Journey Eleven · Mesopotamia · 2100 BC
The oldest story there is, about being unable to accept that it ends.
This is the oldest long story anybody has, and the thing it is about has not dated by one day.
A man who cannot be beaten at anything is given somebody who can match him, and they are happy for a while, and then that person dies, and the man cannot accept it. Everything after the halfway point of this epic is one person refusing to take death as an answer and walking further and further to get around it. He does not get around it. He gets something else.
It opens with a complaint. The king is too much for his own city and the people go up over his head about it, and the answer that comes back is not a punishment: it is a second man, made out of clay, pinched off and dropped in the wilderness. He lives at the water hole with the animals, pulls up the hunters' traps and fills in their pits, and is brought in to the city slowly, by being taught to eat bread and drink beer and be washed and put into clothes. Then he stands in the king's gateway and will not let him through, and they wreck a doorpost, and afterwards they are friends and stay friends.
Then they go and do something enormous and unnecessary. They have axes cast that nobody else can lift and they walk for weeks to a cedar forest to kill the thing that keeps it, and the walk is better written than the fight. Every third night the mountain gives one of them a dream and the other one explains it away, and the explanations get less convincing each time.
And then the second half, which is the part nobody who has read it forgets. A goddess asks the king to marry her and he answers her with a list of what happened to the ones before him, and the bill for that comes due. His friend is the one who pays it. There is a dream about a council and a house where the dead sit in feathers and eat clay, and then an illness of twelve days, and then the king sits on the floor in the dark with his hand on a chest until a worm falls out of the nose, and gets up and goes out into the desert in a lion skin.
What follows is the oldest road in literature: a mountain where the sun comes up with scorpion people at the door of it, twelve double hours of running in total darkness with the sound of the sun coming up behind him, a garden where the trees grow stones, a woman who makes wine and bars her door against him, a ferryman, and a sea of water that cannot be touched, crossed with a hundred and twenty poles each used once and thrown away.
And at the end of all of it, the one man who never died turns out to be an old man sitting down, who tells him about a flood, and sets him a test of staying awake for a week which he fails in about four heartbeats, and gives him a plant from the bottom of the sea that is stolen on the way home by a snake while he is having a wash.
He comes back with nothing. And the last thing in the poem is the king standing outside his own wall telling a stranger to look at the brickwork, and that is the ending, and it is the right one. The twelfth tablet, which raises the dead friend to recite a catalogue, is a later appendix that contradicts this, and it is not used here.
A king too strong for his own city, and a complaint that goes up over his head. The answer is not a punishment. Somebody washes her hands, pinches off clay, and drops it into the wilderness, and out there a second man stands up with hair all over him.
A hunter comes in from the desert with his face the wrong color. There is something at the water hole pulling up the traps and filling in the pits, and it drinks with the gazelles. They work out how to bring it in, and it takes six days and seven nights and no violence at all.
He is given bread and does not know what it is. He is given beer and drinks seven cups of it and sings. He is washed and oiled and put into clothes, and then he goes and stands in the gateway of the city and will not let the king through, and they bring down a doorpost between them.
Two men who have nothing left to prove decide to go and do something enormous and completely unnecessary. The smiths cast axes that nobody else can lift. The elders tell them not to go. Your mother goes up on the roof with incense and asks why she was given a son with no rest in him.
Weeks of walking, and then the first cedar comes over the horizon and the forest stops being an idea. There is a gate in it. You open it with one hand and your hand goes numb, and inside it is cool and enormous and quiet, and neither of you says very much.
The mountain gives you three dreams on three nights and your friend explains every one of them away. Then the keeper of the forest comes out, and the sun sends eight winds against him, and he asks for his life, and the two of you discuss it in front of him.
Home to a parade, and a goddess who asks you to marry her. You answer her with a list of what happened to the ones before you, which is true and which is the worst thing you ever do. Then a bull comes down out of the sky and the snorting of it opens pits in the ground.
He wakes you before dawn to ask why the gods were taking counsel in his dream, and then he is ill for twelve days, and on the twelfth he tells you about a house where the dead sit in feathers and eat clay, and then he is quiet, and you sit on the floor with your hand on his chest.
Six days and seven nights you do not let them take him, until a worm falls out of his nose. Then you stand up in front of the elders and howl. Then you put on a lion skin and walk out of your own city into open country, going east, because there is one man who never died.
A mountain so high the top of it touches heaven and the bottom reaches the dead, with scorpion people standing at the door. They tell you nobody has done this. You go in anyway and run through twelve double hours of complete darkness with the sun coming up behind you.
A garden on the far side where the trees grow carnelian and lapis instead of fruit. Then a woman who makes wine, who sees you coming across the shore and bars her door, and tells you the thing you do not want to hear, and then tells you where the boatman is.
A sea of water that cannot be touched, crossed with a hundred and twenty poles, each one used once and thrown away. On the other side an old man sitting down, who is the only person who never died, and who turns out to look like nothing at all.
He tells you how the world was drowned: the reed hut, the warning, the boat with everything aboard, seven days of weather, the mountain that held the hull, and the three birds. And the silence on the seventh morning when he opened the hatch and all of mankind had turned to clay.
He sets you a test that lasts a week and you fail it in about four heartbeats. Then they bake you seven loaves, one a day, to prove it to you, and you look at the row of them going from fresh to hard and there is nothing left to argue with.
His wife asks what you will be sent away with, so you tie stones to your feet and go down to the bottom of the sea and bring up a plant that makes an old man young. On the way home you stop to wash, and a snake takes it off the bank. And then you come home and look at your own wall.
The Complete Journey
The whole epic in one sitting — the clay, the water hole, the gate, the forest, the bull, the twelve days, the lion skin, the mountain, the ferry, the flood, the plant and the wall. Edited to run as one unbroken road: you are taken under once at the beginning and brought back once at the end, with the nights crossfading into one another. Best with headphones, somewhere you will not be interrupted.