I was 40 years old when I left Ur, the city where I was born. Sarai and I had been married for 10 years—it was usual in those days to take a wife later in life, after one has become a man of substance, but even then I was somewhat late. Sarai, too, was somewhat older than was typical, for all that she was barely twenty.

The great city of Ur is sacred to the god Nanna, lord of the moon. It is an ancient city, older than men remember. The walls of our neighboring city, Uruk, with whom we alternately warred and traded, were built by great Gilgamesh himself who had seen the very face of Inanna, goddess of spring. Who had helped her, and even, it is said, spurned her advances. The temple in Eridu, they said, had been built from the corpse of the great sea monster himself, the leviathan.

There are flax weavers in Ur, wonderful weavers, who can make the cloth as soft as the clouds themselves, out of the produce of the rough fields, a kind of miracle. I knew that quite well, for I had been a shepherd in my younger days, as many of the young boys were, and during lambing season, we would spend weeks out in the hills around the city, tending our flocks. The city is fed by an endless stream of meat from the granges outside the walls and shimmering silver fish from Euphrates, our mother. Scroll-makers, and clay craftsman, scribes and dignitaries. Every morning in Ur you wake to the trumpets of the prayer sayers, chanting Nanna to sleep, every night they call him again from the waves to the sky.

All of that is in my blood, my father’s blood, though I have left it long ago. I have never in my life slept past the moment when the last sliver of moon disappears behind the mountains, nor ever turned to bed until he has fully come again. No matter where one goes in life, nor what one sees, there is no way to stop being what one has been.

Do you understand what I'm telling you? There was this world full of gods and people, populous cities with all their moving parts, fields and sheepfolds, a way of life old as the sky. Then the voice filled with fire came to me and told me to leave this world and go into the wilderness. Be alone as I am alone. And the sun rose with a thousand colors I had never seen before and changed my heart.

As we left the city, I felt the old gods watching me. I could feel them clustered around the bowl of Earth in the blackness, watching, and for just an instant I could not tell who it was who was performing for whom. Sarai’s arms were around my waist, on the swaying donkey, and the whole sky was watching us.

Perhaps the gods did nothing because they knew where we were going. What I heard, drowning all the sounds of the prosperous city, was the roaring silence of the waiting wilderness.

With my wife, astride that donkey, otherwise alone, we went forth to what we did not know.