But this very uncertainty offered a favorable opportunity for various nations, some speaking Nahuatl and some other tongues, to claim descent from this mysterious, ancient and wondrous race.
The question seems, indeed, a difficult one.

When the Light-God disappears from the sky, shorn of his beams and bereft of his glory, where are the bright rays, the darting gleams of light which erewhile bathed the earth in refulgence?
Gone, gone, we know not whither.
The original home of the Toltecs was said to have been in Tlapallan--the very same Red Land to which Quetzalcoatl was fabled to have returned; only the former was distinguished as Old Tlapallan--Hue Tlapallan--as being that from which he and they had emerged.

Other myths called it the Place of Sand, Xalac, an evident reference to the sandy sea strand, the same spot where it was said that Quetzalcoatl was last seen, beyond which the sun rises and below which he sinks.

Thither he returned when driven from Tollan, and reigned over his vassals many years in peace.[1] [Footnote 1: "Se metio (Quetzalcoatl) la tierra adentro hasta Tlapallan o segun otros Huey Xalac, antigua patria de sus antepasados, en donde vivio muchos anos." Ixtlilxochitl, _Relaciones Historicas_, p.

394, in Kingsborough, vol.ix.Xalac, is from _xalli_, sand, with the locative termination.