How Erlik Made the Mountains by Cheating

In the beginning there is water.

There is water and there is Ülgen, who flies above it on the back of the divine bird, and there is nothing else. The water has no edges, no depth, no temperature — it is not cold water or warm water but simply the condition of there being something rather than nothing. Ülgen looks down at it for a time that has no length.

He needs something to make the earth from.

He sends a messenger down through the water to find the bottom, where the clay is — the dense potential at the base of all that undifferentiated possibility. The messenger is Erlik, who is at this point Ülgen’s helper. The relationship between them has not yet broken. They are something like partners, or perhaps creator and first creation, or perhaps two aspects of the same original impulse.

Erlik dives.

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The dive takes a long time. The water is deep — as deep as the distance between the sky’s highest point and the earth’s lowest one, which has not yet been established because the earth does not exist yet. The bottom is dark and cold and smells of creation-before-creation, the way new clay smells when it has never been opened before.

Erlik fills his hands with clay for Ülgen. But he also fills his mouth.

This is the moment everything changes. The clay in his hands is Ülgen’s; the clay in his mouth is Erlik’s. He is going to make his own world, underground, a counter-creation that Ülgen doesn’t know about. He is not evil yet — this is not yet evil. This is simply the first act of wanting something for himself, the first emergence of a self that is separate from the entity that made it.

He surfaces. He delivers the clay to Ülgen.

Ülgen takes the clay and places it on the surface of the water and breathes over it, and the clay spreads outward and becomes the flat earth, the first earth, the earth that would have remained perfectly flat forever except for what is about to happen.

Ülgen sees Erlik’s swollen cheeks.

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He commands Erlik to spit it out.

Erlik spits.

The clay he has been holding — which Ülgen’s creative breath has also been affecting, since everything on the surface world is affected by Ülgen’s presence — explodes outward from Erlik’s mouth. It doesn’t just fall; it erupts. The hidden clay and the creator’s latent energy combine in a release that sends matter flying in all directions, and where the clay lands and piles it becomes the mountains, and where the clay hollows it becomes the valleys, and where the clay has been carried farthest it becomes the plains at the mountains’ feet.

The flat earth that Ülgen made is gone. What remains is the complicated earth — the earth with geography, with variation, with the interesting and difficult and beautiful and dangerous topography that makes the world a place where things can happen.

Erlik is condemned for this. In some versions he is cast down to the underworld immediately, where his stolen clay desire becomes the dark kingdom he will rule forever. In other versions he spends more time on the surface world first, making additional trouble — giving the first humans their capacity for deception, which Ülgen did not intend to include. Eventually he goes below.

But the mountains remain.

And the valley between the mountains is where the river runs. And the river is where the animals come to drink. And where the animals come to drink is where the hunters make their camps. And where the hunters camp is where the shamans drum.

All of it is made from Erlik’s theft, Erlik’s refusal to be only a vessel for another’s intention.

The mountains are the monument to the first no.