Chile

The Mapuche flood is a contest rather than a verdict. Caicai Vilu, the serpent of the water, raises the sea to drown the land; Trentren Vilu, the serpent of the earth, answers by lifting the ground higher as the water climbs. The people scramble upward as the hills grow beneath them. Some reach the heights and live, some are turned to stone or to fish, and the struggle ends in a stalemate that leaves Chile's terrain as its record: the mountains are the height Trentren Vilu managed to reach.

No god decrees this and nobody is judged. The catastrophe arises from two elemental beings in conflict, and survival depends on the land taking the people's side, which makes the Mapuche account unusual among floods. There is no ark, no warned righteous man, no covenant afterward. Elevation is the whole of salvation, and the hills of Araucanía are treated as the physical residue of the event.

The narratives reached print through Rodolfo Lenz and Félix de Augusta, both of whom recorded Mapudungun texts from named speakers in the 1890s and 1900s rather than paraphrasing them, which is why variant versions survive with their differences intact. The story is told in Trentren and Caicai: the Mapuche Flood and the wider system in Mapuche Eschatology (Trentren and Caicai). Set beside the Andean turning-over to the north, the contrast is one of scale: the Andean scheme reverses an entire cosmic order, while the Mapuche flood is a local quarrel whose outcome is written in the local geography.