It was then, according to some reckonings, that the mysterious Quetzalcoatl appeared in Tollan. He must have been a real personage, for the tale is deeply rooted in the traditions of the country, of the white man with a long beard who came from the East, and disappeared as mysteriously as he had come, over the Atlantic Ocean. The Toltecs were dark, with scanty beards and short; this stranger was absolutely unlike them. He remained with them twenty years, teaching them the arts of a better civilization. Recent study has busied itself with extinguishing the beams which surround the bright image of this wonderful being. Before the traditions of his greatness are thus swept away, we will preserve them for a little longer.
Quetzalcoatl (The Shining Snake) is sometimes described as one of the four principal gods who shared with the terrible Huitzilopochtli the work of the first creation. Elsewhere he is represented as a man who came to live among the Toltecs, and who disappeared as mysteriously as he came. Between the two accounts of him, then, is every shade of matter-of-fact and miraculous in the tales that are preserved of him. One, shown in an ancient painted writing, now lost, depicted him a youth, fasting seven years alone among the hills, and drawing his blood, because the gods made of him a great warrior, showed how he became chief of Tula, selected by the inhabitants on account of his bravery, and how he built them a great temple. "While he was doing this, Tezcatlipoca came to him, and said that towards Honduras, in a place called Tlapalla, he was to establish his home, and that he must leave Tula and go thither to live and die, and there he should be held to be a god. To this he replied that the heavens and the stars had told him to go within four years. So, after four years were past, he left, taking along with him all the able-bodied men of Tula. Some of these he left in the City of Cholula, and from those the inhabitants are descended. Reaching Tlapalla, he fell sick the same day, and died the following one. Tula remained waste and without a chief nine years."
A legend adds that "his ashes were carried to heaven by handsome birds; the heart followed, and became the morning star."