Two unconnected traditions furnish the between-worlds interval identically: everything drowned back into one primeval water; a span measured in cosmic units (millions of years / a night of Brahma); and the sole survivor a god withdrawn into or onto a SERPENT, explicitly unseen by men and gods, waiting out the gap. The long sleep is literally a sleep — on the water, in serpent company — and both texts agree that no one inside an age can witness it.
The chapter shows the interval-world from inside: 'airless, waterless... it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein.' Its duration is decreed: 'thou shalt live for millions of millions of years, a life of millions of years.' And Atum announces the end of the current world in the same chapter: he will destroy all he has made, the land 'will return into Nun, into the flood, as in its first state,' while he alone remains with Osiris, transformed into serpents 'which men know not' and gods do not see.
At the elemental dissolution (prakrita-pralaya) 'the whole of the three worlds is one ocean.' The breath of Vishnu becomes a wind that blows a hundred years until the clouds are gone; then the lord 'reposes, sleeping upon Sesha' — the world-serpent — 'in the midst of the deep,' for a night equal in length to his day, until creation dawns again.
Ch. 175 fragments ('airless, waterless... black as the blackest night'; 'millions of millions of years') verified against Budge's Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914) at wisdomlib; Atum's destruction speech (return to Nun 'as in its first state,' remaining with Osiris as unseen serpent) is the standard reading of the same chapter, full text mirrored at ancienttexts.org. Vishnu Purana VI.4 wording ('one ocean... reposes, sleeping upon Sesha, in the midst of the deep') verified against Wilson's translation at wisdomlib (doc116065) and sacred-texts (vp159).
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
Real editions and scans. Every link leaves this site.
Both traditions insist the treasures of the first age were not composed by anyone living but FOUND · golden game-pieces standing in the grass, god-written slabs buried in temple foundations · physical leavings of an elder age recovered by later hands.
Two poets, each writing from INSIDE the degraded age, each dating themselves against a lost golden age · and each betraying knowledge that the dark age is a corridor, not a terminus.
Same skeleton with no shared geography: humanity's crime is an affront to the senior god's comfort or dignity, a council formalizes extermination, the killing is halted mid-course by subversion within the pantheon itself, a remnant survives, and the wearied god afterward binds or removes himself.
The serpent as impounder of water: in both, the serpent takes the waters into its own keeping (encompassed under Vritra's bulk / swallowed into the Bakhu serpent's body), the world's motion stalls (the rivers penned like cattle / the solar barque standing still), and an armed god compels restitution · the waters are given back in full and flow resumes.