“Beyond the blue outer wall of heaven, beyond the bright place of the Sun, across the plains of darkness where the stars spread out like trees, like trees and bushes, far away to the heart of all the worlds, low down like the Morning Star.
“And at the heart of all the worlds those were waiting whose faces I could not see. And in voices like bees they murmured among themselves: This is Quetzalcoatl whose hair is white with fanning the fires of life. He comes alone, and slowly.
“Then with hands I could not see, they took my hands, and in their arms that I could not see, at last I died.
“But when I was dead, and bone, they cast not my bones away, they did not give me up to the four winds, nor to the six. No, not even to the wind that blows down to the middle of earth, nor to him that blows upward like a finger pointing, did they give me.
“He is dead, they said, but unrelinquished.
“So they took the oil of the darkness, and laid it on my brow and my eyes, they put it in my ears and nostrils and my mouth, they put it on the two-fold silence of my breasts, and on my sunken navel, and on my secret places, before and behind: and in the palms of my hands, and on the mounds of my knees, and under the tread of my feet.
“Lastly, they anointed all my head with the oil that comes out of the darkness. Then they said: He is sealed up. Lay him away.
“So they laid me in the fountain that bubbles darkly at the heart of the worlds, far, far behind the sun, and there lay I, Quetzalcoatl, in warm oblivion.
“I slept the great sleep, and dreamed not.
“Till a voice was calling: Quetzalcoatl!