“The woman’s relatives hadn’t eaten meat for a long time. They found the chunks piled in the basket delicious. They grabbed with greedy hands. At last, in the bottom of the basket, they found the woman’s feet, her rings and bracelets. Her mother said: ‘I have eaten my daughter. Get the knives and kill her husband.’

“But the man was gone. While his in-laws were eating, he had said: ‘I’m just off to look for my wife. Perhaps the basket she’s carrying is too heavy for her.’ They pursued him for years. The man fled through the forest, where his brothers-in-law found the remnants of his campfires. At first they were cold and windblown. Gradually they got closer and closer. Now they were finding warm ashes. One day they caught sight of the man climbing into a canoe to get away. He already had one foot in the boat and one leg in the air when a brother-in-law’s axe hacked it right off. The man fell into the canoe and drifted out onto the water. Bleeding heavily, he thought: ‘So now what can I turn myself into? If I become a fish, they will fish for me. If I become an animal, they will hunt me down and eat me.’ Lying on the bottom of the canoe, he lifted his eyes to the sky. ‘Up there, I’ll go up there,’ he said. ‘They’ll never catch me there.’ So the man ascended to the constellation of Orion, where at last he had a name: the one-legged hunter.”

VI

“Like a pool of light sunk in a broader light, certain images come back: Gilgamesh and Enkidu build a raft and load it with a cedar trunk from Humbaba’s forest. Enkidu is at the helm. Sitting on the trunk, Gilgamesh is holding Humbaba’s head, now bereft of its powerful auras. That is the moment it begins, before everything falls apart. And Gilgamesh reaches my abode, alone.”

“Gilgamesh would never have confronted Humbaba if he hadn’t been with Enkidu, the man of the forest whom he had fought the first time he saw him, only to realize that he loved him more than anyone else.

“The animals of the forest saw Enkidu as one of their own. They would meet at the watering hole, without troubling one another. A form of benign, mutual disregard. This changed forever when Shamhat appeared. A prostitute of rare beauty. Enkidu was dazzled. More than Shamhat’s body, it was her makeup, her jewels, her perfume that stunned him. There was a new animal in the forest. They coupled for seven days and seven nights, without a break. For Enkidu it was a long journey through unknown territory. Pure pleasure was alien to the forest, where coupling was like eating, drinking, or sleeping.

“The animals sensed at once that something had changed forever between themselves and Enkidu. They stayed away from him. The gazelles fled. He had become a stranger, even before Shamhat took his hand, covered him with some of her clothes, and led him to a place Enkidu had never seen: Uruk, the Great City.