the wandering bird, after long searching for a place to alight, falls with weary wings into the sea. The sea in unchecked liberty has now buried all the hills, and strange waves now beat upon the mountain-peaks. Most living things are drowned outright. Those who have escaped the water slow starvation at last o'ercomes through lack of food.
The land of Phocis separates the Boeotian from the Oetean fields, a fertile land, while still it was a land. But at that time it was but a part of the sea, a broad expanse of sudden waters. There Mount Parnasus lifts its two peaks skyward, high and steep, piercing the clouds. When here Deucalion and his wife, borne in a little skiff, had come to land—for the sea had covered all things else—they first worshipped the Corycian nymphs and the mountain deities, and the goddess, fate-revealing Themis, who in those days kept the oracles. There was no better man than he, none more scrupulous of right, nor than she was any woman more reverent of the gods. When now Jove saw that the world was all one stagnant pool, and that only one man was left from those who were but now so many thousands, and that but one woman too was left, both innocent and both worshippers of God, he rent the clouds asunder, and when these had been swept away by the North-wind he showed the land once more to the sky, and the heavens to the land. Then too the anger of the sea subsides, when the sea's great ruler lays by his three-pronged spear and calms the waves; and, calling sea-hued Triton, showing forth above the deep, his shoulders thick o'ergrown with shell-fish, he bids him blow into his loud-resounding conch, and by that signal to recall the floods and streams. He lifts his hollow, twisted shell, which grows from the least
