Free Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette Page A

much of the epic is just flat-out bunk, with gods coming down and exacting their wrath directly—rather than through a nice, indirect pestilence—and heroes who are capable of unfathomable physical acts. My favorite part of the story is when the wild, god-created animal-man, Enkidu, is tamed by a prostitute. As soon as he has sex with her, all his body hair falls off, making the creatures of the forest fear him because suddenly he looks more human than animal. Whenever I think about the Enkidu story, I think Kipling really missed out on a much better ending for The Jungle Book .
    Nobody who looks closely at The Epic of Gilgamesh could mistake it for a historical text, but in a way it is. It’s a collection of several tales told about different people—all exaggerated beyond recognition—throughout early Sumerian history, most predating Gilgamesh.
    And there really was a Gilgamesh. He was a king in pre-Akkadian Sumeria. (The Akkadians, a Semitic people, conquered the Sumerians—who were more white-skinned and from the North—and took over their empire in such a way that many consider Sumerian and Akkadian to be synonymous. I never stopped calling them Sumerians because truthfully, they didn’t act all that different.) And Gilgamesh really did come to seek out my advice one day.
    The event that set things in motion was something we would now consider mundane, or failing that, something we would have a ready explanation for. It happened while I was sitting alone outside the small shelter I’d made for myself in a stretch of woods I had called home for roughly a century. I was in one of my back-to-nature phases. Not in the man-animal sense of the warrior Enkidu, more in a crazy hermit on the hill way. With a civilization only few days’ walk, I could have been more sociable, but as I said the Sumerians were quite nuts. I did stop by for the fertility rites in springtime, but that was just to enjoy (and participate in) the spectacle of a thousand temple prostitutes copulating in the name of the gods. Great fun, that.
    It was a clear, warm evening during a new moon, and I had decided to forego a fire in order to spend the night studying the stars, something I did a lot. (And which came in handy later when I became a vizier in Egypt. The Egyptian kings were crazy for astronomy.) At sometime well past the point when the moon had reached its zenith, an amazing thing happened. A part of the sky fell.
    I first spotted it low on the horizon—a flash of something I didn’t think had been there a second before. It flared brighter and brighter, this point in the sky. It appeared to grow larger, but in fact it was simply getting closer. And then it disappeared from view. About ten fairly rapid heartbeats later, a tremendous bang rang out, similar to the sound of a thousand whips cracked against a thousand backs at the same time.
    I had already been on the planet for a good long while by then, and had of course heard stories about parts of the sky falling. But this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes. I had no idea what it meant. For me, and everybody else in this time, the sky simply was. It didn’t change. Sure, over the course of a year—and even a night—elements of the sky moved in a predictable pattern, but pieces of it weren’t supposed to just drop off like that. I re-examined the portion of the firmament the piece hailed from, but it didn’t look as if any of the stars were missing. It was as if it hadn’t happened at all.
    By morning, I decided I had imagined it. This seemed like a much safer conclusion than any other option such as, say, one of the gods had slipped on something. A day later, I’d forgotten the whole event.
    But I wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, as I discovered when Gilgamesh arrived at my door three days later, looking very scared.
    All legendary exaggeration aside, Gilgamesh really was a pretty huge guy, a full head and shoulders taller than me. He was also profoundly hairy,