The King Who Refused to Die

by Zecharia Sitchin

  “Gilgamesh is more interesting, then, though long dead, in spite of all his searches for immortality,” Henry said. “Did you know that to keep himself young he roamed the streets of Erech at night, seeking out wedding celebrations? He then challenged the bridegroom to a wrestling match, which he always won. Then he claimed for himself as a prize the right to be the first to sleep with the virgin bride.”

  “He did?” Astra said. “And what if there had been more than one wedding that night?” She chuckled.

  “It says here,” Henry said, pointing to the text of the first tablet, “that Enkidu, a sort of artificial man created by the god Enki, made love to a harlot for six days and seven nights without taking time out. Gilgamesh, equally virile, survived an annual rite of a Sacred Marriage with the goddess Inanna during which he had to perform fifty times in one night. . . . Does this answer your question?”

  Astra now took a closer look at Henry. He was younger than she was, maybe thirty. He had a freckled face and light brown hair and was far from being good-looking. But his smile had an audacity about it, fresh and inviting . . .

  “You seem to know a lot,” she said. “Are you a teacher or something?”

  “Indeed I am. A lecturer on Assyriology. And you?”

  “A has-been,” Astra replied with a shrug. “A damn good cabin attendant, now running the cabin crews’ briefing room, having become more mature and plump.”

  “Curvy, I would rather say,” Henry said, tilting his head as though to get a look at her from another angle. “Not unlike Inanna, better known as Ishtar, as a matter of fact. She used to flaunt her naked beauty, so most depictions of her show her naked or wearing a see-through garment.”

  He took Astra’s hand and drew her away from the display of tablets to the showcase with the seal cylinders. “Here,” he said, pointing at a group of seals, “you can see some of those depictions.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “She was the goddess of love. I suppose she had to live up to her reputation. . . . The sixth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh relates how, seeing him naked, Inanna invited him to make love to her. Will history repeat itself, Astra?” He looked into her eyes, his hold on her hand tightening.

  “Did Gilgamesh accept the invitation?”

  “Well . . . as the ancient tale goes, he did not. He turned her down, citing the instances when she had killed off her human lovers. But I would have taken the chance!”

  “It’s an interesting offer: to reenact an encounter from millennia ago and see if it turns out differently,” Astra said, pulling her hand from his. “But I still want to find out how I happen to be here. Do you know?”

  “I do,” a voice beside her said. Astra turned toward the speaker. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his fifties, his thick hair graying at the temples. His eyes were blue-gray, and he was staring at her so intensely that she could not move her gaze to see his other features.

  “You? But why?” Astra blurted out.

  “It’s rather private,” the stranger replied. He held out his hand. “Would you come with me, please?” He was still staring into her eyes.

  “Just a minute,” Henry said. “This young lady is with me!”

  “Nonsense,” the stranger said. “I’ve watched you trying to pick her up, even mocking her when she felt a bond with the ancient monuments. . . . So, please don’t mind my borrowing Miss Kouri for a while.”

  Without giving either one of them a chance to object further, he took Astra by the arm and led her away through the jostling crowd.

  They were outside the special exhibit area when Astra stopped short, pulling her arm away from his hold. “You know my name?” she said.

  “Yes. You are Miss Astra Kouri, aren’t you?”

  Astra could feel blood surge to her face. Her heart began to pound. “How?”

  The stranger smiled. “I am pleased you could accept the invitation,” he told her.

  “Who are you?”

  “My friends call me Eli, but that is short for my family name, Helios. Adam Helios, that is my full name. . . . Now you have your answer, don’t you?”

  Astra nodded.

  “Come with me, then.” He took her by the arm again and led her toward the entrance to the Assyrian exhibit, stopping in front of the stela of Ashurbanipal.

  “Look, Astra, look at your destiny star,” he whispered.

  “You!” Astra cried out. ‘‘What do you want of me?”

  Without shifting his gaze from hers, he took her hand and slid his fingers along its side to where Astra had a barely noticeable, lumpy scar. Then he took her free hand and slid her fingers along his hand’s side, until Astra could feel a similar lumpy scar on his hand.

  “Oh my God!” she said.

  “Yes, I too had a sixth finger that was surgically removed when I was a child,” he told her. “Isn’t that what was done to you, too?”

  “It’s incredible,” Astra said. “Totally confusing. . . . How did you know that? How did you know my name?”

  “Do you believe in destiny, Astra?” he whispered, putting his hands around her waist. “Do you believe that stars can beckon, that stones can speak?”

  Astra resisted his grasp. “How much do you know about me, for heaven’s sake?”

  He let go of her waist. “More than you yourself ever knew,” he said. “Come with me and I will tell you all.”

  He was no longer looking at her, but at the celestial symbols on the monument.

  “I really don’t think . . .” Astra began to say, but stopped as his hand reached out again, and he pressed his lumpy scar against hers.

  “We are one of a kind,” he said. “Uniquely endowed with a sixth finger. . . . Can’t you hear our destiny calling?” His eyes were again gazing straight into hers, demanding and commanding. Astra wanted to say something, but couldn’t.

  “Come,” he said, and took her by the arm. Astra went along.

  “I live nearby,” Eli added as they reached the stairs leading out of the museum. They crossed the courtyard and then Great Russell Street, which led into Museum Street, a narrow street flanked by old buildings that once upon a time were homes of the rich but now housed publishers’ offices and bookstores specializing in Orientalia and the occult. They walked silently, Eli still holding Astra’s arm.

  They turned into an even narrower street, then into an alley. Astra figured they were somewhere in the back of the buildings they had passed minutes earlier, but she couldn’t be sure. There were no street lights in the alley; in the darkness, Eli stopped in front of what turned out to be a door. Deftly he unlocked it, for the first time letting go of Astra’s arm. A dim bluish light went on inside as he opened the door, and a narrow stairway steeply leading up came into view.

  “Please,” he said.

  As soon as Astra was inside he locked the door behind them. “I’ll lead the way,” he continued, as he began to climb the stairs.

  There were landings at half-floor levels, leading through unexpected doors to unseen rooms, all barely noticeable in the dim bluish light whose source Astra could not determine. After walking up what seemed to Astra to be about two full floors, Eli opened a door and led her into a medium-size room where the bluish light was brighter. Astra could see that the room was furnished as a sitting room, with most of its available wall space taken up by ceiling-high bookshelves. There was a smell in the room, a dazzling smell. From her flying days, Astra could recognize, in a whiff, the smells of marijuana, hashish, and the like, but what she now smelled was none of those.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Eli said, pointing to a large, soft armchair. Astra tucked her handbag by her side.

  “Damn it,” she said, “I left my raincoat and hat in the museum!”

  “No worries,” Eli said. “They’ll be safe there until you pick them up. . . . Sherry?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he filled two glasses from a decanter that was on a small side table. He offered her a glass, and Astra raised her hand to take i
t, but he held on to the glass for a moment. “You are beautiful,” he said as he let go of it.

  Although her senses were engulfed by the sweet and dazzling smell filling the room, Astra did not let the remark slip by.

  “Is that your usual opening line?” she asked.

  He raised his glass. “Let’s drink to an enchanting evening. I promised to tell you all, and I will. Let me begin with the invitation,” he said as he sat himself in an armchair opposite hers. “To explain this will be the simplest thing I will be doing this evening. You see, I work in the museum. My job is to sort out and restore Near Eastern antiquities. I noticed you in the museum more than a year ago, and then saw you on your subsequent visits. I noticed you, you see, because you’ve reminded me of someone.” He paused to sip his sherry.

  “Of whom?” Astra asked.

  “You’ll meet her shortly,” he replied. “After a while I realized that you came to the museum on certain days, at certain hours, and I made it a point of awaiting you. More often than not, I was not disappointed. I watched you as you stood again and again by certain artifacts. As you have done this evening—yes, I watched you—you would touch some of the stelas and wall reliefs, the celestial symbols sculpted on them. You would pass your fingers over them, over one in particular. . . . I watched you, I watched your hand. . . . Unnoticed by you, I stood near you a few times. . . . Then, one day, as you raised your hand to touch the celestial symbols, I saw it!”

  “What was it that you saw?”

  “The scar, the telltale scar—the scar where your sixth finger had been before it was removed!” he answered, excitement in his voice, “and I knew then that finding you was the omen I had been waiting for. . . .” He paused and sipped his sherry to becalm himself. “The rest was easy. I followed you, I found out where you live and work, I found out your name. Then, when the museum prepared the Gilgamesh exhibit, and I saw the date that had been chosen for its opening, I knew that it was preordained. . . . I knew that the time had come to take the next fateful step. So I pinched an invitation and addressed it to you.”

  “All on account of my sixth finger?” Astra asked, taking a sip of the sherry. “Or was the rest of my body involved?”

  “Just like her,” Eli said. “Sharp-tongued, quick-tempered. . . . How well do you know the Bible, Astra?”

  “We had no Sunday school where I grew up,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I will let the Bible explain,” he replied. He got up and went to one of the bookshelves, picked out a volume, and went back to his armchair. Switching on a lamp that stood on a side table near him, he leafed through the book until he found what he was looking for. “Are you familiar with the biblical tale of the spies sent by Moses to Canaan ahead of the Israelite tribes?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Astra replied.

  “It’s told in the Book of Numbers, chapter 13. They went from the wilderness of Sinai through the Negev and reached the city of Hebron, which was the renowned abode of so-called giants, the three descendants of Anak: Achiman, Sheshai, and Talmai. . . .” He paused and leafed through the Bible again. “These three descendants of Anak are mentioned again: once more in the Book of Joshua and then again in the first Book of Judges, reporting the conquest of Hebron by the tribe of Judah. Each time the three are listed by their names—Achiman, Talmai, and Sheshai. . . . Do you know what the name Sheshai means?”

  “No idea.”

  “He of the six!”

  “Six fingers?” Astra ventured a guess.

  “You can bet your life on it,” Eli answered. “That whole part of southern Canaan bordering the Sinai Peninsula was known in antiquity for being the abode of descendants of superhuman beings, one of whose unique features was a sixth finger. Five hundred years later, King David, fighting the Philistines in that very same area, encountered the descendants of those superhuman beings. There were four of them in the city of Gath. Here, let me read to you from the second Book of Samuel: ‘And there was yet another battle at Gath, and there appeared yet another giant; and he had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in all, for he too was a descendant of the Rephaim.’”

  “Are you suggesting that we have something in common with the giants of the biblical tales?”

  “Of course,” Eli said. “The phenomenon is known to modern medicine as polydactyly, where a small extra digit grows on the side of the hand or the foot. The growth is without question an uncommon genetic trait, passed from generation to generation. Like all such uncommon traits, the erratic gene must be carried by both father and mother for the peculiarity to reappear in their offspring. . . . Sometimes, therefore, the gene may remain unseen, unexpressed, for generations—then reasserts itself when the matching mating occurs. The trait then appears in the offspring—in our case, a sixth finger or toe.”

  “I’ve read about such genetic defects peculiar to certain groups of people,” Astra said. “It’s a matter of heredity, they claim.”

  “Precisely,” Eli said. “Except that our particular trait is not a defect, not at all . . .”

  He did not finish the sentence. Instead he got up and refilled their sherry glasses. He handed Astra hers and remained standing. The lamp light formed an illuminated background behind him, a glow enhancing his silhouette in the room’s bluish hue. Astra was silent, awaiting his words.

  “We—you and I,” he said looking into her eyes, “have a common gene; we are descended from the same ancestors . . . people from days of yore who were already ‘of old’ in biblical times . . .”

  “But you just were saying that this is not a defect,” Astra interjected.

  “On the contrary,” said Eli. “It means we are eligible for immortality!”

  “Immortality? You must be joking.”

  “Not at all,” Eli said. “I’m dead serious.”

  “Just because we were born with a sixth finger?”

  “Because we are descended of the Rephaim, among other things. . . . Do you know what this biblical word means?”

  “No.”

  “It literally means ‘the Healers.’ They are mentioned in the Bible several times as the extraordinary residents of certain parts of the Holy Land in remote times. According to the lore of other ancient peoples, the Rephaim were divine beings who knew the secrets of healing . . .”

  “Like the archangel Raphael?”

  “That’s right, that’s precisely what the name means. ‘God’s Healer,’ or more literally translated, ‘the Healer of the deity called El’. . . . According to an ancient Canaanite tale, a king named Keret was a demigod, the son of El. Having angered a certain goddess, she afflicted him with a fatal disease. But as he was dying, El sent the goddess of healing to the rescue, and she restored Keret to life.”

  He took a sip of the sherry. “And then there is the Canaanite tale of Dan-El, clearly identified as a descendant of the Rephaim. Like the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, he had no male heir by his wife. Like Abraham, residing in the Negev area of Canaan, he had divine visitors who promised him a son by his wife in spite of the couple’s old age. To make that possible, they gave Dan-El a potion called Life Breath, which rejuvenated and invigorated him.”

  “Did it work?” Astra asked.

  “Oh, yes. A son was indeed born. When he grew up to be a young man, the goddess Anat—the Canaanite name for the goddess of war and love—desired him. Knowing the consequences of making love to a goddess except in certain circumstances, he refused. So, to entice him, Anat promised to obtain immortality for him.”

  “Immortality through rejuvenation. Eternal youth. Was that it?”

  “Yes,” Eli replied. “The divine trait of the Rephaim, passed along genetically to their descendants, revealed by the sign of the sixth finger!”

  “Tell me more,” Astra said. “All there is to know.”

  He came closer to her and with his hand lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “It’s a long journey back,” he said, “back to our origins.” />
  “Take me back,” she murmured. “I must know it all.”

  She wanted to close her eyes but his gaze was too penetrating to do so. Still holding her chin, he began to bend down over her, and Astra knew that he was going to kiss her. A shiver, like a lightning bolt, passed through her body. But he only kissed her lightly on the forehead, then let her go.

  “Very well,” he said. “Let us begin our journey to the past.”

  2

  Eli went back to his seat by the table lamp. In the bluish light that engulfed the room, and to which Astra’s eyes had now become accustomed, the bright light of the table lamp bathed Eli in an eerie glow, casting his large shadow upon the opposite wall.

  “The events concerning us happened long ago,” Eli began, speaking slowly, “and their roots are shrouded in the dimmest past. . . .” He picked up the Bible, holding it up. “The beginnings are recorded here, but only enough for a glimpse. The Bible is the entry point, the corridor is the tales of the misty past that are called mythology. And the treasure room is the Sumerian tales of prehistory that are, in fact, the Earth Chronicles.”

  “Like the tale of Gilgamesh?” Astra interjected.

  “From times much, much earlier than his, but the tale of Gilgamesh is more appropriate than you realize. First we have Gilgamesh himself. He claimed the right to immortality because he was two-thirds divine. His mother, Ninsun, was a goddess, and his father was descended from the god called Shamash. Then there was the hero of the Deluge, the one called Noah in the Bible and Ziusudra in the Sumerian texts. Gilgamesh went to find him because the gods had granted to Ziusudra an Everlife. The Bible described Noah as having been of pure lineage. The Sumerian chronicles are more specific; they tell us that Ziusudra’s father was the son of a god, the same Shamash.”

  “Lineage traced back to the gods, a divine gene—is that the secret of an Everlife?” Astra asked.

  “Lineage, heredity, divine origins, a certain gene . . . call it what you want.”

  “Which some mortals have because they are descended from offspring of gods?” Astra shifted uneasily in the armchair as she spoke. “And what is there to support the Sumerian contention that the so-called gods intermarried with humans?”