When at the end of the four thousand Yugas the earth was over flooded with water like one vast ocean and all mobile and immobile creatures were silenced to death, the sun, moon and the winds were all destroyed and the universe was shorn of planets and stars, the supreme being, Narayana, who is beyond the perception of senses and is adorned with a thousand heads eyes and ears, longed for rest. The dreadful serpent Shesha, having thousand heads and the lustre of ten thousand suns and white as the Kunda flower or the moon or a string of pearls or the white lotus or milk, of fibres of lotus, became His conch. There the Divine Lord slept on the bosom of the deep enveloping all quarters with nocturnal darkness.