He intended that its summit should reach the clouds, but the
gods, angry at his presumption, drove away the builders with lightning.
This has a suspicious resemblance to Bible stories. Equally fabulous was
the retreat of the Araucanians. It was a three-peaked mountain which had
the property of floating on water, called Theg-Theg, the Thunderer. This
they believed would preserve them in the next as it did in the last
cataclysm, and as its only inconvenience was that it approached too near
the sun, they always kept on hand wooden bowls to use as
parasols.[204-1]
The intimate connection that once existed between the myths of the
deluge and those of the creation is illustrated by the part assigned to
birds in so many of them. They fly to and fro over the waves ere any
land appears, though they lose in great measure the significance of
bringing it forth, attached to them in the cosmogonies as emblems of the
divine spirit. The dove in the Hebrew account appears in that of the
Algonkins as a raven, which Michabo sent out to search for land before
the muskrat brought it to him from the bottom.
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