The tall, shabby houses cast long, long shadows, and the sky was darkening. Only a scattering of people were still abroad. He intercepted a hurrying townsman—a tanner’s apprentice, from his smell and appearance—and inquired directly: what way should a stranger turn his feet in order to arrive at the Temple of Aten?
The youth’s eyes widened. He drew back, gave a blank stare, and pushed on past Enkidu quickly.
Enkidu drew similar responses from the other folk of Babylon, what few he could find to ask.
Twilight came over the city. Stars began to sparkle like lamps being lit in distant windows. It occurred to Enkidu that he might be forced to defer his visit to Aten’s temple until morning. He began to consider where he might lodge for the night.
The Temple of Marduk, of course. He would go there, present his credentials, accept their hospitality. He knew where Marduk was, at any rate.
Yet he was reluctant to visit Marduk first. Aten was the god who had drawn him to Babylon. Enkidu slowed his pace, considering his alternatives. Could he engage a room at an inn? For how much? He was not sure of the going rates in such a city. Despite his education, he remained a country lad. Still, he reasoned: half a shekel should be more than sufficient for a night’s room and a meal or two. He had fifteen of the silver half-sheckel coins on his person, and three full shekels. And other things of value. He tightened his finger on his clay tablet and looked about him.
He saw only closed doors.
It was dark now. Countless stars were out, and the half-moon rode high in the sky. The luminous arch had dimly materialized, spanning the entire sky, fascinating him as it always did. The planet Ishtar glowed in the west, seeming as close as fruit ripe for the plucking.
The street was far from divine, in contrast. Its tomb-like silence was broken only by the scurryings of rats and the barks of stray dogs that competed for street scavengings.
Enkidu had passed one or two places that might be inns. He struck out northward.
But the gate that separated Merkes from the rest of the city was now closed and locked. Enkidu’s shouts and bangings brought neither notice nor reply from the gatekeeper, if indeed there were one. Some system!
He would have to remain the night in Merkes.
He headed southward again with some vague plan of walking until morning or perhaps finding some place to sit or lie in the open, though he did not relish sullying his white cloak with the offal of the streets. But he was too tired to walk much longer, and it was not safe to stay out with one’s silver…
The streets continued to narrow as he moved on with something like panic supplanting his weariness. The paving ended and the houses closed in to a solid mass, one connected to the next—windowless, forbidding, gloomy. The only evidence that life went on behind the palmwood doors was the occasional openings and spewing out of table refuse. The street was in fact buried in offal and debris. The leavings of countless eaten shellfish crackled underfoot, and each step was a hazard of broken bricks half buried in settled clay. In some places the street level rose above that of the door stills, for the street was built of trampled refuse.
He had just dodged another post-priandal emission when another footfall crackled not far distant. He peered toward the sound.
A figure was approaching him, but the moon was behind it so that he could not see it clearly.
Enkidu stood very still. No point in inviting the attentions of a possible cutpurse.
As the person approached he could just make out a long, plain tunic, but it concealed the bodily outlines. The face seemed smooth. A woman? He could not tell her age in the shadow.
She eyed him boldly, perhaps noting the richness of his cloak, the quality of cloth in his shawl, his knee-length tunic, his headband, and his soft leather sandals. Or was it his face she contemplated: the high-set eyebrows that people claimed lent his narrow face a look of half surprise, the dark brown eyes, the young man’s beard that half-concealed his cleft chin? He knew he was not precisely handsome, of course; still—“One shekel,” she said. Enkidu realized that he had been approached by a prostitute.
He was in no mood for such wares. Moreover, she did not wear the mark of a registered courtesan of the Temple of Ishtar, so she was probably diseased. He turned away. All he wanted was a place to spend the night.
Reacting instantly to his look of distaste, she caught his arm. “Half a shekel.”
Enkidu angrily shrugged off her hand. He was not trying to bargain! But then another thought struck him. “Where may a stranger spend the night?”
Her eyes appraised him cynically. “The night? Two shekels!”
He caught her meaning. “Not with you!” he grunted, at once embarrassed and exasperated. “I want to sleep—no more. A room for the night, alone.”
She stared noncommittally until he brought out a bright shekel, its head of Nabonaid frowning in the shadow.
She took it without a word and turned. He followed her down the alley and into a nondescript dwelling. Even in the darkness of the inner passage he could see its degenerate state. The thin clay lining the walls had cracked and fallen down to be trampled into the dirt floor, and the unbaked bricks behind it were crumbling. They passed into a courtyard whose stench heralded the stacked tiles of an untended privy. Next to that, great jars were filled with water for drinking and household use. A standard arrangement. Crude steps cut into the courtyard wall led to the upper stories.
Enkidu wondered what kept the top floor from settling down into the bottom, since the house was so close to collapse, but he took a breath and mounted the steps. It was only for a night. He took his blank room on the second floor, not even asking for a lamp.
Strange that this city, rich with its temples and palaces and ziggurats, should neglect the wants of its living masses. The silver and gold outlay for just one temple, out of the half-hundred in Babylon, could rebuild the entire Merkes. But the voices of the priests were ever louder than those of the needy.
As he removed his rich outer tunic so as not to foul it on the filthy palm-bough mattress on the floor Enkidu was glad he had no light. He could not see the racing roaches that he knew were disturbed and intrigued by his presence. He folded the tunic carefully, brushed a space clear with the side of his hand, and set the material down beside him. He weighted it with the clay tablet. His money pouch he kept on his body, not trusting it elsewhere.
As he lay in the silence, his nostrils pinched by the close odor of cramped quarters in this old city, of stale sweat and rind of milk spilled in the mattress, the droppings of rats and fat roaches, his hand reached out to touch the tablet beside him. As his long sensitive fingers passed over the wedge-shaped indentations in its surface, as he read it in the dark, the discomforts and ugliness of his surroundings faded.
This was the script that summoned him to a new position and made possible his search for a new god.
Babylon, whose ancient beginnings were lost in legend, was the city of gods. King Nabonaid, usurping his way to power six years after Nebuchadnezzar, was a scholarly, unpopular man, more concerned with the religions of remote antiquity than with the Persian menace of today. He had ordered the idols of the realm brought to the capital. He stored the foreign gods in his own palace and allowed only the deities of Babylon to remain in their temples. Enkidu well understood the fury of the outlying worshipers thus deprived of their holy objects, yet he sympathized also with the king, who understood that there were more gods than Marduk and who claimed to be protecting them against the onslaughts of the barbarous Medes.