Finding Gobi: The Bond between a Man and a Dog

Dion Leonard, age 42 and seasoned ultra-marathon runner, is adopted by a stray dog in his 155-mile race through the Gobi Desert. The multi-day race starts at 8am on the first four days, a run each day of about a marathon distance, and the final and fifth day of the race, the run is a 50-mile endurance race to the finish. On ultra-marathon races, the runner must carry his own gear and food for the entire distance. Only water and a tent is provided, the most basic of elements to facilitate in the run. So to pare down the excess ounces of weight, Dion was carrying only 2,000 calories of food per day—mostly in power hydrating gels—even though he would be burning about 5,000 calories a day.

At the end of day 1, the leg of the race through high elevation in the Tian Shen Mountains, Dion was placing third in the race. He chugged into camp and moved to his tent space, passing a small dog that was charming people for food. Getting people to give it food so early in the race was no mean feat, and Dion’s thoughts, “Clever dog. There’s no way I’d feed it.”

Day 2 of the race the cute dog was out at the starting line, fascinated with the line up of runners. Dion took his place near the front to get in position for a tight squeeze he knew would be coming up in the trail early on. The dog fastened its attention on Dion’s yellow gaiters and started playing with the shoe strings, and once Dion burst into motion, the flashing yellow gaiters became even more fascinating to the little dog, and thus became the race for Day 2 … Dion running and being paced by a small dog with legs no longer than Dion’s hands. At the end of Day 2 Dion sacrificed a morsel of calorie-giving food to the dog, which happily curled up beside Dion and claimed its spot for the night.

Day 3 kicked off with the dog adamantly attached to Dion’s side and they sped off through an increasingly hot desert. Running for Dion is not pleasure like it is for his wife, a running trainer. In fact, he hates running; he just likes competing. Frustrations bother him, his scarred childhood affects his performance, and running without his wife Lucja to emotionally support him is hell. But the dog running beside him soothes him and his mind reaches out … and he starts to care. The dog is determined but when culverts appear, the short-legged dog struggles to keep up, and when a knee-deep river appears and the dog whines and barks behind him, Dion finally does something he’s never done before, the competition takes second place and he turns around … giving the dog priority. Losing race-breaking minutes, he wades back, scoops up the dog, and crosses the river. From then on he carries the dog over other culverts, and stops every hour or two to give the dog water out of his own bottle and in his own hand.

At the end of the race, a race that Dion placed second in and could have been first if he had sacrificed the life of another runner who collapsed and would have died without Dion’s attention and all of his water, Dion triumphed over some of the evil demons that had haunted him from his childhood. He was content placing second, saying second felt good because he was a trail player who recognized that priorities affect life and one’s ultimate satisfaction in it.

Source

The cover of the book says “A man, a dog, and the love that changed both their lives forever” is not an understatement. About two-thirds of the book is about the bonding relationship of Dion and the dog he named Gobi as he went through the process of immunizations and immigration to the UK. He sacrificed another ultra-marathon he was scheduled to run in Chile in order to eliminate the stress to Gobi a four-month quarantine time period in the UK would create. Priorities were priorities, and by this time the story of Gobi and her bonding with an ultra-marathon runner had become one of the international heart-throb stories of 2016.

From Jonathan Brown’s write-up in the Daily Mirror which brought the story of Gobi and Dion to the press (July 2016), Dion interviewed with BBC Radio Live, BBC UK and World Services, CNN, Washington Post, ESPN, ABC, Fox News, USA Today, Huffington Post, Reuters, the New York Times, Inside Edition, Times, Canadian Post, Channel 7 Australia, Good Morning Britain, Eric Zane Show podcast, and more. The story went even more viral with crowd funding with contributions from all over the world—Australia, India, Venezuela, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Ghana, Cambodia, and even North Korea. The book Finding Gobi: The Amazing True Story (2017) ends with Gobi at home in the UK with Dion, Lucja, and Lara the cat. But does the story end or … will Dion take Gobi out on subsequent ultra-marathons as the dog is clearly a runner?!

Stones Turned to Animal Art

Japanese artist Akie Nakata (known simply as Akie) turns found stones and rocks into adorable animal paintings you can hold in the palm of your hand. Inspired by the natural shapes of each stone she comes across, Akie chooses the ones she believes already have their own destined characters. Ever since she was a child, the self-taught artist has loved collecting stones. She began her stone paintings in 2011 when, while taking a walk along a river bank, she encountered a particular pebble that looked like a rabbit. The artist tells My Modern Met in an email, “Stones have their own intentions, and I consider my encounters with them as cues […] to go ahead and paint what I see on them.”

After sourcing the animal-shaped stones, Akie considers each character carefully. She asks herself, “Am I positioning the backbone in the right place? Does it feel right? Am I forcing something that disagrees with the natural shape of the stone?” She then carefully paints the stone’s surfaces with acrylic paint. From cats and dogs to owls, mice, and even an entire opossum family, each of Akie’s stone animals look remarkably lifelike. Painting the eyes last, Akie considers her work complete when she sees “the eyes are now alive and looking back [at her.]” She tells us, “To me, completing a piece of work is not about how much detail I draw, but whether I feel the life in the stone.”

While some might contest that a stone is not a living organism, when Akie holds one in her hand, she feels everything it has “silently witnessed over the millennia.” Believing each rock has a story to tell, the artist decides to breathe life into each one with her paintings. She reveals, “Sometimes I paint while I talk to the stone as I hold it in my hand.” Akie hopes that her stone animals will be treasured by those who hold them, as they treasure their own lives “because we all stand on the same earth, and we come from the same earth.”

You can find more of Akie’s incredible artwork on Instagram, and if you're lucky enough, you may get the chance to own one of her unique pieces when she announces their availability on Facebook. Japanese artist Akie Nakata turns found stones and rocks into adorable animal paintings you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Sources article: Artist Transforms Found Stones Into Animals You Can Hold in the Palm of Your Hand

Inspired by the natural shapes of each stone, Akie uses acrylic paint to bring their creature characters to life.


Each stone animal looks remarkably lifelike.

Talking Hands: Signing in an Israeli Village

Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, is the only Western journalist to have set foot in the remarkable Bedouin community in Israel where there is an unusually high rate of deafness. Margalit’s book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007) is the outcome of her three-day immersion visit to the village with expert sign linguists. To be allowed into the village as an observer, Margalit had some background in American Sign Language but was under no circumstances to “speak” to anyone during the three days. She was allowed to document but not allowed to contaminate the pure sign language that had evolved in the previous 70 years into a third-generation language. Margalit explored the visit with an analysis of the unique syntactic sign language which was very different from the Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the sign language of the country.

Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4% of the population! In Israel and the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 percent or one in a 1,000! Unlike in those areas, in Al-Sayyid there is no stigma against being deaf, and because of the high rate of deafness, and because of the remoteness of the village, the rest of the village sees deafness as normal and the majority of hearing villagers are bilingual, signing their local sign language while also speaking Hebrew.

Seventy years ago the first deaf child was born to the community and soon followed by nine more. In this first cohort of deaf children sprouted the pidgin sign which blossomed into the highly communicative local sign language three generations later. However, in the present generation the young deaf children are bussed to a neighboring village to be educated with Israeli Sign Language and linguists are madly trying to document the local sign language that is now  being infiltrated with more and more ISL. Thus, Margalit’s visit with linguists to Al-Sayyid.

Speakers and signers work side by side with almost no job being exclusive for either a speaker or a signer. In fact, the whole village has evolved into a speaking-signing village, but this is not new. From the early 1700s to mid-1900s Martha’s Vineyard had two up-island towns (West Tisbury and Chilmark) where the villagers had so intermarried that their incidences of deafness was one in 49 in Tisbury and one in 25 in Chilmark, just as it is in Al-Sayyid. Also like in Al-Sayyid, signing among all of the townspeople had evolved but was very difficult if not impossible for signing outsiders to understand. Apparently and unique to signing in the United States, Martha’s Vineyard sign language evolved from British Sign Language as 40% of the signs were found to have British cognates while only 22% had overlap with ASL. Martha’s Vineyard sign language was active for about 250 years until islanders started marrying off-islanders, diluting the recessive deaf gene. No deaf signers from Martha’s Vineyard are alive today. Similarly, the demise of the local sign language at Al-Sayyid is expected to rapidly decline, also to marriages outside of the village and with the more globalized education of bussing the young to broader educational opportunities outside of the Al-Sayyid community.

Interesting Points Related to Signing Noted by Margarit Fox

• Al-Sayyid sign language has not evolved differently because of differences related to gender. However, sign language for Dublin’s deaf children was introduced in the mid 1800s by two Dominican nuns but taught in two gender isolated institutions—St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. The schools rarely mixed and thus their language evolved radically differently. However, the deaf girls frequently married the deaf boys with the girls learning the dialect of their husbands, making them bilingual Irish Sign Language users. Husbands rarely deigned to learn the dialect of the women as it was viewed as an inferior dialect. With children using the “male” dialect for schooling and interactions, the women’s dialect gradually disappeared.

• In 1917 Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened the Connecticut Asylum for teaching the French version of sign language (the British refused to teach Gallaudet).

• Nicaragua had no widespread education for the deaf until the 1970s. In 1977 a small 50-pupil school was opened and this cohort brought their many home-signs which started a more universal Nicaraguan sign language. The first cohort of students never really attained fluency but they did establish a mean of communication, much like a pidgin language. The second cohort came in 1983 and attached grammar, fluency and syntax to the pidgin, creating a Creole. In the space of just a few years the full-blown Nicaraguan Sign Language had evolved.

• American Sign Language (and perhaps Al-Sayyid Sign Language) evolved into signs for complex words on seemingly an infinite rage and nuance, from compounds to constellations of inflections. As one researchers states, “The existence of such elaborate formal inflectional devices clearly establishes ASL as one of the inflecting languages of the world, like Latin, Russian, and Navajo.”

• Spoonerisms are the reversal of two speech sounds, often with a humorous effect, and were made famous by the Oxford don, Reverend William A. Spooner (1844-1930). Examples:

“the queer old dean”
“noble tons of soil”
“You have hissed all my mystery lecture. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted the whole worm.” (said to reprimand a student)

Or others not attributed to Spooner:

“Don’t throw your cigarette down, there’s a hire fazard.”
“Who am I to sneeze at a flee runch?”
“We’re having a rot post for dinner.”
“fash and tickle”
“Wing’s babliography”

• Linguists study slips of the tongue to reveal info about language—language structure, language acquisition and historical language change. For signers, slips of the hand can similarly reveal the structure and organization of language.

• Sign language is of “vertical” construction. People can speak faster than they can sign, with the ASL signers producing about two signs per second to typical speakers of English saying about four words per second. However, sign language has “vertical” construction which allows words to be pluralized by a shift in the hand or questions asked by the tilt of the head. In fact, these subtle sign cues make signing easier comparable to spoken English.

• The most commonly word order for spoken languages in the world is SOV, e.g. Japanese and Korean. The local languages of Al-Sayyid are Arabic, a SVO (Standard Arabic is VSO) and Hebrew, also SVO. Israeli Sign Language, however, is relatively free, but the most common orders are SVO and OSV. The local sign language wasn’t specified, but it is modality-driven, has WH-questions tagged on the end, and is clearly a structure consistent language. Imagine that--a language evolving in a mere 70 years!

29 "Difficult" Women Who Wrote Their Own Rules

National Geographic article, May 12, 2018, by Simon Worrall, curator of Book Talk

These 29 women weren’t willing to be anything but fully themselves, 

from Jane Goodall to Frida Kahlo to Billie Jean King.

“If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun,” Katharine Hepburn once remarked. So, in honor of Mother’s Day, we have asked Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women, to talk about some of the iconic women that have inspired her, from aviator Amelia Earhart to newscaster Rachel Maddow and National Geographic Explorer Jane Goodall. What links them all is a determination to trust themselves and the courage to break the rules.

Speaking from her home in Portland, Oregon, Karbo explains why Jane Goodall was one of her childhood heroes; why she finds the demands of modern American womanhood such a challenge; and why women are often labelled “difficult” just for being themselves.

____________________________________________________________________________

Being difficult is usually a negative character trait. But you celebrate it as a virtue. Unpack the paradox for us and explain how it links the diverse women you profile.

There are invisible quotes around “difficult” that don’t appear in the title. Women who are strong, passionate and determined don’t walk around saying, “Oh, look, I’m difficult.” They just believe they’re living their lives. It’s a word slapped on them by other people. If you don’t care too much what people think, you risk being called a difficult woman because you’re not staying in your lane or doing what is expected of you. For the most part, any time a woman doesn’t do that she can be called difficult. When a woman inconveniences somebody she can be called difficult. A woman who believes her own needs, goals, and desires are at least as important as everyone around her risks being called difficult. One of the first reviewers said, “That’s a pretty low bar.” I said, “Thank you for making my point for me.” Because it actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us. [laughs]  

In the book, there are 29 women and each woman has what I believe to be her very specific traits. That was the lens that I used when I wrote these essays. If you look at someone like Rachel Maddow, she’s brainy. Oftentimes a woman who is not afraid to display her intelligence can be considered difficult. It’s like, “What is she, a know-it-all?

The first person in the book is J.K. Rowling, whom I call “scrappy.” She is someone who, given the position she finds herself in, could rest on her laurels, continuing the Harry Potter franchise or writing adult mysteries. But she takes to Twitter, calls people out, speaking truth to power, and so gets in a lot of hot water. But that’s her nature. She needs to express her opinion regardless of the fallout.

Jane Goodall appears in the television special “Miss Goodall and the World of Chimpanzees,” originally broadcast on CBS, on Wednesday, December 22, 1965. Goodall was only one of eight people allowed to get a PhD at Cambridge University without having an undergraduate degree, based on her field experience studying chimps in the wild.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CBS VIA GETTY

One of National Geographic’s most celebrated explorers is Jane Goodall. Tell us about that key moment when she stood her ground in the face of criticism from male superiors, and why trusting yourself is so important for a woman.

Jane Goodall was one of my very first idols. My parents had a subscription to Nat Geo and before I could even read I would flip through pictures of Jane Goodall in Africa, squatting down in her khaki shorts, talking to a chimp. But it is important to look at where she came from. She was one of only eight people ever allowed to do a Cambridge PhD program without having an undergraduate degree. Everything she knew, she knew from the field. 

When she had to meet with the Cambridge dons, you can imagine how intimidating it must have been. They were sort of mocking her because she insisted on giving the chimps names, and believed they not only had a very specific social structure, but specific personalities, which sounded extremely silly in that day and age. When they expressed that to her, she went back to her own childhood and said, “Anyone who has ever had a pet dog knows that an animal has a personality.” Imagine the courage it took to say, “Look, I know what I know and all of your grandeur, authority and power is not going to move me off of my position.”

You write, “We are exhausted—or at least I am—by the demands of American womanhood.” Talk about that feeling and whether it has got harder—or easier—to be an independent woman today?

Women today feel like they have to be better all the time. I remember a friend in college who would run a mile every day. It was like she was headed for the Olympics! Now, if you run a mile a day it’s practically like you’re not even exercising. [laughs] We all have to be super fit, which takes a lot of time; we have a baby and then eight hours later we have to be ready to walk the red carpet; we have to have a great career; and we have to be up to date, having read all the good books and seen the good movies. 

The Internet hasn’t helped because we can now hop on 24/7 and see all the ways in which we are not trying to improve ourselves. [laughs] It used to be women’s fashion magazines, but those came out once a month! Once you had read that, you were good for three weeks. Now, it’s ever present—10 ways you can improve your tennis game, 9 ways to improve your love life. All of that, coming at you all of the time, doesn’t give you a lot of headspace to think of anything other than yourself. You also wind up thinking, “Oh, God, my tennis game is crappy and I didn’t think about that until this moment!” [laughs] It’s insane!

Amelia Earhart is greeted by her husband George Palmer Putnam on her return to Newark Airport, New Jersey, after a transcontinental flight on June 22, 1931. When Earhart and Putnam married, she told him that she wasn’t going to be a “traditional” wife.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CSU ARCHIVES, EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY

Amelia Earhart once said, “Women, like men, should try to do the impossible.” She also had some very unconventional views on marriage, didn’t she?

She married George Putnam and they were the perfect couple because he was a born promoter. He was the heir to the GP Putnam Sons Publishing house, who had published a lot of explorers and adventurers, and he was one himself. So what was so great about falling in love with Amelia was that she was the perfect person to promote. Not only was she courageous, she was very photogenic and polite; she wore clothes well; and she had a lot of stamina and a genuine interest in talking to people. 

On her wedding day, she gave Putnam a letter saying, ‘I’m not gonna stop doing what I’m doing to be a traditional wife.’ There was also a veiled subtext, saying ‘I’m going to try and be loyal to you if I can, but don’t have too high expectations on that front.’ [laughs] I included her specifically because I was interested in including women who were introverted. When we think of difficult women, we tend to think they’re extroverted and opinionated. But there are a lot of quiet, introverted women, like Jane Goodall and Amelia Earhart, who were doing exactly what they wanted to do and moving under the radar.

Journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway traveling together shortly after their 1940 marriage. Gellhorn was a noted writer and war journalist in her own right.
PHOTOGRAPH BY EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL, ALAMY

Martha Gellhorn, the writer and journalist, is best known for being the partner of Hemingway. But she was much more than that, wasn’t she?

When I give shorter interviews, Martha is always Hemingway’s third wife. I know she is spinning in her grave, because she was a writer and intrepid journalist in her own right. In fact, she wound up leaving the marriage to Hemingway, the only wife who did leave, because she couldn’t bear the insular life they had. She wanted to be where the world was being made or unmade, as the case may be. 

She was extraordinarily courageous. She made it to the front in WWII by hook or by crook. She was forever sneaking aboard a ship, or flying under false pretenses, or pretending to be a nurse, in order to get to the front lines. Throughout her life, she was concerned with injustice—particularly economic injustice—for people all over the world who were not getting a good deal. She was smart, very difficult, and also glamorous! She was blonde, long-legged, and would wear these great hunting outfits.

Artist Frida Kahlo stands by her painting, entitled Me Twice, on October 24, 1939. Kahlo, like many “difficult women,” was gender-fluid, refusing to be limited in any area of her life, says author Karen Karbo.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMAN/GETTY

 Like the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, quite a number of the women you celebrate have fluid attitudes to sexuality and gender. Is this part of “being difficult,” or, at least, different?

Women tend to be people-pleasers. But the problem of being a people-pleaser is that you wind up shuttering off more and more of your personality, like someone in a big house who keeps shutting up empty rooms until they are living in the kitchen and the front room. Difficult women have all the doors open in all the rooms. They are so fully human that, to keep the metaphor going longer, they are happy to walk through every door.

I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with being difficult, but difficult women tend to be in touch with all the different parts of their personalities. They’re inhabiting the fullness of themselves. So, being gender-fluid, as we say today, or having sexual proclivities you’re not willing to ignore, is often true of difficult women.

Billie Jean King was recently celebrated in the movie Battle of The Sexes. But her tennis match against Bobby Riggs was a small part of her contribution to women’s liberation, wasn’t it?

The battle of the sexes was obviously the headline event, but there was a lot of interesting backroom politics, when she broke with the USTA and started the women’s tour, in protest of the fact that, as tennis became more popular, men were paid more and more while women’s wages remained stagnant, or even declined. 

When Billie Jean first hit the tennis courts in the 70s, women’s tennis was a kind of nice sideshow to men’s tennis. They wore these little skirts, they were pretty and would glisten with sweat. It was all great, but nobody took it seriously. From the get-go, though, Billie Jean was a competitor. Today, we take it for granted when we see someone like the Williams sisters out there being competitive, grunting and groaning and hitting that ball for all they’re worth. But that wasn’t always the case. Billie Jean was the first female competitor to show that she was competitive and what it meant to be a serious professional athlete.

She also became an inspirational figure for the LGBT community, right?

She did, though she grew up in a conservative part of Southern California that was very homophobic. She openly admits that when she first came to terms with her own sexuality she was also homophobic! So, it was very confusing. When she was outed by her partner, Marilyn Barnett, everyone said, “Deny it, deny it, deny it!” But she couldn’t. She had to be honest and it was extraordinarily difficult for her. It made things complicated with her parents. The book is not just a celebration of difficult women. It is also, sub-textually, saying, ‘You can be difficult and get through these tough parts of your life. You will survive it.’

If you could have dinner with just one of these women, who would you choose, and why?

OMG! Give me a moment. [laughs] You know, one of the women people don’t talk about much is Vita Sackville-West. I think I would have dinner with her. She was a writer and a poet who married fellow writer Harold Nicholson. She was also Virginia Woolf’s lover. We talk about gender fluidity now as if we all know what that is and it’s no big deal. But she was one of the first people who really struggled with this. She lived a long life and had two sons, one of whom wrote a wonderful biography of her marriage to Harold Nicholson. She even created a world-class garden, at Sissinghurst Castle. So I would, for sure, want to hear her gardening tips. [laughs]

This interview was edited for length and clarity [and for this blog paragraphing adjusted to imitate the question-answer style of the article].

Gilgamesh

[DUSTCOVER] Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, and although previously there have been competent scholarly translations of it, until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed translator Stephen Mitchell's lithe, muscular rendering allows us to enter an ancient masterpieces as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is. His insightful introduction provides a historical, spiritual, and cultural context for this ancient epic, showing that Gilgamesh is more potent and fascinating than ever.

Gilgamesh dates from as early as 1700 BCE — a thousand years before the Iliad. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tablets on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1953 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century. When the great Poet Rainer Maria Rilke first read Gilgamesh in 1916, he was awestruck. "Gilgamesh is stupendous," he wrote. "I consider it to be among the greatest things that can happen to a person."

The epic is the story of literature's first hero  — the king of Uruk in what is present-day Iraq — and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city that a preemptive attack on a monster can have dire consequences, and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned. In giving voice to grief and the fear of death— perhaps more powerfully than any book written after it  — in portraying love and vulnerability and the ego's hopeless striving for immortality, the epic has become a personal testimony for millions of readers in dozens of languages.

AUTHOR STEPHEN MITCHELL, widely known for his ability to made ancient masterpieces thrillingly new, has also written Tae Te Ching, The Book of Job, The Gospel According to Jesus, The selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Bhagavad Gita, and Loving What Is (written with his wife Byron Katie).

About this version of Gilgamesh, Mitchell calls it a translation for many reasons. He doesn't read cuneiform and has no knowledge of Akkadian for judging textual meaning. Therefore, he depended on A. R. George's meticulous two-volume edition of the original text as well as profiting from the readings of other translations. 

Wikipedia - the first is the tablet containing the story of the GREAT FLOOD,
the second and third are the front and back and tablet V of 11 tablets relating the story of Gilgamesh

In writing Gilgamesh, he grasped the story and then transformed his notes on the story to English verse, using a loose, non-iambic, non-alliterative tetrameter which is rare in English. Two examples of this meter in English verse that Mitchell is aware of are Eliot's Four Quartets and Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina". Mitchell endeavored to keep the rhythm from sounding too regular, varying lines so no two consecutive lines maintained the same rhythm.

BOOK 1 (opening stanza): 

Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers  —   
fortress they called him, protector of the people,
raging flood that destroys all defenses  —   
two-thirds divine and one-third human,
son of King Lugalbanda, who became
a god, and of the goddess Ninsun,
he opened the mountain passes, dug wells
on the slopes, crossed the vast ocean, sailed
to the rising sun, journeyed to the edge
of the world, in search of eternal life,
and once he found Utnapishtim  — the man
who survived the Great Flood and was made immortal  —   
he brought back the ancient forgotten rites,
restoring the temples that the Flood had destroyed,
renewing the welfare of the people and the sacred land.
Who is like Gilgamesh? What other king
has inspired such awe? Who else can say,
"I alone rule, supreme among mankind"?
The goddess Aruru, mother of creation,
had designed his body, had made him the strongest
of men — huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.

Gilgamesh in a nutshell

The story is of King Gilgamesh who meets a man nearly as perfect as himself, a counter-self who balances out Gilgamesh's rapacious tendencies (despite being called perfect which he clearly wasn't), and the two great powerful men become the best of friends. Gilgamesh is tempered, but in his docility to his kingdom he still sought to conquer and still felt omnipotent. He convinces his powerful friend Enkidu to go on a journey to vanquish Humbaba, watcher of the Cedar Forest. They succeed but the price is Enkidu's slow and draining death of which Gilgamesh mourns violently, and then realizes his own mortality. So how his journey is to seek immortality, and his burning journey takes him onward. 

Ultimately, he meets Utnapishtim, the man who along with his wife survived the Great Flood and was given immortality afterwards. Gilgamesh failed Utnapishtim's first test of finding immortality but he heard of another way, to dive deep into the ocean and procure a plant which would be "the antidote to the fear of death". But Gilgamesh, after nearly dying in procuring the plant, became timorous and decided to return to his kingdom and test the plant on one of his old men first, so he journeyed homeward. On the way he stopped to bathe at a pool and leaving the plant on the ground beside the pool where he bathed, the fragrance of the plant allured a snake to take it and "throw off its skin" (gain immortality). The plant was gone, Gilgamesh wept, and ... obviously died for the story ends with him returning and describing the timeless description of his glorious, magnificent and ancient city Uruk.