Tren Tren and Kai Kai: the two serpents of the Mapuche flood

One serpent cried "cai, cai" and the sea rose; the other answered "ten, ten" and the hill where the people had taken refuge rose above the water. This is the Mapuche flood story of Tren Tren and Kai Kai, in the oldest version we know of, written down around 1674 by the Jesuit Diego de Rosales, and in the versions told after it, each credited to whoever described or collected it.

Families who, after every great earthquake, climbed the hill with a wooden plate on their heads; a huge lizard that cried "cai, cai" and split the earth open; a Kai Kai that neighs when the sea is about to rise; and a man rowing over the water creeping into the land: what Olivares and Molina described in the 18th century and what Augusta and Robles Rodríguez collected in the early 20th. As John M. Cooper wrote in 1946, Mapuche folk stories "were told by men or women, at night, with enlivening mimicry, intonation, and gesture, and with frequent interpolations of, 'they say,' 'it is said,' 'it seems.'"