The Earth Appears

Slowly, the water went down. The hills, which had been islands for a generation, stood out of the receding flood like the backs of animals emerging from a lake. The plain, drowned for as long as any living person could remember, showed itself again: first the tops of ruined roofs, then the tops of trees, then the brown wet earth, black and rich, that the flood had left behind it.

The people came down from the trees. They came down slowly at first, afraid to believe it. They touched the earth with their hands and found it solid. They walked where the water had been, and the water was not there. They looked at each other, and some of them laughed, and some of them wept, for they had not imagined they would ever stand on dry ground again.

Yu walked among them, and he was not celebrated as a hero, because he looked like nothing but a laborer, and spoke like nothing but a laborer, and would not allow himself to be called anything else. He marked the new boundaries of the land. He divided it into nine provinces, so that the people might know where the fields began and ended. He measured the channels he had dug, and wrote down their courses, so that after he was gone no one would clog them again.