“Desperate, Gilgamesh asked for help from more than one god, in vain. Only the knowing Ea came to his aid. And Enkidu’s shade reappeared. Then Gilgamesh eagerly asked him how the Underworld was governed, what order prevailed, what fate awaited men? Did it depend on how they had lived on earth? Enkidu’s answers read like articles of law. But no mention was made of the ball and stick.”

“Twice Ishtar wept. The first time out of rage and vexation, because Gilgamesh had rejected her. The second time in her temple, because the solitary willow she had taken from the Euphrates was all eaten away. Gilgamesh was present on both occasions. First offending the goddess, then indulging her, but as a brother, not a lover.

“And twice Gilgamesh wept. Once because his ball and stick, made from the wood of the solitary willow, had vanished into the Underworld. Once for his friend Enkidu, who went down to the Underworld to get them back, never to return to the light above, except as a shade.

“Ishtar and Gilgamesh could be fierce opponents. But they are the only ones who are said to have seen the Deep. The waters of Ea. Such complicity went beyond hostility.

“Ishtar’s throne and Gilgamesh’s ball, which fell into the Underworld and led to Enkidu’s death, were both made of the wood of the same willow. No bond could have been stronger.”

“Gilgamesh came here as a stranger, a foreigner, standing tall in Urshanabi’s boat. He was worn out, pale, distraught. He was punting the boat with a long pole. I saw a rag hanging from another pole, vertical on the boat. It was the first ever sail, I later discovered, made from the boatman’s clothes. But only the faintest breeze blows over the waters of the dead. What matters is never to touch them. They are fatal.

“When Gilgamesh spoke to me, the first thing he talked about was the many risks he had run and the challenges he had faced to reach me. Every word reminded me of someone else, someone who spoke the same way: Ishtar. She was the only one of the Anunnaki who told stories of the rivers and marshes and mountains she had crossed, of the icy cold and suffocating heat that had oppressed and bruised her beauty. The goddess and the man who had refused to be her lover seemed to take turns at telling the same story. As if that story tied them tighter than the bed they hadn’t shared.

“I knew it and dreaded it: I was the one who would have to explain to Gilgamesh that his adventures were to no avail. Man is as fleeting as the dragonfly that flits for a day over the waters of the Euphrates and is gone. It was a hateful task, but that was why the Anunnaki had given it to me.

“I did what I had to. Afterward I was pierced by the sharpest of pains. A moment of torment that has stayed with me ever since, and will be with me, I imagine, forever.