To the Land of the Living Read Online Free PDF

to live forever?”
    “Gilgamesh am I, yes, who was king in Uruk when that was the greatest city of the Land of the Two Rivers, and who in his folly came to think that there could be some way of cheating death.”
    “Do you hear that, Bob?”
    “Incredible. Beyond all belief!” muttered the other.
    Rising until he towered above them both, Gilgamesh drew in his breath deeply and said with awesome resonance, “I am Gilgamesh to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna the goddess in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal.” He paused and stared at them, letting it sink in, those words that he had recited so many times in situations much like this. Thenin a quieter tone he went on, “When death took me I came to this nether world they call the Afterworld, and here I pass my time as a huntsman, and I ask you now to excuse me, for as you see I have my tasks.”
    Once more he turned away.
    “Gilgamesh!” said Lovecraft again in wonder. And the other said, “If I live here till the end of time, H.P., I’ll never grow used to it. This is more fantastic than running into Conan would have been! Imagine it: Gilgamesh!
Gilgamesh
!”
    A wearisome business, Gilgamesh thought: all this awe, all this adulation.
    The problem was that damned epic, of course. He could see why Caesar became so irritable when people tried to suck up to him with quotations out of Shakespeare’s verses. “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus,” and all that: Caesar grew livid by the third syllable. Once they put you into poetry, Gilgamesh had discovered, as had happened to Odysseus and Achilles and Caesar after him and many another, your own real self can begin to disappear and the self of the poem overwhelms you entirely and turns you into a walking cliché. Shakespeare had been particularly villainous that way, Gilgamesh thought: ask Richard III, ask Macbeth, ask Owen Glendower. You found them skulking around the Afterworld with perpetual chips on their shoulders, because every time they opened their mouths people expected them to say something like “My kingdom for a horse!” or “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” or “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Gilgamesh had had to live with that kind of thing almost from the time he had first come to the Afterworld; for they had written the poems about him soon after, all that pompous brooding stuff, a whole raft of Gilgamesh tales, some of them retelling his actual deeds and some mere wild fantasies, and then the Babylonians and the Assyrians and even those smelly garlic-gobbling Hittites had gone on translating and embroidering them for another thousand years so that everybody from one end of the known world to the other knew them by heart, and even after all those peoples were gone and their languages had been forgotten there was no surcease, because these twentieth-century folk had found the whole thing and deciphered the text somehow and made it famous all over again. Over the centuries they had turned himinto everybody’s favorite all-purpose hero, which was a devil of a burden to bear: there was a piece of him in the Prometheus legend, and in the Heracles stuff, and in that story of Odysseus’ wanderings, and even in the Celtic myths, which was probably why this creepy Howard fellow kept calling him Conan. At least that other Conan, that ratty little sniveling drunken one, had been a Celt. Enlil’s ears, but it was wearying to have everyone expecting you to live up to the mythic exploits of twenty or thirty very different culture-heroes! And embarrassing, too, considering that the original non-mythical Heracles and Odysseus and some of the others dwelled here too and tended to be pretty possessive about the myths that had been attached to
them
, even when they were