to have been places of refuge for
their ancestors when the fountains of the great deep broke forth.

One of the Mexican traditions related by Torquemada identified this with
the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise, and added that one
of the seven demigods who escaped commenced the pyramid of Cholula in
its memory. 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. A raven also in the
Athapascan myth saved their ancestors from the general flood, and in
this instance it is distinctly identified with the mighty thunder bird,
who at the beginning ordered the earth from the depths. Prometheus-like,
it brought fire from heaven, and saved them from a second death by
cold.[205-1] Precisely the same beneficent actions were attributed by
the Natchez to the small red cardinal bird,[205-2] and by the Mandans
and Cherokees an active participation in the event was assigned to wild
pigeons. The Navajos and Aztecs thought that instead of being drowned by
the waters the human race were transformed into birds and thus escaped.
In all these and similar legends, the bird is a relic of the cosmogonal
myth which explained the origin of the world from the action of the
winds, under the image of the bird, on the primeval ocean.

The Mexican Codex Vaticanus No. 3738 represents after the picture of the
deluge a bird perched on the summit of a tree, and at its foot men in
the act of marching. This has