Covering the face of the world, the ocean ran, not idle, but with its prolific and warm humor softened the entire globe. Fermented the great mother to conceive, satiated with fertile moisture, God said: "Gather now, waters under the sky, in one place and let the dry land appear!" Immediately they emerged, huge, the mountains raised their broad and bare backs to the clouds and their tops ascended to the sky. As much as the prominent mountains rose, the spacious bed of waters sank into a deep abyss. There they rushed happily, like the drops that slide on the dry. Entering in his haste and rising like a glass wall. Such was the flight that the great order provoked in the swift currents. As armies to the call of the trumpet (because of armies it was) they form behind their banner, so the aquatic crowd, wave after wave, finds its way. If it is pending, forming torrents; slowing down on the plain, Neither rock nor hill stops them. They, under the ground or in the open sky, meander and find their way, and deep channels are excavated on the mud. God asked the earth to dry except where the moist and perpetual course of the rivers now passes. And he called the dry land and sea to the great vessel of the gathered waters.
(John Milton)
Paradise lost. John Milton:
While this said, the angelic squadrons burned in reddened fire, and unfolding in circular to their phalanges, they surrounded it, aiming at him with their spears; as when in the fields of Ceres, ripe for the harvest, the crowded spikes sway, leaning to one side and the other, depending on where the wind is shaken, and the farmer contemplates them with anxiety, fearing that all those beams in which figure your greatest achievement, do not come to become useless straw. Alarmed Satan in view of that attitude, he made an effort on himself, and dilated its members until acquiring the excessive proportions and strength of Atlas or Tenerife. He touches his head in the firmament and wears in his helmet the Horror by the plume of his crest; nor does he lack weapons, since he has a spear and a shield. Tremendous contest would have arisen then, that not only the Paradise but the celestial vault would have moved around, and even, put in serious conflict all the elements to impulses of so irresistible shock, if foreseeing that catastrophe there had not the Omnipotent suspended in the sky his golden balance, which since then we see shine between Astrea and the Scorpion. In that balance God had weighed everything created; the spherical earth in equilibrium with the air; and now events, the fate of battles and empires, weigh in the same way. At that time, he put the result of the flight and the combat in a counterbalance, and the second went up quickly to the point where the faithful indicated it; and then Gabriel said to his Enemy: "I know, Satan, your forces as you say you know mine: neither of us belongs to us, God has lent them to us". [Fourth part. Gabriel faces Satan] (John Milton)
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