The Cherufe: The Lava Monster of Chilean Volcanoes
The spine of Chile is a procession of fire. Down the whole immense length of the country the Andes carry their cones — Villarrica, Llaima, Osorno, Lonquimay — snow-shouldered by day and, in the active seasons, red-throated by night, glowing over the lakes and araucaria forests of the Mapuche country in the south. A people who live under such neighbors do not leave them unexplained. In the traditions of the Mapuche and in the broader Chilean folklore that grew from them, the fire in the mountain has a body and a name: the Cherufe — a vast creature of living lava and rock, serpent-like or man-shaped in the tellings, dwelling in the magma pools at the heart of the volcanoes. When the Cherufe stirs, the ground shudders; when he rages, the mountain opens; when he hurls his heat at the sky, red stones fall on the villages. Earthquakes and eruptions — the two great terrors of Chilean existence, in the most seismically violent country on earth — are, in this old accounting, the movements of o...