“At last the wind blew from the valley of the Indus, that wind written in your name: sind bad. You came from the sea, not from the lagoon. You are salty with seawater. I live at the point where the fresh waters spring up from the deep and mingle at the confluence of the rivers. We speak languages from different families, though both worship what is liquid. You traveled far to reach this place, unaware. I expected you from the start. I yearned to feel this other wind, blowing from places that know nothing of the Anunnaki and celebrate other gods that the Anunnaki know nothing of. I am fascinated by this confusion, this mixing of names and languages, something always about to happen and never finally accomplished.

“One day the Anunnaki withdrew. Where they went I don’t know. They had homes in the stars. And their name means: Children of Heaven. As for me, very likely they forgot me. Or wanted me to stay put where I was. In the end, I was always a relic.

“The thing I know best is the thing that most resists man’s knowing: my protector god, Ea. I can’t pretend to be an expert on anything else. The first thing that has to be said about Ea is that his kingdom cannot be seen. A boundless subterranean stratum of fresh water: the Apsu. Beneath that water, a staircase leads down to the kingdom of Ereshkigal. Where the dead are.

“From the beginning, Ea’s home was apart and remote from that of the other gods. The waters rise in two spouts from his shoulders. Umsu, his minister, has two faces and looks very like his master. They wear the same hat, with four parallel pairs of horns. But the waters do not gush from his shoulders.

“There was a time when everyone knew these stories. They introduced variations, they superimposed one on another, or combined them, or split them up. And etched them on clay tablets. The tablets ended up buried under rubble and sand. Thousands upon thousands of them. In the end, I was the only one left who knew those stories. But I had no one to tell them to, until you arrived. From that moment on, I haven’t been able to stop telling them once again, even when you’re sleeping. Nothing I tell you is made up. It all happened. Or at least, it was all etched on those clay tablets.”

At this point Sindbad interrupted:

“In the ports I passed through, people didn’t tell stories about gods. They didn’t feel the need. They told stories about merchants and warriors, princesses and prostitutes, peasants and administrators, cultured men and sages, as well as kings and queens. But every now and then, there would be stories quite unlike any of these. And they lodged themselves in the mind, they came back at night. One of those stories has tormented me for years. All I can say is that I came across it in a very remote place, in the Tropics. And it has never left me.