It took possibly forty-five years to build the Ark. From the point of view of Crowley and Aziraphile, this was forty-five years of complete and utter tedium. But it gave the angel and the demon a chance to really get to know each other. There really wasn't an alternative. As circumstances allowed, they would take turns to go off and do what the angelic or demonic temperament called for, elsewhere in the world. Basically, this meant one going off on a long working holiday for between two and four months, while the other held the fort in the boat-builder's yard, putting in a hand's turn along Noah and the boys, and chiding and reassuring whenever his faith in the enterprise wobbled.

"Look" Aziraphile said, as patiently as he could manage.

"Just forget about the rodents for now, OK? The… fast-breeders, I suppose you could call them. I can assure you, you'll have no difficulty whatsoever in finding a mating pair of rats or mice or rabbits when the time comes. Focus on the large slow ones at this stage of the Plan. The ones who only mate every five or six years and then only produce one offspring after a two-year pregnancy. Lord above knows how two elephants are expected to create a viable population after the… when all this is over. Maybe we should get seven of each, to be on the safe side. And OK, Shem, I acknowledge that you've been illuminated in prayer as to which are ritually clean and unclean, kosher or traife, sorry. Nice of the LORD to tell you before he tells me… All pachyderminous animals(1) are unclean in the sight of the LORD, therefore you need to find space for only two each of African Elephant, Indian Elephant, black rhino, white rhino, dwarf rhino and hippopotamus. Now there's a relief. Saves on space, I suppose!""

Aziraphile looked up.

"Oh, hello, Crowley. Travelled far?"

"From going up and down in the world and prowling like a roaring lion, sort of thing." the demon agreed.

"I need a private word with you. About… the secret?"

"Of course" the angel agreed. "Will you excuse us, gentlemen?"

Noah and his family withdrew, leaving what they presumed to be their two angelic guests discussing divine business.

"Listen, they're trying to hide something from us, aren't they?" Crowley pressed. "Like when they said "don't bother with polar bears, arctic foxes, or penguins. Arrangements have been made."

Aziraphile nodded, and looked shifty.

"Where did you get to this time?" the angel asked.

"Atlantis." Crowley said, curtly. "The most civilised place and the most advanced civilization on the bloody planet, this is the first time I have an inkling the wretched place ever existed, and it's all got to go. Founded by people of almost pure Nephilim blood who despaired of the barbarians, incidentally, and got together and founded a –place of their own where the Sons of the Nephilim…"

"And daughters" Aziraphile prompted.

"Where the sons and daughters of the Nephilim could breathe free air and found an advanced civilization based on principles of freedom, equality, pacifism and scientific discovery, one that would live and flourish for ten thousand years."

"Except that it's at Ground Zero for the Divine Will, and they'll clock up barely two hundred and fifty." mused the angel.

"They know." said Crowley, curtly.

"How are they taking it?"

"Philosophically. They knew the Almighty was out hunting down Nephilim. They're going to go with dignity and they won't beg. No point, really."

There was a silence.

"Sometimes, don't you just want….something… that allows you to blot it all out for a while and think happy thoughts?" the angel asked, rhetorically.

"Almost all the time now, angel. I asked the Atlanteans, but they're opposed to what they call mind-altering drugs of any kind."

"Well, at least we know what to look for."

"Alcohol is apparently a good one. Whatever it is." Said Crowley.

"Anyway. I asked one of their best scientists. I had nagging doubts about the promise that the Flood would cover the whole world to a height of fifteen cubits above the highest land. And you know what he said? He said there's this place out in the big central landmass, this mountain, right, which is nineteen thousand three hundred and thirty-four point six recurring cubits high.(2). Tallest thing on Earth. He went away and crunched a few numbers, right, and came back and said "it's all wrong. Even the Almighty is constrained to work with what's already there. To cover the whole world to a depth of nineteen thousand three hundred andforty-nine point six recurring cubits, He is going to need ten times more water than actually exists in the Earth's ecosystem. Take all the polar ice and all the water already in the seas and the clouds, and that totals ten percent of the water it needs for a global flood. So where's the other ninety per cent going to come from?"

Azirpahale shrugged.

"Search me." he said. "Maybe it's Ineffable."

"He needs more than just ineffable. He needs several thousand trillions of cubic feet of water."

"Fresh or sea?"

"And that's the other thing. There's a fine ecological balance between freshwater and seawater. Fish that live in one can't survive in the other, and if He goes mixing them all up so that everything is slightly salty – how's He going to restore the rich diversity of marine life afterwards?"

"He is omnipotent, Crowley!" Aziraphile reminded him. "Anyway. One of Noah's grandsons is crazy about fish. He's sorting out seven of everything for the aquarium deck."

"Aquarium deck!" raged Crowley. "On a bloody boat? On a flooded planet? Covered in, may I remind you, water? The one sort of life that shouldn't need bloody well rescuing, by either twos or sevens?"

"That's a quick change of tune, isn't it? Five minute ago you were fretting over the fine ecological balance of marine life!"

"We need the space, Angel! It isn't infinite, and at some point we should be, you know, prioritising. I just happen to think that despite the obvious risks caused by mixing salt and freshwater, fish are… well, a low priority in a global flood. And I like a piece of grilled halibut as much as the next…ma… ang… supernatural entity."(3)

"It'll all work itself out." The angel shrugged. "Whether the Ineffable can manage a global flood at this time, or whether He'll settle for doing the best he can with the resources available and organise nine or ten pretty catastrophic localised floods simultaneously, targeted on the major population centres of the world, well, that's His business. We're just charged with preserving one human family here and all the animals necessary to repopulate a new antediluvian ecology."

Crowley considered this.

"Well, the brontosauruses can go for a start. " he said. "Too much room for two creatures!"

Crowley snorted, and returned to the logistics of feeding several thousand animals for nearly nine months. It'll need another bloody Ark towed behind us, just for the food. And where in Babylonia can I find nine months' worth of bloody bamboo shoots for two bloody pandas?

He looked up at the immense wall of wood that was growing by the day and blocking out the light. It offered lots of blessed shade to sit in.

You have to admit, these guys know their stuff as boat-builders. Shame about their utter lack of knowledge as animal-handlers, though.

Several years later, with the great ship nearly completed and the latest draft of cash advanced unquestionably from Hell available to draw upon, the angel and the demon were again discussing the global picture. They'd travelled enough between them to work out that the one single world-destroying flood was purely Heaven's propaganda to be recorded unquestioningly in the Bible.

The likeliest scenario was that Heaven would blitz the middle-East, the cradle of civilisation, where most members of the human race had opted to remain, not far away from the fabled and lost Garden of Eden. The effects would be felt from Egypt and Hellas in the west right across to Northern India in the East. Smaller but still deadly floods, combined with discreet earthquakes for maximum disruptive value, would target Atlantis, South America, China, Western Europe and Australia.

"Australia?" said Aziraphile.

"Perhaps He doesn't like it." Crowley suggested. "You have to admit, though, splatting Atlantis suggests He's thought about it. As the island is dead-centre of the big Western Sea, right, sinking it it sends out secondary floods and tidal waves that hit the big Western continent along its whole eastern length – this bit here, that's like a fat top half and a long tapering bottom half separated by this squiggly thin bit in the middle. At the same time, . Africa gets it along the west coast, where most of its population live. The tsunamis and secondary flooding also get the cavemen and Stine Age people in the British landmass here and further along this western extension of the central continent – what d'ya call it?"

"Europe." said Aziraphile.

Meanwhile, thumping this place you discovered in the Pacific where the Nephilim also went to ground – Lemuria? Means the tsunamis it causes when it goes under blitz India, Japan, all these little islands, and as far East as the western seaboard of the big landmass…"

"America." said Aziraphile, helpfully.

"Whatever. Sombody's really thought this one through. Economy of effort. Best use of available resources."

"And our trigger is in this middle sea here. The one separating Europe and Africa. You can see here that only a little spit of land, the one between Anatolia and Hellas (4), stops the Med from spilling into the Middle East. A little earthquake to take that tiny land barrier down…"

"And it turns everything on our side into a bloody big lake. You might just as well consider the whole world had flooded."

"Exactly, Crowley. By the way, what's the date today?"

"The fifteenth of February, angel."

"Better turn in then. Long day tomorrow."


7:6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

7:7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

7:8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,

7:9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.

7:10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.


As if prewarned, the Angel gave the signal to start loading the Ark on the sixteenth of February. Under a late-winter sky which even this early in the year was cloudless and hot, the humans, an angel and a demon worked incessantly, oblivious to jeers from Noah's neighbours who thought he'd finally lost it. .

The seventeenth dawned. But clouds roiled across an utterly transformed sky. And the first drops were felt.

"What happens now?" said Noah.

"We wait." said Crowley, who had spotted the distant black wave. But we're a hundred miles inland here….

He listened to the frightned lowing of the brontosaurs and the low reptilian growling of the tyrannosaurus rexes.

"Shame we couldn't take them." said Aziraphile.

"Be reasonable, angel. Those things would have eaten all the fodder plus all the other animals within a week! Prioritising, remember?"

"To everything, there is a season, and a time to everything under Heaven…"

"Hey, I like that!" said Noah. "You could set it to music!"(5)

"Theirs just ran out." said Crowley, flatly.

"A time to live and a time to die, and all that…"

The trigger events happened on both sides of the globe simultaneously.

Massive seismological activity beneath the continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, the twin civilizations of the Nephilim who had turned their back on humanity and sought to live separate lives, shook and threw down the works of the two most advanced civilizations known on Earth. Both nations had considered pyramids to be the most pleasing and logical building design and had built them stronger and higher than ever seen before, nor indeed would ever be seen again. And in the space of a day they, and hundreds of thousands of people, were all but gone.

As the earth beneath their feet subsided and the waters inexorably rose, some took to boats, spent hurtling around like corks in the sheer violence of the turbulent waters. Others took to their air-cars, which owing to principles lost ever after to the world, could stay in the air for months at a time. It would take lesser Man many thousands of years to rediscover some, more debased, principles of creating and sustaining flying craft. But there were precious few of them…. those Atlanteans and Lemurians with access to air-cars sought, with difficulty, to get above the storm-clouds and make it to the relative serenity of the upper atmosphere, where they waited, for the moment unheeded.

But they represented less than half a per cent of the people of the Nephilim race, the vast majority of whom fatalistically succumbed to death as their stricken lands sank beneath the waters, crumbled from underneath by mighty subterranean stresses that had crumbled the very foundation of their continents.

One Atlantean, Lilith Melkor, did not die serenely. Somehow she scrambled to the top of the broken Great Pyramid and clung on there, shaking her fist and screaming in rage at the Ineffable. Over and again, Lilith screamed

Why did you create us if today you returned to murder us? Why?

Until, tears streaming down her face, she fell in the wreckage of the shattered pyramid.

A priest called Eiwass, sitting in cross-legged contemplation of pain, death and inevitable rebirth, watched her fall, without pleasure or revulsion, without regret or anticipation. He knew he would be back as his role in the world had not come to an end. Only this Atlantean incarnation had.

And thus passed Great High Atlantis, and thus passed beautiful Lemuria.

As their lands collapsed, waves began in the turbulent seas. Slow and slight at first, they rippled outwards as from a stone thrown into a pond, amassing mass and impetus and speed as they travelled.

The fisherman Bran MacPhoeball clung on for dear life as his coracle jumped and rocked in suddenly turbulent waters.

Sweet Mananaan, he thought, that felt like the very monster Cromm Cruach having a wee bit of a swim and kissing me boat as he passed under it. He shrugged, welcoming the rain as a chance to gather fresh water, and threw his net again.

The wave that had passed underneath him, rocking his boat in passing, struck the western coast of the Land of Albany as a massive tsunami. The peoples of Danu were decimated and decimated again and decimated a third time by the force of the waters. And by the time the waters receded, the once continuous land of Albany was sundered and its remaining peoples ever more divided. Sweet Eire was made an island, standing proud of that land its peoples called either Prydein or Brigantia depending on locality. In later millennia, cloth-eared Romans would hear both names and bastardize them into Britannia, the land of the British. Only its northern waste would remain Alban, unconquered by the Romans. And in its turn, Britain would be sundered from Gaul and Belgia, now the nearest points of a greater continent.

Bran would return to devastation, and gather the remnant of his people together. As the High King of new Erin, he would lead a ship west to look for Hy-Breasil, the continent populated by wise and magical people. And he would find nothing, except for scattered islands. And the tale of the Great Flood would live forever in Celtic legend.


And one such tsunami rushed at the Pillars of Hercules, surging over into the middle sea seperating Africa from Europe. Again, the ripples surged from one end to the other of that enclosed sea, swamping Italy, Greece, mighty Minoan Crete and great Egypt alike with phenomenal loss of life.

In Greece, the dying hero Prometheus was granted a vision of the flood and had urged his son Deucalian to build a boat and stock it with enough of each animal and sufficient seedcorn to ensure a hedge from famine when the waters receded. Deucalion had cause to bless his father's forethought. He and his wife Phyrra finally came to earth again on Mount Othrys in Thessaly when the waters began to recede.

As if making sure, Dardanus of Arcadia was also ordered by the Gods to build an Ark with the usual cargo. He came to rest on the western coast of what is now Anatolia. Scared of another flood, he built no city, choosing to live a twitchy neurotic existence on the dry plain looking over his shoulder for signs of a displeased Poseidon, but his grandson Tros founded the City of Troy on the site where he came to Earth, one of the few survivors of the Great Flood.


In far Cathay, the Emperor Yao came to grief attempting to intercede with Heaven to turn back a flood, that came suddenly from the Great Sea like a great towering wall of water.

And a nightmare interrupted the Dreamtime, of a great toad who, strewth mate, only went and sucked up all the flamin' water from the seas and rivers and then spat it back out again over the bloody land, didn't he!


But the inevitable happened.

The press of new water in the Mediterranean threw down the land-bridge of the Dardanelles.

With nothing to stop it, trillions of tons of water spewed over into the space behind, overwhelming the peoples living in the Black Sea region and pouring onward towards the Four Rivers.

It was this tsunami that Crowley had seen in the distance.

As the terrified dinosaurs threw themselves at the walls of their pen, Crowley alerted Noah, who said

"Oh. Right. Yes. Batten down the hatches, everyone!"

7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

7:13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;

7:14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.

7:15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

7:16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

7:17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

7:18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.

7:19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

7:23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

7:24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

It was only by sheer good luck, or perhaps divine aid, that the great wave struck the Ark stern-on, lifting it off its supports and setting it afloat on what was steadily becoming an unguessably deep body of water.

Screams and roars and wails from outside, including the press of people who had been begging to be allowed aboard, suddenly cease and all that remained was the roaring of waters.

Noah and his sons looked at each other.

"We did it, dad. Biggest boat ever and she floats! We did it!"

But after the elation laid some seriously hard work for a handful of humans and two supernatural entities.

1 (1) It's there in Leviticus, just after the bits everyone knows about kosher animals, which exclude pork and shellfish from Rabbi Lionel Blue's books on Jewish cookery. Elephants, rhinoceri and hippopotami are also meats you will not see in the local Jewish deli, either. Or camel. Or rabbit.

2 (2) or twenty-nine thousand and two feet high.

3 (3) Several thousand years later, Crowley, in the guise of a BBC producer, blagged his way to dinner with John Cleese and Eric Idle and suggested a spoof movie of the life of Jesus Christ might be fun. It could have, ooh, a stoning scene pointing out the inflexibility of Judaic law, some poor sod being stoned for something trivial… Crowley was stuck for a moment, then remembered that sunny day in the boatyard, and suggested it might be some old buffer saying his lunchtime halibut was good enough for Jehovah himself. For "Monty Python's Life of Brian", Crowley received another demerit.

4 (4) Anatolia and Hellas: modern Turkey and Greece. Aziraphale is referring to what later became the Dardanelles Strait separating Europe from Asia. Modern geologists and archaeologists believe the biblical Flood was precipitated by the erosion of the straits and the final breakthrough of the Mediterranean Sea into what was then a very much smaller Black Sea. This can be fairly accurately dated to nearly siz thousand years ago and explains why just about every civilization bordering the Black Sea, including the ancient Hebrews, has a flood myth This theory also explains why evidence of human habitation, including the remains of small towns, have been found well inside the modern boundaries of the Black Sea and why the sea has the unique anomaly of having a layer of saltwater sitting on top of a deep-down layer of freshwater. Both fresh and saltwater fish apparently live happily at their respective depths.

5 (5) From the book of Eccliasiastes. Aziraphile ran it past King Solomon, when he could spare a rare moment away from the duties of looking after a thousand wives.(6) Several thousand years later, he was checking out the hippie scene in San Francisco, remembered Noah's words, and put the idea into the head of a then penniless hippie band called the Byrds. Who very soon eased to be penniless. .

(6) Because husbandly duties such as putting up shelves and assembling flat-pack furniture for a thousand wives doesn't half take it out of you, that's why.