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nowhere to stand, no side we can ultimately take and not cut ourselves off from the truth. Yes, Humbaba is a monster; perhaps he is evil, as Ninsun says; conceivably he is even a threat to the city, though we are never told how. But it is at least as true that Humbaba has his appointed place in the divine order of things. He has specifically been commissioned to be monstrous by one of the great gods, because humans are not supposed to penetrate into the Cedar Forest and chop down its trees.
    If there must be a monster in the house (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens), let him be one who is just doing his job, without malice. The problem with believing in evil monsters and an evil-hating god (or God) is that it splits the universe down the middle, separates us from at least half of creation, and eventually leads to the claustrophobic and doom-haunted world of the Germanic hero sagas, however idealistic we may be. “The struggle between good and evil / is the primal disease of the mind,” wrote the sixth-century Zen master Seng-ts’an, who knew what he was talking about. It is all too easy to see ourselves as fighting on God’s side, to identify our ideology with what is best for the world and use it to justify crusades, pogroms, or preemptive attacks. Projecting evil onto the world makes me unassailably right—a position as dangerous in politics as in marriage.
    Much of Book III is in debate form: between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, then between Gilgamesh and the elders of Uruk. It is a debate between bravery (or foolhardiness) and prudence. Gilgamesh’s position is that he must go on this journey in order to wineverlasting fame. Enkidu first points out that the Cedar Forest is forbidden to humans and that Humbaba has been put there by Enlil himself, to terrify men. Then, echoed by the elders, he says that in any case the journey is too dangerous and Humbaba too powerful. The arguments are not sophisticated and don’t vary. Gilgamesh wins the debate by walking away. He is the king, after all, and can do whatever he wants; what he wants now is to order new weapons at the forge. By the end of the episode, Enkidu and the whole city support him. The elders offer their cautious, geriatric advice. The young men cheer. The heroes depart.
    They walk east, in three-day marches, at the pace of more than three hundred miles a day (not a huge effort for someone like Gil-gamesh, whose legs, according to one fragmentary passage, are nine feet long). Each march is described in exactly the same way; the repetition creates a sense of extended time, a shift from the ordinary time of the city into mythological time. Each culminates in the dream ritual, which is described in the same few crisply visualized lines. Gilgamesh’s dreams vary in their details, but they are all essentially the same dream of disaster or near disaster. Enkidu, by the method known as “reversal of values,” interprets them as omens that promise victory. And though his interpretation is correct for the actual battle with Humbaba, there is another sense in which the dreams are begging to be taken at their face value, unreversed, as the other dreams in the epic are. A disaster does indeed loom ahead, though with a time delay. Ironically, it involves the death of the dream interpreter, a death that is the direct, divinely ordained consequence ofkilling Humbaba. A more literal interpreter might advise Gilgamesh to turn back, however aggressively Shamash urges him to attack.
    Inside the Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are alternately seized by terror, and each in turn encourages the other. For a Babylonian hero, unlike the imperviously brave men of Germanic legends, like Beowulf and Siegfried, it was no disgrace to feel fear. Gilgamesh can not only be afraid at the sight of the monster, but can say he is. He does not run like the great Hector fleeing in terror from Achilles outside the wall of Troy, but he is frozen in his tracks. Enkidu, who