Cuauhtitlan_, pp. 16-22.]

That there is a profound moral significance in this fiction all will see;
but I am of opinion that it is accidental and adventitious. The means that
Tezcatlipoca employs to remove Quetzalcoatl refer to the two events that
mark the decline of day. The sun is reflected by a long lane of beams in
the surface waters of lake or sea; it loses the strength of its rays and
fails in vigor; while the evening mists, the dampness of approaching
dewfall, and the gathering clouds obscure its power and foretell the
extinction which will soon engulf the bright luminary. As Quetzalcoatl
cast his shining gold and precious stones into the water where he took his
nightly bath, or buried them in underground hiding places, so the sun
conceals his glories under the waters, or in the distant hills, into which
he seems to sink. As he disappears at certain seasons, the Star of Evening
shines brightly forth amid the lingering and fading rays, rising, as it
were, from the dying fires of the sunset.

To this it may be objected that the legend makes Quetzalcoatl journey
toward the East, and not toward the sunset. The explanation of this
apparent contradiction is easy. The Aztec sages had at some time
propounded to themselves the question of how the sun, which seems to set
in the West, can rise the next morning in the East? Mungo Parke tells us
that when he asked the desert Arabs this conundrum, they replied that the
inquiry was frivolous and childish, as being wholly beyond the capacities
of the human mind. The Aztecs did not think so, and had framed a definite
theory which overcame the difficulty. It was that, in fact, the sun only
advances to the zenith, and then returns to the East, from whence it
started. What we seem to see as the sun between the zenith and the western
horizon is, in reality, not the orb itself, but only its _brightness_, one
of its accidents, not its substance, to use the terms of metaphysics.