1Five hundred years after the priestess, the cities between the rivers had new masters and the same clay. In Nippur there was a tablet-house, and the master of it was a man named Ipiq.
2He was a good master, patient and exact. He taught twelve boys the signs, six hundred of them, and the two tongues, and how to reckon a field. It took a boy ten years to learn. Most of the boys were sons of scribes and priests. One was not: a brick-maker's son named Kubbur, whom Ipiq had taken in for nothing because the child could add in his head faster than Ipiq could on clay.
3Ipiq had one son of his own. His name was Etel, and he was eight. He had just begun the signs. He pressed them crooked, and laughed at them, and pressed them again.
4In the month of the marsh fever, Etel fell sick on a market day and was dead by the next new moon.
5They buried him under the floor of the house, as that people did, so that the dead stayed near. His mother Ahassunu wept as the women wept, aloud, with her neighbours round her, and after a time she rose and ground the barley, because the living must eat. Ipiq did not weep. He did not do anything. He did not go to the tablet-house. The boys came each morning and sat in the court and waited, and each evening they went home.
6At night he sat in his own yard by the bread oven and looked at the coals. He had read every wise saying in the two tongues. Not one of them was any use to him. Twenty days went by so.
7On the twenty-first night someone knocked at the yard gate.
8It was a traveller, an old woman, with road dust on her to the knees and a staff worn dark by her hand. She asked if she might sit by a fire until morning. Ipiq did not care who sat by his fire. He let her in.
9She had dates in her bag, and she laid them out on a cloth. He had bread, and an onion, and a jar of thin beer. It is hard to sit across food from someone and give them nothing. He pushed the bread toward her, and she pushed the dates toward him, and they ate.
10"This is a house of tablets," the old woman said. She was looking at the reeds soaking in a bowl by the door. "Then you must have tales. I have walked a long way with only my own. Tell me one, for the dates."
11"I have no heart for tales," said Ipiq.
12"Then tell me one that has no heart in it," she said, "and we will see."
13He almost smiled, and was angry at himself for it. He turned over the tales in his mind like a man looking through a chest for something he does not want to find. There was one he had been keeping his hand away from for twenty days. So he told that one.
14This is the tale, as the tablets hold it.
15In Uruk, in the old days, there was a king named Gilgamesh. He was taller than other men and stronger. It was said he was two parts god and one part man. He built the great wall of Uruk, and he was proud of it. But he had no equal and so no friend, and he wore out his people with his restlessness, taking their sons for his works and his wars. The people cried out for relief.
16So the gods made a match for him: Enkidu, a wild man of the grasslands, who ran with the gazelles and drank at the water holes with the beasts. He came to Uruk and stood in the king's road and would not let him pass. They fought in the street like two bulls, so that the doorposts shook. Neither could throw the other. When they were too tired to fight, they looked at one another and laughed, and after that they were not apart.
17Together they did what no one had done. They went to the far Cedar Forest and killed its guardian, Humbaba, whose voice was the flood. They killed the Bull of Heaven when it was sent against the city. Gilgamesh thought there was nothing the two of them could not do. He thought it would go on for ever.
18Then Enkidu fell sick. It was no wound of battle. It was a sickness in a bed, and it took twelve days. He lay and grew weaker, and Gilgamesh sat by him, and on the twelfth day Enkidu did not answer when he was called.
19Gilgamesh would not let them bury him. He sat by the body six days and seven nights, as if his friend might rise at the sound of his voice. He gave him up only when he saw with his own eyes what death does to a body. Then a fear came into him that he had never known. He said: What happened to my friend will happen to me. I too shall lie down and not get up.
20He put off his robes and put on a lion's skin and walked out of his city into the wild. He had heard there was one man, far away at the edge of the world, to whom the gods had given life without end. This man had lived through the great flood. He meant to find him and learn the secret.
21He went through the mountain where the sun goes down, through the long dark. He came to the shore of the sea, where a woman kept an ale-house, and she saw his hollow face and barred her door. When she had heard his story she told him plainly that he would not find what he was looking for. She told him to go home, and fill his belly, and wash his head, and hold his wife, and look at the child who held his hand; for that was what there was.
22He would not hear it. He found the ferryman and crossed the waters of death, pole after pole, and stood at last before the old man who had outlived the flood.
23The old man looked at him and was not impressed. "You want to conquer death," he said. "Begin with something smaller. Conquer sleep. Stay awake six days and seven nights."
24Gilgamesh sat down to wait. And as soon as he sat, sleep rolled over him like a fog. The old man's wife baked a loaf each day he slept and set it by his head. When he woke, he swore he had only shut his eyes. They showed him the seven loaves: the first hard as wood, the next gone leathery, the next spotted, down to the last, still warm on the coals.
25Then he understood. He could not even master sleep.
26As a parting gift the old man told him of a plant with thorns, that grew at the bottom of the water. Whoever ate it would be young again. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and went down and pulled it up, though it tore his hands. He did not eat it. He said he would carry it home to Uruk and give it first to the old men of the city.
27On the road home he stopped at a pool to bathe. He laid the plant on the bank. A snake smelled its sweetness, and came up out of the ground, and carried it off. As it went it cast off its old skin and left it lying, and was new.
28Gilgamesh sat down and wept. He had gone to the end of the world. He had bled for it. And he had won a new skin for a snake.
29Then he got up, for there was nothing else to do, and went home with the ferryman beside him. They came in sight of Uruk. And the king, who had nothing in his hands, said to the ferryman: Go up on the wall. Walk along it. Look at the brickwork. See if it is not burnt brick, and well laid. See the palm groves, and the clay pits, and the houses of the city.
30That is the end of the tale.
31Ipiq stopped. His voice had held steady until the snake. After that it had gone rough, and he had finished with his face turned to the oven.
32The old woman had eaten nothing while he spoke. She sat with her hands round her staff. The coals ticked.
33Then she asked him a question. She asked it quietly, as one asks the way.
34"What have you left open?"
35He stared at her. Then anger came up in him, the first thing he had felt in twenty days, and it was almost a relief. "Open?" he said. "Nothing. Nothing is open. I had one son. He is under that floor, there, where you can see the new plaster. I taught him eleven signs. He will never learn the twelfth. What do you want me to say to you, old woman? That there is a wall? I have built no wall. I am a schoolmaster."
36She did not answer. She did not argue with him or comfort him. She had asked what she had come to ask. She took a date from the cloth and ate it, and after a while she lay down on her side by the oven with her bag under her head, as travellers do, and slept.
37Ipiq did not sleep. He sat on, furious, and the question sat with him. It would not go away, and it would not change into a different question.
38In the grey before dawn he heard the gate latch. When he looked, she was gone. She had left the rest of the dates on the cloth.
39He got up stiffly. He did not know why, but he went into the house, to the corner where the boy's things were. Ahassunu had not been able to move them. There was a clay donkey with three legs. There was a sandal. And there was a school tablet, the kind beginners use, round like a small loaf, to fit a child's palm.
40On one side was a line in Ipiq's own neat hand: the master's copy. On the other was the pupil's. The signs leaned and wandered. One was pressed so deep it had nearly gone through. At the edge, where the boy had held the wet clay, was the whole print of a small thumb.
41Ipiq held it for a long time. Then he did weep, at last, standing in the corner with his forehead against the wall, as quietly as he could. Ahassunu woke and came and stood beside him and said nothing, and put her hand flat between his shoulders.
42When it was full light he washed his face and went to the tablet-house.
43The boys were in the court. There were eleven of them. They got to their feet when they saw him, and no one knew where to look.
44"Where is Kubbur?" said Ipiq.
45One of them told him. The brick-maker had waited twenty days. Then he had said that a school with no master was no school, and a boy who could carry was a boy who could earn. Kubbur had gone to the brick pits three days ago.
46Ipiq knew the brick pits. A boy went into them at ten and came out at thirty bent like a hook, if he came out. He would mix mud and straw until the sums in his head went quiet. And it came to Ipiq, standing there, that this was a door too, and that it was closing while he watched, and that this one he could reach.
47He walked out of the city gate in his good robe, down to the pits by the canal. He found the boy up to his thighs in mud. He found the father and spoke with him a long time. What he promised is not recorded. But it is recorded that Kubbur came back with him, leaving mud on the tablet-house floor, and that Ipiq said nothing about the floor.
48That day he taught. And in the evening, when the boys had gone, he took a fresh tablet and began to write out the tale of Gilgamesh, from the beginning, in his best hand. He did not hurry. It took him the rest of that year. When a tablet was done he gave it to the older boys to copy, and he mended their mistakes.
49He kept the round tablet with the thumbprint on a shelf above his seat. He did not show it to anyone. Sometimes, when a small boy pressed a sign so deep it nearly went through, Ipiq would look up at the shelf for a moment before he spoke.
50Kubbur became a scribe, and then a master. He taught for forty years in a city downriver, and he made his pupils copy the tale of the king who would not die. He told them he had it from a man who had taken him out of the mud. They copied it for their pupils.
51We do not have Ipiq's tablets. They are dust, or they lie under some mound not yet opened. It does not matter much. The tale was never one man's. A thousand hands like his wrote it out, over a thousand years, each from the hand before. Some of them added to it, and some mended it. A scholar far down that line set at the front of it a call to climb the wall of Uruk and walk about on it, so that the tale began where it ended.
52Then the cities fell, and the tongue died, and for two thousand years no one on earth knew the name of Gilgamesh. The tablets lay in the ground and waited. They were dug up and read again, by people from countries that had not existed when they were written, and those people wept at the snake.
53The old woman was not seen again in Nippur. Ipiq asked at the gates. No one remembered her.
54He thought about her question for the rest of his life. He never did give her an answer in words. But there was a shelf with a round tablet on it, and under the shelf a row of boys bent over their clay.