out the place and the powers with which the story deals. For this Tollan,
where Quetzalcoatl reigned, is not by any means, as some have supposed,
the little town of Tula, still alive, a dozen leagues or so northwest from
the city of Mexico; nor was it, as the legend usually stated, in some
undefined locality from six hundred to a thousand leagues northwest of
that city; nor yet in Asia, as some antiquaries have maintained; nor,
indeed, anywhere upon this weary world; but it was, as the name denotes,
and as the native historian Tezozomoc long since translated it, where the
bright sun lives, and where the god of light forever rules so long as that
orb is in the sky. Tollan is but a syncopated form of _Tonatlan_, the
Place of the Sun.[1]

[Footnote 1: "Tonalan, ô lugar del sol," says Tezozomoc (_Cronica
Mexicana_, chap. i). The full form is _Tonatlan_, from _tona_, "hacer
sol," and the place ending _tlan_. The derivation from _tollin_, a rush,
is of no value, and it is nothing to the point that in the picture writing
Tollan was represented by a bundle of rushes (Kingsborough, vol. vi, p.
177, note), as that was merely in accordance with the rules of the picture
writing, which represented names by rebuses. Still more worthless is the
derivation given by Herrera (_Historia de las Indias Occidentals_, Dec.
iii, Lib. i, cap. xi), that it means "Lugar de Tuna" or the place where
the tuna (the fruit of the Opuntia) is found; inasmuch as the word _tuna_
is not from the Aztec at all, but belongs to that dialect of the Arawack
spoken by the natives of Cuba and Haiti.]

It is worth while to examine the whereabouts and character of this
marvelous city of Tollan somewhat closely, for it is a place that we hear
of in the oldest myths and legends of many and different races. Not only
the Aztecs, but the Mayas of Yucatan and the Kiches and Cakchiquels of
Guatemala bewailed, in woful songs, the loss to them of that beautiful