Page Content (OCR)
338 immense brilliance: "they spread awesome rays towards the lour points of the earth, scorching everything like fire," one text stated; another, a lamentation over Nippur, recalled "the storm, in a flash of lightning created." An atomic mushroom—"a dense cloud that brings gloom"—then rose to the sky; it was followed by "rushing wind gusts ... a tempest that furiously scorches the heavens." Then the prevailing winds, blowing from west to east, began to spread toward Mesopotamia: "the dense clouds that bring gloom from the sky, that bear the gloom from city to city." Not one. but several, texts attest that the Evil Wind, bearing the cloud of death, was caused by gigantic explosions on a day to re- member: and the Earth was smitten, its face obliterated by the maelstrom— When the skies were darkened "in the west," near "the breast of the sea"—a graphic description of the curving Mediterranean coast at the Sinai peninsula—from a plain "in the midst of the mountains," a plain that became a "Place of No Pity." It was a place that served before as the Place of Launching, the place from which the gods ascended toward Anu. In addition, a mount also featured in many of these place identifications. In the Erra Epic, the mount near "the place from which Great Ones ascend" was called the "Mount Most Su- preme"; in one of the lamentations it was called the "Mount of Howling Tunnels." This last epithet brings to mind the descrip- tions, in the Pyramid Texts, of the tunneled mount with sloping un- derground passages, to which Egyptian Pharaohs journeyed in search of an afterlife. In The Stairway to Heaven we have identi- fied it with the mount Gilgamesh had reached in his journey to the Place of the Rocketships, in the Sinai peninsula. Starting from that mount, a lamentation text stated, the blast's deadly cloud was carried by the prevailing winds eastward all the way "to the boundary of Anshan" in the Zagros Mountains, affect- ing all of Sumer from Eridu in the south to Babylon in the north. The unseen death moved slowly over Sumer, its passage lasting THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN On that day When heaven was crushed and covered as with a shadow... . The lamentation texts identified the site of the awesome blasts as