known to be takers of the dead.
5. The overall message seems almost Nordic—with clear echoes in later Hellenic myth, such as those of Orpheus and Odysseus—in that all men are cursed to die and that even gods of earlier ages shall pass into oblivion with the rise of new ages.
