In consequence, all the creatures obeyed him, and the erstwhile savage grew gentle, and in their new tameness followed him as a flock follows its leader. When they had all entered,
[62] anyone who surveyed the crew might fairly have said that it was a miniature of earth in its entirety, comprising the races of living creatures, of which the world had carried before innumerable specimens, and perhaps would carry them again.
[63] What he had surmised came to pass not long afterwards, for the trouble abated, and the force of the deluge diminished every day, as the rain ceased and the water that had covered every land partly disappeared under the heat of the sun, partly subsided into the beds of water torrents and into chasms and the other hollows in the earth. For, as though by God’s command, every form of nature, sea, springs and rivers, received back what it had lent as a debt which must be repaid; for each stream subsided into its proper place.
[64] But when the sublunary world had been purged, when earth rising from its ablutions shewed itself renewed with the likeness which we may suppose it to have worn when originally it was created with the universe, there issued from the wooden structure himself and his wife and his sons and his sons’ wives, and with the household, moving like a herd, the various animals which had been assembled there came forth to beget and reproduce their kind.
[65] These are the guerdons and the prizes of the good, by which not only they themselves and their families won safety and escaped the greatest dangers, which, with the wild uprising of the elements as their weapon, stood menacingly over all and everywhere, but also became leaders of the regeneration, inaugurators of a second cycle, spared as embers to rekindle mankind, that highest form of life, which has received dominion over everything whatsoever upon earth, born to be the likeness of God’s power and image of His nature, the visible of the Invisible, the created of the Eternal.