Also by John Mitchell

Ceremonial Time

Living at the End of Time

A Field Guide to Your Own Backyard

Walking Towards Walden

Trespassing

The Wildest Place on Earth

Following the Sun

A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Hebrides

John Hanson Mitchell

for Prince Averino

Contents

Invocations, Prayers, and Poems to the Sun

Preface: A Solar Transit

One

Genesis

Two

The Breath of the Sun

Three

The Virgin and the Minotaur

Four

Dark Star

Five

Half Course in the Ram

Six

In the Hall of the Mountain King

Seven

Sun Song

Eight

Holy Light

Nine

The City of Light

Ten

Ancient of Days

Eleven

The Last of the Sun Gods

Twelve

A Certain Slant of Light

Thirteen

Apparell’d in Celestial Light

Fourteen

Chariots of Fire

Fifteen

The Longest Day

Acknowledgments

Invocation, Prayers, and Poems to the Sun

Creator of all and giver of their sustenance

Egyptian: Hymn to the Sun

You rise glorious at the heaven’s edge, O living Aton!

You in whom all life began.

When you shone forth from the eastern horizon

You filled every land with your beauty.

How manifold are thy works!

They are hidden before men,

O sole God, beside whom there is no other.

Thou didst create the world according to thy heart.

Egyptian: Akhenaton’s Hymn to the Sun

Surya with flaming locks, clear-sighted god of day,

Thy seven ruddy mares bear on thy rushing car.

—To the refulgent orb

Beyond this lower gloom, and upward to the light

Would we ascend, O Sun! Thou God among the gods.

Indian: The Rig Veda

This divine and wholly beautiful universe, from the highest vault of heaven to the lowest limit of earth, is held together by the continuous providence of the god—has existed from eternity ungenerated, is imperishable for all time to come—the beams of the sun—the King of the whole universe who is the center of all things that exist.

Julian the Apostate: Hymn to the Sun

I offer, offer cocoa

That I may be sent to the House of the Sun.

Beautiful and rich is the crown of quetzal plumes:

May I know the House of the Sun, may I go to that place.

Aztec

For it is after the solstice, when Christ, born in the flesh with the new sun, transformed the season of cold winter and vouchsafing to mortal man a healing dawn, commanded the nights to decrease at his coming.

Paulinus

—Above all Brother Sun

Who brings us the day and lends us his light.

St. Francis of Assisi: The Song of Brother Sun and of All His Creatures

Now this day, my Sun Father,

Now that you have come outstanding

To your sacred place.

That from which we draw the water of life

Prayer meal

Here I give unto you.

Zuni

In the abode of light are the origins of truth—In the hand of the prince of light is dominion over all the sons of righteousness—

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The royal palace of the Sun rose high

On lofty columns, bright with flashing gold,

With bronze that glowed like fire, and ivory crowned

The gables, and the double folding doors

Were radiant with silver. Manner there

Had conquered matter, for the artist Vulcan

Carved, in relief, the earth-encircling waters,

The wheel of earth, the overarching skies.

Ovid: The Metamorphoses

(description of Apollo’s palace)

Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,

Came slope upon the threshold of the west:

Then, as was wont, his palace doors threw ope—

His flaming robes stream’d out beyond his heels

And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire

That scar’d away the meek ethereal hours

And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,

From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,

Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,

And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades …

John Keats: Hyperion: A Fragment

Saule wears silken garments

With a silver crown

With a silver crown

Made of gilded leaves.

Saule crosses the lake, brilliant as tinsel,

A crown of gold on her head,

And polished slippers on her feet.

Goddess mother Saule

Reached her hand above the river

Her shawl, her gilt shawl,

Slipped from her shoulders.

Latvian

We sacrifice to the undying, shining, swift-horsed Sun. When the light of the sun waxes warmer, when the brightness of the sun waxes warmer, then stand up the heavenly Yazatas by the hundreds of thousands. They gather together in its glory, they make its glory pass down, they pour its glory upon the earth made by Ahura, for the increase of the world of holiness, for the increase of the creatures of holiness, for the increase of the undying, shining, swift-horsed Sun.

Zoroastrian: Hymn to the Sun

O Day-spring, Brightness of the Light eternal, and Sun of Justice, come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death

Roman Catholic: The Great Antiphon

(traditionally sung on the day of the winter solstice)

E pur si muove

(Nevertheless it moves)

Galileo

(sotto voce after recanting his heliocentric theory at his inquisition)

Oh, Shamash, when thou enterest into the midst of heaven

The gate bolts of bright heavens shall give thee greeting,

The doors of heaven shall bless thee

Oh valiant hero, Shamash, mankind shall glorify thee

O lord of E-babbara, the course of thy path shall be straight.

Go forward on the road which is a sure foundation for thee.

O Shamash, thou art the judge of the world, thou directest decisions thereof.

Babylonian: Hymn to the Setting Sun

[Whan] the younge soone hath y in the Ram his haf course yronne,—Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

Preface

A Solar Transit

Long ago I lived in a little stone cottage at the end of a lonely road in one of the hill towns of New England. Winters in that country were sharp and snowy and subject to fierce storms, and after three years there, as the shadows lengthened and the days grew shorter, I began to feel a vague chill in my soul, a need to follow the swallows south with the sun. That January I went down to the Everglades at the southern tip of Florida. I stayed for weeks, making little kayak forays into the unpeopled rivers of saw grass and mangrove and getting myself badly bitten up by mosquitoes and other creatures of warmer climates. Toward the end of that winter, I reversed the journey and traveled slowly northward with the increasing light.

By this time I had devised an ambitious plan: I would continue this northward migration by bicycle. Starting in southern Spain on the first day of spring, I would ride slowly northward along the sun-blasted rural roads of Andalusia, through western France to England, and on to Scotland and finally west to the Outer Hebrides and the ruins of a great stone circle I knew of that marks the former solar temple at Callanish on the isle of Lewis. My plan was to arrive at Callanish on the day of the summer solstice.

With this idea in mind, I booked passage on a freighter outbound for Cádiz from Norfolk, Virginia. On a blustery, bright day in mid March, I wheeled aboard the freighter an old bicycle I had inherited, an antique Peugeot, constructed in the original Peugeot bicycle factory in France in the mid-1950s. It was a heavy old horse by modern standards, all black, with low-slung handlebars, ten gears with two ranges of five changes each, and a small rack over the rear wheel—not the sort of vehicle on which to undertake a fifteen-hundred-mile journey. But for me the Peugeot was a good means of getting from one place to another without losing touch with earth, air, and light, although to be true to form I suppose I should have walked or ridden a horse all the way.

In point of fact, I had begun to imagine myself a pilgrim on this journey, one of that ancient company of questing sojourners, traveling scholars, and troubadours who had once wandered the countryside of Western Europe during the twelfth century. I imagined the old Peugeot as one of the great horses of history, Alexander’s Bucephalos, or El Cid’s loyal horse, Babieco, or perhaps more to the point in my case, since this was nothing if not a romantic, misguided quest, Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. My horse bike would carry me through storm and sun, over the parching dry plains of La Mancha, and up foothills, steep valleys roaring with treacherous rivers, and mountain passes where wild beasts still snatched unfortunate travelers from their saddles. Or so I hoped.

As soon as we cleared the shelter of the harbor in Norfolk a roiling chop of whitecaps frothed the sea around us and high, bitter winds and cold sprays swept the decks. Flocks of gannets wheeled and dove in the gray waters, the sky was lowering and charged with scudding, fat-bellied clouds, and little bands of scoters and shags arrowed away just above the crests of the waves. Day after day, the freighter plowed eastward against the heavy weather, the great bow sometimes nose-diving into mountainous, rogue waves and rising again, streaming with foaming waterfalls. Fewer and fewer passengers left their cabins, and even some of the crew members looked grim about the mouth. But we crashed onward, the decks empty and washed with salt waves, the skies low in the east and black in the west at dusk. Then, finally, on the sixth day out, the weather warmed and the sea calmed.

That night I went out onto the foredeck. Just below me, I could hear the shush of the bow wave, and astern, like two plowed snow furrows, the white foam of the wake rolled off into blackness, tumbling and sparking in the starlight. It had been three months since the winter sun plunged into the icy sea and made the long nights linger. Now there were only six more days to spring, and only seven hours to sunrise. The Lion was rising in the east; Orion was sinking into the black sea sky astern, and northward, on our port side, the great circle of stars known as the Bears was wheeling past Arcturus. It was a moonless night, a black, star-spangled night when the tribes of constellations march in their courses across the sky and time and the circle of the sun seem for the moment eternally suspended.

The next morning, before dawn, I went out on deck again. There had been a warm, passing shower in the night, and the waves were subdued and steaming. Eastward a rose-colored slash of sky appeared and spread out over the gray horizon. To the north and south, churning horse-herds of clouds were forming and re-forming, creating towers and mountain valleys into which a silvery glow expanded. Slowly the colors changed; great sheets of yellows and reds flared upward above the horizon, the towers of gray black clouds began to crumble and sink into the sea, and then abruptly, like a rayed diadem, a golden bead of crowned light rose up, grew and spread, and formed into a full round orb of radiance. The sun had risen.

Three hours later we raised the toothy peaks of the Azores.

It was Rafe, the second mate, who pointed the Azores out to me through his binoculars—a few green stubs, barely visible on the torn line of the horizon. These grew all day as we steamed eastward, and by late afternoon we slid through St. George’s Channel, with sperm whales rising and spouting off the starboard side as if in greeting and, on the port side, the sharp, volcanic hills of Sao Miguel, with its verdant sheep pastures dotted with white houses and its raking little vineyards where the locals grew the grapes for their vinho verde.

I first met Rafe when I boarded the freighter back in Norfolk. He eyed my bicycle as I wheeled it up the gangplank. It turned out that he was a serious bicycle rider, and had carried aboard his own, upscale, multigeared machine, plus all the associated equipage. Whenever he was in port long enough, he’d roll his bike ashore and speed around the countryside, logging sometimes as much as eighty miles before returning to his ship. I was no match for him, but when it was announced that we would not be sailing from Norfolk on the appointed date because of high winds, he invited me to go for a spin.

Rafe was the only African-American on the ship’s crew and one of the highest-ranking officers. He had green eyes and an aquiline nose, but I supposed from the slight ripple of tension that we experienced in a small local diner that afternoon that his crisp hair and chocolate-colored skin were enough to classify him. Rafe did not seem to notice; he rambled on in his discursive way with stories of his adventures at sea and his wild bicycle rides along the dusty roads of the various developing countries where his ship would dock. He came from a small village in upstate New York, went through high school longing for the sea—which for no especially good reason sometimes strikes twelve-year-old boys—and then entered the American Maritime Academy. He had worked on all manner of ships, and had had no small number of adventures.

On one of his first voyages, shortly after graduation, he had a watch that required him to circulate the ship at night and cut, or otherwise cast overboard, the grappling hooks and lines of sea pirates in the South China Sea who would come alongside in small boats and throw lines over the rail and then clamor up to break into the containers that were stored on deck. On one occasion he happened upon the pirates scurrying along the deck and was attacked by knife-bearing Sea Dayaks, in the style of a Conrad character. He drove them off by firing over their heads and allowed them to scramble back down to their small boats.

With the weather clear and the seas calm, for the first time I began meeting some of my fellow passengers. They emerged from the cabins, looking gaunt and pale. There was an older retired couple from Pennsylvania whose custom was to travel the world by freighter. They would sign on and then stick with the vessel until it stopped at an American port close enough for them to catch a bus back to Pennsylvania. After a few months of recovery, they would find another ship and set out again. In this manner, there was hardly a place in the world they had not been.

There was one other passenger other than myself who was not ill from the heavy seas, a woman of about thirty, named Dickey, who was from New York City and was crossing by freighter to buy antique furniture. Dickey was fond of marijuana and smoked on deck each night, after dinner, carefully walking to the leeward side so as to have the smoke carried away and not tempt the crew. She had reddish, hennaed hair, smooth, creamy skin, and green eyes, and for all the world could not figure out why I would want to ride a bicycle from southern Spain to Scotland when I could rent a car.

“It would be so much easier,” she said. “And bikes are dangerous.”

She had lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years and had learned to hate bicycles. “Silent killers” she called them.

It was no use explaining my desire to be close to the sun.

Dickey, it turned out, had a mother on board, who only now, after a day or two of calm, emerged from her cabin. The two of them were headed to Cádiz and from there they were intending to travel on to Portugal to buy their furniture, which they would then ship back to New York from Lisbon to sell in their shop. Seasickness notwithstanding, they liked traveling by sea.

On one of these calm days I saw another new passenger, an Arab man standing by the starboard rail with a radio clapped to his ear, smiling broadly at some private information. He swept the radio away and held it out when he saw me approach. “Listen,” he said. “Arab music. The first time in years, I hear Arab music.”

We were now close enough to the North African coast to catch the local radio stations.

In some ways, this solar transit was the culmination of a lifelong pilgrimage. I had long been in thrall to the sun and this devotion began, as all true religions do, in my youth, in a consecrated place.

Every Sunday of my childhood, I was forced to dress in a hair shirt, that is to say, an itchy wool suit, and was banished to an uncomfortable wood pew set beneath a vaulted ceiling with dark, soaring beams. Here, for what seemed like half of one of the only two days I had free from that other prison—school—I sat fidgeting while my old father, a well-read Episcopalian minister, delivered seemingly interminable sermons. All natural light was obscured in this place. Through winter, spring, summer, and fall, the bright sun cast a distorted, broken image through stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ—innocent lambs holding crosses, virtuous donkeys bearing the Virgin and Child, and white-bearded men dressed in what I always thought were their bathrobes.

Much to my father’s dismay I was an irreligious child, and by way of entertainment during these long services, my friends and I would sometimes mumble prayers to idolatrous gods—prayers to the Buddha, to Shiva, Mohammed, or our favorite, the Great Spirit of the Sioux, Wakahntanka. This sacrilege came to a head one brilliant autumnal Sunday when the leaves in the landscaped church grounds were in their full glory and the earth was moist with night rain. I was suffering through yet another two-hour confinement while my father read from an account of St. Paul’s missionary work as recorded in Acts.

In his travels through Greece, Paul had come across an altar dedicated to an unknown god, and he announced that he now intended to declare that god to the people of Athens. For once, I was listening, and I began to wonder who this god could be; he sounded more attractive than the one my father was always talking about. Paul explained that this unknown deity was Jesus Christ. But as my father read on, the pallid image of the autumn sun crossed one of the stained glass windows. It suddenly struck me that the real god of all things, the unknown god of the Greeks, was not Jesus, or Mohammed, or even Wakahntanka, but this giver of all light, this force of all rivers and streams and cataracts, the driver of weathers, the creator of heaven and earth, our own star Sun.

I was only twelve and had a limited worldview.

Years later in college, in order to fulfill a dreaded science requirement, I enrolled in a course entitled Astronomy 101. The course was supposed to be about the physics of the universe, but the professor had a bias toward the history of astronomy and spent many of the lectures discussing arcane and interesting facts, such as the startling physiognomy of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a sword fight and wore a golden nose as replacement.

This same professor was an avowed atheist, and when he came to the section of the course devoted to our own solar system, he introduced his lecture with an uncharacteristic theological discourse. “If you wish to bow down to some god,” he said, and here he lowered his head with mock solemnity, “then bow down to the sun. It is the source of all life on earth, the nearest any of us will ever come to experiencing a creator.”

This seemed to confirm my childhood suspicions about the nature of the sun, but at the time the closest I came to solar worship involved sacrilegious pilgrimages to beaches where—callow youth that I was—I joined other celebrants and adulates, stripped bare to better appreciate the salubrious rays of this god. I would end the summer as thoroughly bronzed as one of Joseph Conrad’s marauding Sea Dayaks.

In time I settled down, acquired land, and assumed the role of a country gardener, thereby coming even closer to the beneficent earthly effects of this compassionate deity. During this time, I became acutely conscious of the seasonal cycles of the sun, and its stepchild, the weather. I came to know exactly where, at a certain hour on a certain day in a certain season, the sun would cast a shadow in the garden; in fact I could tell time without a clock simply by observing the position of the sun in relation to certain trees or rocks on my land. I became obsessed with light. I found myself unwilling—almost unable—to go to seven o’clock movies between April and October for fear of losing out on precious minutes of sunlight. I began to dread certain appointments for fear of being drawn indoors to some windowless, sealed office whilst the visage of my lord shewed forth in all his summer glory. I even came to dislike luncheon engagements between April and October, except at restaurants with outdoor seating.

In time, this obsession began to coalesce into a more conscious spiritual devotion to the sun. I began reading ancient, sacred texts, translations of prayers to the sun, and obscure anthropological and archeological accounts of the solar practices of long dead cultures from around the world. Slowly it came to me that the sun really is a god, at least as god is defined in the texts of so many religions. It is the creator of all things, the prime mover, the only god we can ever actually know, as my professor used to say.

Now, at last, in order to make a more conscious union with this deity, I was ready to undertake a pilgrimage. On the day of the vernal equinox, one of the four most sacred days in the solar calendar, I would begin cycling north with the increasing light, traveling at an easy pace of about twenty-five miles or so a day. In this way I calculated, I would move north with the European spring, along with the blossoming of flowering plants and the migrating birds and arrive at Callanish in time for the summer solstice, when this great chariot of fire reaches its northernmost point in the east, rides high above the earth, and then descends at the northwesternmost point in its annual journey.

For three more days the weather held calm and steady. And then, shortly after dawn on our eleventh day at sea, we saw the low-lying, green coast of Spain. There, spreading out ahead of us was the white port of Cádiz. The vessel slowed and then anchored offshore to wait for the flooding tide, while flocks of little gulls wheeled around us, mewing and crying. By four that afternoon, we were towed to the quayside. Carts rumbled across the cobblestone quay pushed by men in blue coveralls. There was much scrambling, many arguments and shouting and many inefficiencies and discussions, and arms thrown here and there. Well-attired officials in white uniforms trooped aboard in a line, set up a little wooden table near one of the passageways, and officiously checked our papers, and by five o’clock we had cleared customs and I rolled the old Peugeot down the gangplank to start my journey.

Following the Sun

One

Genesis

By ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-first of March, two days after I arrived in Cádiz, having purchased for this leg of the journey a bottle of vino tinto, water, an onion, some tomatoes, and the round little loaves of bread called pan duro, I set out for the Hebrides.

From the San Fernando district, I skirted the tidal flats of Cádiz and headed around the bay to Puerto Real and thence, taking back roads, began northward for the town of El Puerto de Santa María. The traffic thinned once I extricated myself from the city, and I began passing freshly plowed fields and shallow ponds with spiky green spears of grass and croaking frogs. I pedaled along at a slow pace, smelling the morning air, dreaming of the things to come.

All about me there were birds: white storks, ringed plovers, lapwings, and beside the road, stonechats, chaffinches, and sparrows flitting in the shrubbery and wagtails at the pond edges. The smell of the fresh earth and fresh-cut herbage crowded in on me as I sped onward, and the sun was warm, and I felt that I was once more in touch with the actual earth, with a humane, accessible world, as opposed to the cold, watery life at sea. It was all violets and sweet days and the heralding of birds, and the brown hills melting into green.

This was easy riding, no wind, and the countryside was flat, and I clipped along, pacing off the miles comfortably. There were periods on this stretch when I could see nothing around me but greening fields, olive groves, distant, white-washed farm buildings with red roof tiles, pastures with grazing black bulls, and blue-green hills rising up higher to the east.

Not far outside the city I began riding by bands of country folk, mostly women, headed to or from the fields. They wore wide-brimmed straw hats held in place with white bandannas tied beneath their chins, and they all had round, nut-brown faces, with rosy cheeks and white teeth, and many of them wore full-cut blue or brown skirts and heavy shoes. Some carried mattocks over their shoulders, and they whistled and waved as I sailed by and shouted out phrases that I couldn’t quite catch, possibly wishing me luck, possibly off color.

This retreat into the past was periodically broken by hurricanes of passing trucks, as well as whiney little cars that would whip by and then disappear like dreams over the horizon. The road was narrow here and the shoulders were rough gravel, or in some places lined with deep, grassy ditches dotted with suspicious frogs. Except for the cars and trucks, I rode on in peace, alone with the solitude of the seven-hundred-year reign of the Caliphate and the jackdaws in the groves, lapwings in the fields, the dashing flights of kestrels, and the ever-present flickings of sparrows and chaffinches in the brush.

I was purposely taking a small road to El Puerto, as I intended to do during this whole journey, and after a pleasant hour of this circuitous, inland wandering, I retired to a nearby olive grove to rest in the shade. Here I opened a bottle of water, ate an orange, and listened to the bird songs and the whinny of a distant horse and imagined myself free at last, a rambler out on the road, cut loose, the happy wayfarer, out on a splendid sojourn.

Most pilgrims know exactly the route they will take to their destinations. I had no particular itinerary. My main fix was time; I wanted to be at the stone circle of Callanish on the evening of the twenty-first of June to watch the sundown. My intention was to pedal along on small roads until the summer solstice, and then turn around and head home. Other than that, I had no route, no reservations, and no exact date of return; in fact I didn’t know how I would return.

Where I would sleep each night would be a matter of chance. I was traveling light on this expedition, two panniers packed with a few changes of clothes, maps, bicycle tools, and a small backpack stocked with a few things I might need during the day. Lunch, extra clothes, water, and wine were fixed astern on a little rack over the back wheel, and in this manner I forged on, confident that I could find whatever else I needed along the way. I would be burning an inordinate number of calories on this journey and therefore would be able to indulge myself in the local foods and wines of France and Spain. I would ride all day, and then, fully exercised, roll into a pleasant rural town, find a heavy-beamed auberge or pension, top up with a local country repast, a bottle of fine local wine, and a good cheese for dessert, and then retire to my bed to sleep the sleep of the healthy and the just. At least that was the idea. My first night in Cádiz had not offered an auspicious beginning, however.

Two days earlier, shortly after debarking from the freighter, I had begun hunting for a room, but since it was late on a Saturday afternoon every place was full. I was sitting in a little public park near the main promenade, watching the bats twist above the gardens and considering the possibility of spending my first night in Spain on a chill park bench, when two boys sped by on bicycles, spotted me, and spun around.

Spanish boys are not shy.

“What bicycle is that?” they asked.

I explained.

Why was I sitting here with this bicycle?

“I am thinking of where to stay.” I said. “I am going to ride this bicycle to Scotland. But tonight I want to stay in Cádiz.”

“Scotland?” they shouted.

“Scotland,” I said with equal enthusiasm.

This led to a discussion of football teams—of which I knew nothing, but feigned some knowledge—and this led in turn to some cousin who was on some team that at some point in the distant past took him into this Scotland to play in rain and even snow, and this in turn led to the story of one boy’s uncle who, he said, ran a sort of pension.

“We will take you there,” they said. “He rarely has guests.”

And so the three of us mounted up and I followed them ever inland away from the coast, twisting and turning through high-walled little streets until we came to a small door on a small back street. This door in no way resembled a hotel entrance but they knocked and shouted and pounded and eventually an older gentleman in a cardigan sweater came out and said, yes, he had a room.

It was a dark back room with high ceilings, and a massive old Gothic bed, in which, I later learned, the owner’s ancient grandmother had recently perished.

That settled, I went back to the main promenade to meet Dickey and Rafe for dinner.

Rafe knew of a good restaurant that served, so he claimed, the best anguilas al horno in town, a local dish of elvers, olive oil, and garlic, baked at a very high heat in a casuela dish. Dickey left her mother at the hotel to recover from her sea going ordeal and the three of us stayed out late, something that is de rigueur in Spain if you want to have a good dinner. Rafe knew all the hot spots in town, such as they were, and after we had eaten, we went out bodega crawling, sampling the local beers and sherries and listening to touristic versions of bulerías and soleares. Dickey loved it, clapping her hands, clicking, and snapping her fingers, and the performers loved Dickey, with her mop of hennaed hair and her painted nails and her dark lipstick and high spirits.

By two in the morning I left on my bicycle to thread my way home through the labyrinth of streets the boys had followed earlier in the evening. Dickey and Rafe were still celebrating when I left.

All through the summer and autumn before I went south, during the whole winter in the Everglades, all the time that we were at sea, the great spinning earth had been speeding on its appointed course through the heavens. On my second night in Cádiz, on the twenty-first of March, in the pitch dark of the night sky beyond my ominous bedroom, the sun, as viewed from earth, entered the Ram and crossed an invisible halfway point on an imaginary line known as the celestial equator. At that moment, 3:22 in the morning to be exact, spring officially began.

This perception of four distinct seasons, and the ability of early human beings to track and predict or even control the celestial events, seems to have been one of the constants of the human condition. Artifacts designed to measure time and track the courses of the sun and moon date back more than 24,000 years. There is an ancient mammoth-ivory baton marked with designs that was found on the Mal’ta Peninsula in Siberia that appears to be some sort of calendar designed to track celestial events, for example. But the awareness of the seasons, of the importance of seasonal changes, and of the effects on herd migrations is far more ancient.

The perception of a singular, blazing entity in the sky that appears on one side of a given landscape, crosses the sky, and then disappears on the other side, alternately spreading light and then darkness over the land, must reach back even to the dull consciousness of Australopithecus and the other protohumans who roamed the savannas of Africa over one million years ago. Whether these apelike beings in any way associated this blazing light in the sky with life on the earth, we cannot know. Nor can we know whether, at some point in the slow evolution of the bicameral brain and human consciousness, upon seeing this blaze of light appear each day, these apelike beings stretched their lips back over their snouts and hooted with a specific call to indicate its coming and going. We do know that many species, such as birds and monkeys, begin singing and calling at first light. And we know too that certain species of our distant ancestors, the lemurs of Madagascar, collect together at dawn and sit upon their haunches with their arms lowered, palms outward, facing the rising sun as if in prayer. But as far as early humanoids are concerned nothing is recorded.

We do know, however, that burial sites indicate that even the supposedly dull-witted Neanderthals buried their dead with an east-west orientation, implying a consciousness of sunrise and sunset and—perhaps—an association of light and day with life, and nighttime with death and an underworld, a dark continent that this life-giving sun visits at the end of each day.

Not far from the olive grove where I was resting outside of Puerto de Santa María, there is a megalithic site that is believed to be a part of an ancient protoreligion. And just to the south at Tarifa the southernmost prehistoric cave paintings were recently discovered in an area already known for dolmens, caves, and shelters decorated with art of the Upper Paleolithic period. One of the most important of these Spanish sites consists of a multitude of caves that have been purposefully dug into the rock and megalithic constructions that form a closed gallery around ancient graves containing pieces of ivory, bronze and gold, stone tools, jewelry, and perforated discs made from shells of mollusks. Whatever is known about ancient solar practices has to be surmised from artifacts of this sort—cave paintings, burial sites, and megalithic temples.

Archeologists have found what they believe are solar images in the form of spirals that may be 40,000 to 50,000 years old, scratched on cave walls. The pattern shows not only the circular image of the sun itself, but also the seasonal course of the sun in relation to earth, as it migrates along the horizon during the various seasons of the year. There are also innumerable figurines, technically known as “small art,” from the same general period inscribed with geometric designs such as the cross or spirals, and also many examples of one of the most important ancient solar symbols—the swastika. Although sadly eclipsed by the dark star of National Socialism after 1934, this design was a direct representation of the sun’s rays and also a reference to the notion of revolving wheels or clusters of the circumpolar stars.

There is also a 37,000-year-old Mousterian artifact from Pech de l’Aze in the Dordogne Valley in France that suggests the people of that period had what we now understand to be a religion, that is to say they were capable of experiencing themselves as separate entities from nature and that in the occasional idle moment when they were not busy surviving they found the time to reflect on their existence.

Although I didn’t recognize the image at the time, I had seen one of the scratched solar spirals on a cave wall in Portugal a few years before my pilgrimage. Near the town of Moura, on the Alentejo Plain, there is a small cave entrance with an iron gate across it. If you can find the local shepherd who is the keeper of this cave, for a few coins he will open the iron gate and lead you down deeper and deeper into the narrow passageways. Here, lining the crevices of a wall, is a row of human skulls. A little farther along, on the right wall, are the scratched images of animals now extinct in Spain and Portugal—reindeer, woolly mammoths, wild horses, and bison—created some 30,000 years ago by the ancestors of the people who now live on the Iberian Peninsula. Amid these various scratches, straight lines, squares, and stick figures, I remember seeing an engraved spiral.

Not far from that cave there is later evidence of solar worship, a circle of standing stones about thirty yards in diameter. Twenty yards or so beyond this circle are four larger upright stones about five feet high. They stand apart, at the four quarters of the compass, as if guarding the inner circle from some imaginary invader. This oddly formal company of stones, placed here in this empty quarter of the Alentejo Plain, standing alone among the cork oaks and sheep pastures, was the work of a Neolithic tribe of people who descended from the cave artists. The stone circle, the four outlying uprights, and the whole alignment of the structure are arranged in such a way that the sun, on the summer solstice, will appear just over the northeasternmost marker. On this day, at this singular point, it will halt in its daily march to the north and begin south again. Fifteen thousand years ago, this day marked a major event in the lives of the people who lived on the Alentejo Plain. Now no one seems to notice.

I came upon these early solar artifacts some years ago while I was following the story of another solar-related event, a distant cousin of these ancient rituals, the Christian festival known as Carnival, which takes place the world around at the beginning of spring and is, as are so many Christian holidays, essentially a pagan festival. During Carnival, as any revelers will tell you, anything can happen; the world is turned upside down. It is a holiday that actually dates back to the Babylonian period, and probably evolved out of even earlier Neolithic rites. In Europe it is no accident that this event is celebrated at the end of February, when the world itself is changing, when the spring flowers begin to bloom out of the brown winter fields and the migratory birds return to Rome, where Carnival as we know it originated. Carnival evolved out of the pagan rites associated with earlier cults of the vegetative god Attis and bears some resemblance to the solar-based festival known as Saturnalia, both of which were subsumed by the Christian church in the first century A.D.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To begin at the beginning, it is currently believed that some five billion years ago in a smoky region of the universe presently referred to by various cultures of earth as the Milky Way, a vast, incandescent cloud of gas began to coalesce and collapse on itself until it formed just one more of the one hundred billion stars found in the Milky Way.

According to one theory, as it coalesced the cloud began to spin, and the more it shrank the faster it whirled and the rotary forces of this mad turning caused it to flatten into the shape of a spinning top. The force of this rotation was so great that a thin disclike section broke off from its widest girth and separated itself from the central star. This disk continued to spin and eventually clotted and broke apart and whirled off into space to form the nine planets, which, as if in memory of their ancient connection to the mother star, continue circling to this day. Another, more current theory holds that the cloud broke apart earlier and the nine planets formed at the same time as the sun.

In either case, after a cooling period of some two billion years, on one of those planets, the third one out from the sun, a series of chemical reactions began brewing in its warming seas. Three billion years later, more or less, a complex recombination of these same chemicals developed the ability to label objects and subsequently named the planet upon which they—the now recombined complex chemicals—lived.

I’m simplifying, of course, but that is one of the scientific theories concerning the creation of the sun and its family. That is only one version, however.

The ancient Egyptians believed that Ra, the god of the sun, was the creator of our planet. In the beginning of time, they say, an egg rose from the primeval waters and from this primal egg, Ra hatched. Ra had two children, Shu and Tefnut, who became the atmosphere and clouds. They had more children, Geb and Nut, who became the earth and the sky. One day Ra wept, and from his tears human beings were created.

The Fon people of West Africa hold that the sun god Liza created the world with the help of his partner Mawa, the goddess of the night, fertility, rest, and motherhood. Whenever there is an eclipse, it is said that Liza and Mawa are making love. Long ago, after one eclipse, their son, Gu, was born. Gu shaped the world with an iron sword and then taught the people the art of ironworking so they could make their own tools and shelter. (Unfortunately, Gu did not know humans would use their knowledge to make weapons.)

The Sumerians said the work of creation was carried out by Shamash, their god of the sun. Every morning, the scorpion-men of the East Mountain opened a gate and Shamash would emerge, cross the sky in his chariot, and at the end of the day enter the West Mountain gate and begin his travel through the Underworld, only to reemerge the next day and begin again.

The Aztecs believed the universe was composed of several cosmic eras with four different suns in four previous ages, each of which died at the end of its era. The fifth sun was named Tonatiuh, “He Who Goes Forth Shining.” This was the first sun that had the ability to travel across the sky and it is his era in which we now live. Tonatiuh is, or was, responsible for the smooth functioning of the universe, and it was well known that if he weakened the world could come to an end, so he had to be fed, and the food that best sustained him turned out to be human flesh.

In yet another creation story, an obscure, wandering tribe of pastoralists in the deserts of the Middle East says simply that in the beginning an unnamable, abstracted entity created heaven and the earth. All was without form until this entity spoke aloud and said: “Let there be light …”

But before any of this, before the written word, at the very dawn of consciousness, the sun must already have been comprehended as the creator. Its image was scratched on cave walls, elongated stones were arranged upright in circular patterns to mark the annual circuit of this powerful entity. Fires were lit in early winter at the end of his apparent annual decline to assure his return, and finally he, or in some cultures she, was given a means of traveling across the sky, a boat, a chariot, a golden wagon pulled by fiery mules, and in some versions he was even supplied with an armed guard to help assure safe passage through the known dangers of the Underworld from west to east so that he could rise again the next morning.

And he was given also names: Surya, Sulis, Saule, Tsar Solniste, Sol, Sol Invictus, Sonne, Sun. And also food to assure his survival: fire, burnt offerings of goat, of oxen, and, periodically throughout history, of human flesh or blood.

Modern astronomy would in no way have disabused the ancients of their conviction that our closest star is a deity. The sun is, indeed, an all-powerful force, even in the eyes of seasoned astronomers. For some five billion years now it has seethed with hellish internal fires of 5,780 degrees Kelvin, a great heaving world of superheated gas that burns, as is now known, with a thunderous, deafening roar and is fueled by continuous nuclear fusion at its core, the whole of it overlain with explosions and exhalations of bursting, high-energy photons that collide with electrons and ions to create the heat and light upon which we earthlings survive. Immense reverse cataracts of convective currents flow upward from this fiery core, releasing explosions of fire at a million degrees centigrade before they cascade back down to the supercharged inner heart to be reborn. Vast solar flares in the form of electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles with temperatures that can soar to hundreds of millions of degrees shoot off into black space from this burning caldron; sudden upwellings of radiating material surge over its surface; periodically, double islands of cooler material some 40,000 miles wide sweep across its face in tandem; streaming particles of protons and electrons, the so-called solar winds, splay out into interstellar space at speeds of 1,800 miles a second. This yellow-colored, middle-sized star is a deathly furnace, and yet, from this hideous forge of ghastly fire, all life on earth is fashioned and sustained.

For all our science and craft, we are but parasites of the sun. The annual voyage of our own planet around this central star, the spinning earth, the resulting alternations of the four seasons, the turn of night and day, the great sweep of winds and weathers around the globe, tides, ice ages, and the vast, ill-understood cycles of heat and magnetism on the sun’s surface affect the internal cellular and hormonal rhythms of all the living things of the earth. Green plants, the source of all animal life, though fixed in place on the ground, have elaborate and still not entirely understood mechanisms for tracking the sun’s daily course across the sky and through the year. All animals are subject to these same rhythms of light, everything from sleep, to seasonal hormonal changes, to migration or hibernation, digestion, the sex of certain cold-blooded species, and even, it turns out, mood swings in higher mammals, such as human beings.

Even the most atheistic of scientists will admit that, in its magnitude, its veritable power, in its measureless, unknowable inner heart, the sun is very like a god. Like nothing else we know, it breaks down the apparent split between science and spirit. It is both myth and fact, factual and mythological, spiritual and physical, ethereal and material, and there is no escaping its power.

Whichever creation story one believes, the fact remains that every day on earth a large rounded ball of bright fire appears over the eastern horizon and spreads a vast cone of light across the section of earth on which you, the observer, happen to be standing. Even in winter this benevolent light has warmth in it. You can feel it on a January day if you pick the right spot. And this warmth, this heat, this light, this great coursing chariot of blazing flame, is the source of all life on an otherwise cold and lifeless planet called earth. From the sun all things proceed.

That first day of spring outside Cádiz I was feeling the effects of the god of the sun, whoever he or she may be, having spent too much time on the beach the day before with Dickey and her mother.

The morning after our night on the town I had gone out for coffee and sat reading a local paper on the promenade near Dickey’s hotel. It was the sort of day I had been waiting for—a misty warmth, with the smells of the freshly washed streets rising all around and mixing with the smells of the coffee and hot milk and fresh bread. Later that morning Dickey had emerged, and we made plans to go to the beach in the afternoon. I spent the rest of the morning poking around the town looking for a bicycle shop to get a strap fixed on one of my panniers and then rode out to the appointed beach not far from the city.

By the time I got there, the spring sun was burning with a sort of cool freshness, and even though it was still early in the season there were many northern Europeans at the beach that day. Dickey had brought her mother along, a somewhat rounded woman in her early sixties who reminded me a little of one of the early chthonic figurines fashioned by the Paleolithic cave worshipping folk. Without any self-consciousness, she and Dickey stripped off their tops, arranged their towels, and lay back to bask in the spring sun. They had traveled a great deal in Europe, I gathered, and were seasoned beachgoers.

Sun-worshiper though I am, I actually don’t like simply lying out and basking, I much prefer to walk along a beach looking for adventures, so I left them basking and took a walk. All along the shores, people in various stages of dishabille were stretched out flat or walking along the sand, and a few of them, probably German or Scandinavian, were swimming in the still cold waters of the Atlantic. Here were blond well-muscled German Apollos in tiny male bikinis, and there were many topless goddesses, basking or chatting in little groups. One young couple, possibly Swedish, blond, tanned, and stripped naked, was standing with their backs to the water, their faces turned up to the sun so as to better accept its benevolent rays which, I presumed, had been so long denied to them through the long dark winter.

As the day progressed, the sun grew hotter, and more and more winter migrants began to appear, some older visitants in bathrobes and slippers, others younger, carrying small backpacks with towels and suntan lotions. Here, like seals on a rutting beach (which this somewhat resembled, as many of these beachgoers were young and presumably unmarried), the happy throngs stretched out to enjoy the famous sun of Andalusia. Except for a few packs of dark-haired young males, most of these sojourners were northerners judging from their winter-white skin and their light-colored hair. The locals, I noticed, stayed clothed, the northerners tended to strip to le minimum.

None of this sunbathing is especially good for human skin, as we now know. As a part of this life-giving fire, the star we call Sun throws off a wide complex of rays that combine to produce the electromagnetic radiation that we term light. We actually see only a small part of the spectrum, the white light that contains all wavelengths, which, when separated or dispersed by a prism or a rainbow, reveals its full range of colors. But there are other species of rays streaming off of this burning star, including X rays and invisible ultraviolet radiation. Some of these rays are beneficial. Ultraviolet radiation can kill germs and convert a certain amount of vitamin D in our skin. But the healthy bronze of a suntan is, in fact, a sign of damaged skin, a reaction that serves as a form of protection from what is essentially an assault of ultraviolet rays.

Our current concern over the presence of these tanning rays is nothing new; nineteenth-century women also worried about excessive exposure to the sun and pale, lily-white skin in the 1860s was considered as beautiful as the bronzed skin is to the fashion conscious of a later time. But this current fear of exposure to the sun, dangerous though it may be, seems to be part of a larger social phenomenon concerning the many perceived dangers that lurk in the natural world. The outdoors—as opposed to the indoor world of cyberspace—is rank with disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks, poison ivy, and sun, as well as kidnappers, criminals, hunters, and, perhaps worst of all judging from the ominous nightly reports, bad weather.

I’d hoped to get in shape for my bicycle trip, but I never did get around to taking the long practice rides that I had intended to take before leaving. As a result, not four hours into my pilgrimage, I began to feel my muscles tightening. I wasn’t worried though, having no particular schedule in fact I calculated that if I got to Puerto de Santa María, and liked it, I might as well stay there. So I pedaled on slowly through the pastoral landscape, stopping often to look at frogs or birds, and in due time came to what seemed to me a fine overlook, an ancient ruin with crumbling arches just beyond a gully. I was leaning against my bicycle looking at the ruin when a small falcon shot over my head and flew straight into one of the arches, so I wheeled my bike up a narrow sand road and came to a grassy spot among the olive trees and sat down to watch.

In a minute or two the falcon flew out again; clearly it had a nest in among the broken crevices. This seemed a propitious sign for this journey. In the ancient Egyptian cosmology, the sun god Ra would often appear in the form of a falcon. It was he, Horus, the falcon, who represented one of the visible forms of Atum, the first creator.

It occurred to me, while I sat there, that I was getting hungry, so I unpacked my bread, sliced some tomatoes, and uncorked the wine bottle.

The ruined arches were on the other side of what appeared to be an old dried-out streambed. Although I was not sure whether I was in the right spot, there was a Moorish tower marked on the map in about the same place. So here yet again, or so I imagined, was evidence of the great age of the Caliphate. The ruin, whatever it was, appeared to be medieval, which would have dated it back to that singular period in European history when the Moors held sway over the region they called Al Andalus, better known in our time as Andalusia.

The seven-hundred-year period of Muslim sovereignty over Spain and southern France, contrary to Western cant, was one of the more benign periods in the long record of European politics and warfare. It was a period of great artistic, scientific, and commercial advancement, and also a time of great tolerance, imagination, music, and poetry. Moors, as the Europeans called the North African Muslims, entered Europe from the south led by the Caliph Abd al Rahman I in the middle of the eighth century, and within two hundred years had turned Al Andalus into a bastion of culture and commerce. They brought with them the technology of irrigation and turned the normally dry plains of the south into an agricultural cornucopia, supplementing the olives and wheat that already grew there with pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes, and almonds, as well as saffron, sugarcane, cotton, and rice.

One does not get far in Andalusia without reminders of this great age. You see the Moorish influence in the architecture and the tiles, in music, in the physiognomy of the southerners, even in advertisements. Besides, anyone you talk to will often bring up the fact that the Moors, their former enemies, laid out gardens and built marvelous structures admired the world around. Spain does not easily forget its past.

By midafternoon I arrived at El Puerto de Santa María, a town of many hidden courtyards lined with bright red geraniums, buttressed churches, and, like many villages in this region, a deep history. There are several Paleolithic sites in the area, and the actual founding of the village is credited to the Athenian leader Menestheo, who stopped in here after the Trojan War. But as usual in Andalusia, it was the Moors who really settled the place. The town used to be called Alcanatif, which means Port of the Saltworks; Alfonso X conquered the city in 1260 and changed the name to Santa María de Puerto. Some of the later voyages of Christopher Columbus set sail—so it is said—from this small harbor, and the pilot for the Santa Maria was born here.

I rode slowly into the town plaza, dismounted, and wheeled my bicycle around the plaza like a tired racehorse, looking for a good café in the sun. Genuinely fatigued by now, I sat down, ordered a coffee, and stretched my legs out toward the square. It was about three o’clock and the town had entered into that afternoon somnolence that affects sun-blasted villages the world around. Many of the shops were closed, save for the tourist kiosks, and most of the people out and about were northern Europeans. A group of Germans or English had descended upon one of the kiosks that sold hats and were trying them on while a blond gentleman in short pants with a great arching paunch and a camera recorded the adventure. The shop women watched with bemused cynicism, their arms folded and an attentive eye to their hats—they had seen this sort of thing before, no doubt, and were leery lest their merchandise be ruined.

I noticed an old man in gray trousers and a gray vest standing next to the café, also observing the scene. He was the last of the old peasant types that you still see from time to time in this tourist-ridden coast, dark eyes, grizzled, poorly shaven, and hands like rocks, clearly a man of the soil.

“They probably won’t even buy a single hat after all this,” I said to him by way of openers.

He tipped his head to one side, cynically.

One of the tourists dropped a hat onto the stone plaza.

The old man shook his head again. “These women work hard for their hats. I know their fathers and uncles. They are good workers, although one uncle.…” Here he lifted his thumb toward his mouth to indicate drinking and winked at me with a smile.

“Do they live out on a farm?” I asked.

“They raise bulls, not far from here. Another works for Tio Pepe.” He meant the sherry company, not some third uncle. “And the other drinks the Tio Pepe the second one makes. But tell me one thing,” he said, eyeing my bicycle. “This bicycle is yours?”

I said that it was.

“Many years ago, on one of our farms, a Frenchman came through with that very bicycle. He slept in our barn during the rain. We heard later he was a famous man.”

“This bicycle is very old,” I explained. “Older than me, I think.”

He looked at me and then back at the bike and, politely, said nothing.

“Where are you going, señor?” he asked.

“To Scotland.”

“ON THAT?”

“Yes, all the way.”

This begat a long series of stories of dangers of the road, some of which were true, or possibly true—cousins lost in rainstorms, never to be seen again, brigands on mountain passes who lived in caves and hoarded gold and diamonds, and, finally, the legend of a beast “north of here” who had eaten another cousin, or a friend of another cousin, or perhaps it was the friend of his cousin’s friend.

Why, he wanted to know, would I undertake such a journey. “There is a train from Cádiz that will take you to Córdoba,” he explained, kindly. “From there, it is possible to get to Madrid, and from Madrid you can go anywhere in the world, it is said.”

“There are no beasts on that train, and no sunlight.”

“That’s why you should take it. I advise you,” he said.

Before he left we began to talk about writing. There was some confusion at this. He told me he too was a writer, un escritor, and it took a little discussion to figure out that what he meant was that he knew how to write. I asked him if he would write his name for me and extracted my notebook and a pen and opened the page flat on the table. He arranged his chair, took the pen in hand, threw out his arm to lift his coat sleeve and flattened the pages with his left hand. Then leaning close, in slow, labored, circular strokes he inscribed his name in my book.

“Antonio Romero Rincón.”

I watched his old gnarled hands all creviced and glowing in the afternoon sun. I admired the gray stubble on his cheeks, his fine, black eyes that had seen, no doubt, during the Civil War, the horrors of starvation in this poor district of Spain where peasants of his species killed priests and ate the fighting bulls of the finca owners. I wanted to reach out and clap his neck in affection for his downright bravery at simply staying alive, but I thought it would be taken in the wrong way and kept my hands tucked under my legs while I watched.

“Thank you, I will keep this signature,” I said. “It is very well crafted.”

“You will be careful on the passes.”

“I will.”

“You will tell them in Jerez that you know Antonio Romero Rincón. People will take care of you there. After that, after Jerez, you are on your own.…”

By the time I left the café I decided it was too late to push on, and so, having traveled all of ten or fifteen miles, determined to give up and spend the night here. Among other things I knew that finding a room on a weekend at this time of year in Andalusia might not be easy.

I had been in this town once before and remembered a small pension called something like Loretta, so I set out to find it from memory. This begat many wrong turns in the warren of streets, which, after some meandering, brought me back to the town square. I had spotted a few likely pensions on my quest and miraculously on the way back to one of them found the Loretta. I unhitched the panniers from my bicycle and carried them up to my room, a sleepy, whitewashed little broom closet overlooking an interior courtyard, where I smelled cats.

The two women who ran the place dressed in dark cardigan sweaters buttoned to the neck even though it was warm. They were most concerned for the safety of my bicycle and gave me elaborate instructions as to where to stash it for the night. These instructions and directions were so complex that even had they been delivered in English I would have gotten lost; essentially I had to take my bike through another labyrinth of pathways to a small courtyard with a gate. I was to ask for a woman named Maria Luisa, who would let me hide my bicycle there when I explained that I was from the Pension Loretta. This ordeal took another forty-five minutes of more wrong turns, more directions from strangers, until, finally, I found the proper courtyard and, having dutifully rung the proper bell, summoned said Maria Luisa, and with much explanation was permitted graciously to enter. Here along with a number of suspicious looking cats I deposited my bike and said I would be back in the morning.

“Where are you going on that thing?” Maria Luisa asked.

“Scotland,” I said.

“Scotland? Very cold there,” she said. “I wouldn’t go if I were you.”

This was becoming litany.

That night I had more anguilas al horno, a carafe of local tinto, and a slice of local bull meat in a brown sauce with green peas at a small local restaurant where there were no other tourists. After dinner I went promptly to bed and was asleep in seconds.

A huge cat fight broke out beneath my window in the middle of the night and I woke up, so tired and confused I had to sit up to figure out where I was. I smelled mildew and cats, and felt the moist air of sage and salt with a hint of sharp geranium—Andalusia, I thought, Al Andalus of ancient days.

Two

The Breath of the Sun

One of the best spots in all of Western Europe to get a sense of the northward migration of birds is the Coto Doñana, a vast marsh, similar to the American Everglades, that stretches west from the banks of the Guadalquivir River. The sanctuary is one of the great stopover places for migrants moving north from Africa and also an area known for resident eagles, lynx, wild boar, and thousands upon thousands of ducks and geese.

On my way there, I stopped at Jerez for lunch and got into a discussion with a man who told me that I would have to get written permission to enter the Coto Doñana. Spanish information, directions and such like, are not always entirely accurate, and I took his advice with a grain of salt and rode on, confident that I would be able to find a place to stay and gain entrance. But at another café stop (I find it hard to pass up an inviting outdoor café) I heard the same story. By late afternoon, I arrived at the small crossroads of El Cuervo. There I spotted a likely pension in an olive grove at the end of a long drive, secured a room, and went for a walk in the fading light, watching the bats flit through the trees and feeling satisfied and healthy. I slept for a while before dinner and then met a man at the restaurant bar who told me there were lions in the Coto Doñana.

“Lions?” I asked, thinking I was missing something in translation. I thought he meant the Pardelle lynx, which is known to occur there.

“No, lions,” he insisted. “I myself have seen them.”

This begat a great discussion as to which could win in a battle, a lion or a tiger.

“The lion scratches his enemies to death in a fight,” he explained. “The tiger grabs with his claws and then bites. The tiger will always win.”

This brought him to the question of the Roman amphitheater and, as usual, the glorious days on the Iberian Peninsula and the arrival of the Moors. I wondered if he was perhaps using a metaphor for the Moors and the Christians with his lion story.

This same man confirmed the fact that the Coto Doñana was closed to visitors.

As it turned out my informants were right. An official at a tourist bureau in the next town explained that in order to get into the Coto Doñana I would have to get a permit from the central office in Seville. Undeterred, since I was going there anyway, I started out for Seville, pedaling along slowly through broad fields, spiky with young wheat and interspersed with olive groves. In time the road grew narrower and wilder and crowded with scrubland and pines until finally I came to a little ferry over the Guadalquivir, which took me across to the little town of Coria del Río, just south of the city. Here, after an afternoon coffee and a little conversation, I found a pleasant little posada on the outskirts of the town, with landscaped grounds and palm trees just outside my room. As I was settling in, I heard the throaty purr of a motorcycle, and a man attired in white canvas pants and a brown leather jacket pulled in and dismounted. He had the lank blond hair of a foreigner, and the high cheekbones and angular look of an American cowboy.

Coria del Río was a sleepy, slightly rundown little town, once a district of Seville during Moorish times, and like many strategically sited spots along the Guadalquivir, it had been inhabited since prehistory by the early Iberian peoples. The Tartessos, who had control of the region between the eleventh and sixth centuries B.C., had a settlement here, and later the Romans, who recognized a good site when they came across one, established a stronghold.

At a small bright square just back from the river, I found a few cafés and kiosks, and here, in the native style, around seven o’clock, I began stopping at cafés to drink a sherry, eat boiled shrimp and peanuts, and, also in the native style, sweep the shells onto the floor. A thin gypsy woman with bad teeth came into one of the bars and explained that if I were to buy a carnation from her, God would repay me, but before I could obtain this generous blessing the barman waved his index finger at her, and she spun, flaring out her red flowered skirt, and retreated. I was sorry to see her go. I am partial to gypsies.

A man in one of the bars had seen me wheeling my bicycle off the ferry below the town square.

“How old is that thing?” he asked. This begat a discussion of bicycles, and the fabrication of bicycles in the old Peugeot factory, and what things were like around this town back in the time of the Civil War, and how the Moors had once held sway here, and how the Spanish kicked them out and shortly thereafter conquered the world.

As we were talking I saw the motorcycle man pass by, looking for a likely watering hole, and waved him in.

As I expected, he turned out to be an American, named Parker Hamilton, who was headed south to Algeciras, where he intended to take the ferry over to Tangier and points south.

This Parker W. Hamilton, aka Parky, was a great talker and adventurer. He had explored all the American West, he said, from mountaintop to cavern depth, and from cavern depth to the solitary deserts. He had lived for a while in San Francisco, where, if he were to be believed, he had been tapped to play small parts in bad movies—not implausible, I thought; he was a handsome rambler with blue eyes and ruddy skin. We took more sherry, and ate more tapas, and then went for a late dinner and talked about travel and adventure. I told him stories about gem smugglers I had known in Paris; he told me about dope smugglers he had known in San Francisco. When I asked him, in so many words, where he was bound in life, instead of answering, he told me a fable.

“Once there was a little boy,” he began, “who lived in a big house by a deep river. This little boy had everything a little boy could want in life, toys, dogs, music lessons, swimming lessons …” the story rambled on about the quality of life of the young hero, and then recounted the fact that said little boy always knew that in the river beyond his house, there were two currents. One was the current the people could see, which swept ever downstream. But the little boy knew there was another current, a deep, unseen backwash that ran upstream against the apparent flow.

“That,” Parker explained, “is the current the little boy set out to explore.…”

Our hero now was intending to circle the globe on his motorcycle. He had begun in Boulder in late summer, ridden east to New York, where he spent part of the winter, thence to London, and then, just a month earlier, to Amsterdam and points south. He was intending to ride around Africa, then India, then onward to Asia, and finally back to the coast of Chile and northward through South America and through Mexico to the United States.

“Eastward against the sun,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“I mean to say, you are riding eastward all the way. Into the rising sun, rather then westward with the sun.”

He shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“You know, the sun,” I said. “It rises in the east and sets in the west.”

“I guess,” he said. “Whatever.”

The following day I rode up to Seville, crossing the Guadalquivir again on a terrifying bridge, thick with dangerous noisy trucks. Some years earlier I had lived in this city, in a small rooming house not far from the Alcazar, and I headed for this now, wondering if, after an absence of some ten years, the owners were still there and would remember me. In fact they welcomed me with open arms.

“Of course we remember you,” said Anna, the wife of the owner. “El hijo del obispo. Who could forget?”

I had forgotten that somehow in one of the long interchanges we used to have I had told them that, back in America, my father was a bishop—which wasn’t true, but made good conversation and offered me an apparently memorable identity. Bishops in Catholic Europe do not marry, of course, although no doubt a few of them beget children.

Anna had taken a motherly interest in my welfare when I first lived there, expressing concern over my long nights on the town, waking me on time for classes, and periodically encircling me with her arms and drawing me to her ample bosom like the old aunties of my childhood. Like many women of her age she wore a bun of gray-black hair and a dark, conservative suit. She was always dressed in black—no sooner would one mourning period be over than another cousin would die, requiring her to don dark clothing. Some women simply give up and dress in black all the time.

Anna even remembered that I was fond of her zumos—a local drink of whipped orange juice and sugar—and offered to make me one; we sat at the dining room table of the pension, talking over old times while I explained, or tried to explain, my quest on this trip.

“Why not stay here with us,” she said. “The orange trees will be in flower soon. We will feed you eggs, just as you like and keep you from harm.”

I was tempted.

I spent the rest of the day visiting some of my old haunts and the restaurants where I used to eat, and then, in the evening, took a taxi out to the house of an American man whom I knew through a mutual acquaintance. This man, John Fulton, was a well-known character in Seville at the time. He had been for a while one of the few foreign matadors and had then retired to paint bulls and horses. His medium was part of his message. He painted in bull’s blood.

Fulton lived with another well-known personage in Seville, the horse photographer Robert Varva, and armed with a letter of introduction from these two, the next morning I went out on my bicycle to Valverde, where the office of the chief of operations of the Coto Doñana was then located. As usual, following Spanish directions got me lost, but in time I came to the spot and entered through the gate to the small stucco building. Here, for some inexplicable reason, feeding in a fenced yard on the left side of the door, was an African hyena.

The previous night at the American expatriate outpost had been confusing, with many comings and goings, and too much sherry and lights and music and a loud American woman who dressed like a local and an apparent household pet, a young gypsy boy, who danced flamenco for the assembled. The presence of this hyena in the bright sun of southern Spain, the dangerous lions of the Coto, and the whole grand folly of my adventure suddenly struck me as very funny, and I had to wait outside the fence for a while to compose myself enough to present my credentials and my disguised persona of journalist. It was not necessary; the official, a small man with a pencil-thin moustache, was ever so cavalier, and, brushing his cigarette ashes from the documents, stamped a permit and wished me good luck. “Be careful of the wild boars if you go back in the thickets,” he warned.

He also told me to look up a man named Torg while I was there, a Danish bird researcher who had permits to work in the Coto and was living at the research station there.

On the way out of the city, I crossed over once more the Guadalquivir River. It was hard to believe that this shallow brown watercourse with its floating debris of branches and swirling islands of dried grasses from upstream once carried out from the city of Seville most of the Spanish trading vessels that set sail for the New World in the sixteenth century. The city had become established as a major European trading center in the world economy late in the fifteenth century, after the first voyages of Columbus, and the river, which had been an important shipping route during the time of the Moors, then became the major commercial route for the great fleets of Spanish galleons that sailed between Seville and the Americas. Shipping included the large fighting galleons as well as the smaller trading vessels known as carracks, and the even smaller but more maneuverable caravels.

Once in the open countryside I began encountering one of the dreaded conditions of cyclists in open country. Worse than high hills, or steep hills, or even mountains, is a steady headwind. Hills and mountains have down slopes; the wind never quits. Great hot blasts began buffeting me irregularly and for an hour or two, bent low in low gears, I pedaled against them.

All of the trade that made its way from the port of Seville was driven by wind, although ultimately it was also driven by a singular idea that somehow entered the mind of an otherwise little known and not entirely skilled sea captain, known as Columbus. The intent of the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of this period, as all American sixth graders know (or used to know, at least), was to find a short route to the Indies. Before Columbus, all trade with the East either went overland from Europe or by sea, down the west coast of Africa and then back up through the Indian Ocean. But in January of 1492, in Granada, the last of the once powerful Moorish kings surrendered what was left of Al Andalus to the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, the so-called Reyes Católicos. With the reconquest complete, the Catholic Kings, feeling that the presence of Moors and Jews would be an impediment to their ideal of a Spanish unity, expelled them from the peninsula and began a period of expansion that would last for two hundred years.

For six years prior to this event, Columbus had directed appeals to Queen Isabella for support of his idea of a route westward to the Orient. How he got the idea to sail west in order to find a short route to the East is not known. But finally, not long after the fall of Granada, Isabella agreed to allow him to attempt his voyage and named him Admiral of the Ocean Sea. She granted him a contract to any new lands that he might discover and granted him, further, a tenth part of all the wealth that he might find, in pearls or precious stones, or gold or silver or spices. Columbus was already over forty; he had gray hair, and a long career as a local sea captain. But this was no ordinary voyage. His persistent advocacy of this singular idea effectively altered the cultures of the globe, spread Europe far beyond its borders, and begat a vast redistribution of life-forms that continues to this day. The event also effectively destroyed the native cultures that were then thriving in the Americas.

Columbus did not know what was beyond the horizon west of the Canary Islands and the Azores when he set out in the summer of 1492, nor did he know that he would have fair winds all the way west. But he had spent some time on the Portuguese island of Madeira and it is thought that he may have heard from sailors there of a prevailing easterly wind just to the south. He also knew that all the Portuguese voyages of discovery that had ventured west from the Azores had run into contrary winds. So he sailed south some seven hundred miles, refitted his ships in the Canaries, and on Thursday, September 6th, departed from the harbor at San Sebastián de la Gomera and with light following winds sailed into the unknown. Two days later, in the night, Columbus picked up a strong easterly breeze and found himself in the rumored band of favorable winds for the rest of the voyage.

Day after day for four weeks he sailed westward with his small flotilla of three vessels. On the seventeenth of September something went awry with his compass and it would no longer register true north. The crew became concerned. There were grumblings. The rumored edge of the flat earth could lie ahead. But Columbus claimed the variation was due to nothing more than their westward position. He was guessing, but it turns out he was right. They were now far enough west to alter the bearings of magnetic north and the north star.

The little group sailed on. More leagues covered, more empty ocean. Columbus spotted crabs and claimed that they were a sign that the ships were near land. But there was none in sight the next day, nor the next. Then he saw cumulus clouds and claimed again that they were near land. Then the crew saw a length of sugarcane and a small carved stick float by, and a few nights later Columbus saw, so he said, a light gleaming to the west and announced that they would find land the next morning. At dawn there was no land.

Finally, on the eve of the twelfth of October in the moonlight they saw a low-lying coast and hove to. In the morning, they saw the islands of the Bahamas, unfurled their flags, blessed their god and rowed ashore. On shore they found palm trees, and many ponds, and grassy plains. They signed themselves. They smelled the fresh earth and drank fresh waters, and then the following day a company of bronze-colored people emerged from the thick groves of palms. Presuming himself on an island off the coast of India, he called the people Indios—Indians.

There is a good physical explanation for the prevailing easterly winds that carried Columbus westward to this “new” world, and as with so many earthly phenomena, it begins with the sun. Because of the angle of the earth to the sun, solar radiation streaming off this supercharged star makes a direct hit on the equatorial regions of the planet. This heated air rises and thereby creates a zone of low pressure around the equator known as the doldrums, a region of hot humid air and sticky, dead calms, interspersed with towering thunderheads and broken with short bursts of heavy rains. This rising, warmed air flows outward toward the cooler regions of the poles thereby creating a vacuum in the equatorial regions, into which the cooler surface winds rush from both north and south. But as the surface winds flow back in toward the equator, they are turned by the spin of the earth, a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect. Since these winds flow from east to west just north and south of the equator, they are known as the easterlies, and they are, as all transatlantic sailors know, among the most reliable and predictable breezes on earth. By leaving from as far south as the Canaries, Columbus had happened upon them. Had he left from the Azores, he might well have turned back.

But there is more to exploration than the outbound voyage. All explorers from the European continent had to come home to tell the tale, and this too involves the solar-based planetary conditions that create a fair wind for the return trip to Europe. The rising warm air over the doldrums sinks back to earth around 35 degrees north and south of the equator, a region known to sailors as the horse latitudes. The air masses in this region are churned by a combination of the Coriolis effect and areas of high and low pressure, which creates prevailing westerly winds.

These east and west winds provided mariners with a regular system of shipping lanes. After Columbus, a set course of trade developed. Adventurers, colonists, and Spanish grandees would sail southwestward from the Guadalquivir, catch the prevailing easterlies for the outbound voyage, load up with gold and spices, subdue the locals, put down colonies, and then sail north to the region around northern Florida or Georgia to pick up the westerlies for the long voyage home.

Within these churned-up, complex bands of moving air there are local disturbances caused by varying landforms, mountains, cold or warm sea currents, sun-heated deserts, and polar regions. These have begotten a variety of sometimes predictable, sometimes erratic winds that have acquired names: the Elephanta of the Malabar Coast in southwest India, for example, or the chill Mistral of the Rhone Valley in France; the Sirocco that blows off the dry deserts of North Africa, bringing clouds of red dust into southern Europe; the Föhn; and the Churada, and the hot-breathed Harmattan of the Sahara; the Helm of England, which blows in from the Pennine Chain; and the Penente of Italy, the Purga and the Buran of Siberia, the Khamsin of Egypt, the Melteme of Greece. For every region on earth there are named winds, in fact there are some four hundred names for different winds around the globe and these winds bring forth, in their various seasons, recognized changes in the collective mood of the human community—headaches caused by the Föhn, for example, irritability from the Santa Ana, depressions, elations, bad luck, good luck, evil days, and propitious hours.

Our science tells us, and we believe it for the most part, that all these winds of the earth are caused by the Coriolis effect and the spin of the planet and the fact that the continuous furnace of nuclear fusion streaming off our nearest star heats the tropical regions of the planet. But as with so many stories of creation, there are other explanations.

The seafaring Greeks believed that the winds of the earth were housed on a cliff in the Tyrrhenian Sea, kept in a cave by their overlord, the god Aeolus. Here dwelt Zephyros, the gentle west wind, and Boreas, the chill wind from the north, and Notos, who brought rain from the south, and Eurus, the ill-tempered wind from the east. Odysseus, on his way home from Troy, stopped to visit Aeolus, who instructed Zephyros to carry him safely back to Ithaca. He tied the other winds up in a goatskin sack and told Odysseus not to open it. With a fair wind and following seas, the company of sailors was soon within sight of Ithaca, but the greedy crew, thinking there was gold inside, opened the bag while Odysseus was sleeping. Out burst the angry winds of the north and the east, and sent the vessel scudding back to sea. It took Odysseus twenty more years to get back home. At the culmination of his voyaging, he and his men landed on the Island of the Sun. Here, while Odysseus slept, his men made the mistake of killing and roasting the favored cattle of the sun, who grazed on the island. Instantly there arose a mighty wind out of the west, and the blast snapped the forestays of the ship’s mast; the vessel foundered and sank, with all hands, save Odysseus, who clung to the keel and the broken mast and after ten days finally washed up on Calypso’s island, where he lived for the next eight years.

In North America, the Abenaki of northern New England claim that there is a mountain peak in the far north where, on top, lives a giant eagle that continuously flaps his wings, thus creating all the winds of earth. In Central Asia there is a mountain, possibly the same one since the Abenaki originated in Central Asia, where, according to legend, there is a hole, and from this hole winds issue at tremendous force.

In Central America the Aztecs, whose culture was destroyed by those Sevillanos and Castilians who, riding the easterlies, came after Columbus, believed that the sun god begat an associate deity, a god of the wind. In time he evolved into a dragonlike, flying figure, a serpent with wings whom they called Quetzalcoatl. He was a god of extreme purity, a kindly benevolent redeemer who gave his blood for humankind. But like many gods of old, in the time of the Aztecs, the story held that Quetzalcoatl had gone away. He promised to return, though.

There are winds that are known to be spirits of the dead. There are winds in some cultures that are carried in a sack by ancient figures who live in the mountains. There are winds that are dragons, and there are many winds that are horses (and many horses, it should be added, that were inseminated by the winds). And there is a mysterious, sun-heated desert wind in the Middle East that has no known source but has miraculous powers. In one local folktale it parted the sea, allowing an army to pass, and then closed up again, enveloping a pursuing enemy army. In another story this wind collapsed the house of a powerful local chieftain, killing all his sons. It brought plagues, and carried locusts, and swirled around mountaintops, and, as if in recognition of its fiery source, it had the ability to burst into flaming bushes. Sometimes it even spoke out loud. A wandering tribe of pastoralists in the region named this wind ruwach. The word meant, by association, a blast of air, or whirlwind. It also meant breath, or powerful breath, and finally it meant spirit, a very powerful spirit, so powerful that the tribal people refused even to utter its name. We here in the West are more direct (or less respectful) and have translated ruwach as God, the unspeakable Yahweh of the ancient Hebrews.

By late afternoon the wind dropped and the road south to the Coto began to descend through rolling hills with pastures where rough-looking fighting bulls of the Romero family were grazing. There was no traffic, I was alone in the fading green light, separated from these trained killing bulls by a thin strand of wire alone, and as I pedaled along, I began to appreciate the bravery of the matador, John Fulton. He was just a good American boy from Philadelphia, an artist, who had somehow become fascinated with the corrida. Seeing these great, heavy-shouldered, full-horned bulls eyeing me as I innocently pedaled by gave me a chill. But I forged on to Castilleja del Campo and ate some pork sandwiches with a glass of tinto to calm my bull-tormented nerves, and then rode on to Carrion de los Cespedes.

By now it was late, the hour of the paseo, and the town square was filled with families and courting couples, all strolling around the small square in the same direction or standing in the middle discussing important matters, such as the upcoming Feria at Seville or the football scores. I began looking for a place to stay, but it appeared that there was no hotel or pension in the town. A man I spoke to, with typical Spanish courtesy, took up my cause and spread the word and down at the plaza my homeless plight soon became the talk of the town. A great crowd of sympathetic black eyes surrounded me in the dusk; there was much discussion and the older men began talking among one another about what they could possibly do for this poor bicycle man who had appeared in their town. Then the crowd parted slightly and the alcalde himself came forward and took my elbow solicitously. Soon he summoned forth one Diego Valdería, a former bicycle racer, who happily assumed the role of personal escort. By now it was pitch dark, but the congress had decided my fate.

Calls were made ahead and a room was secured for me in the town of Pilas, about five miles down the road. But how to get me to this room in the bull-haunted black nights of rural Andalusia, when the duendes emerge from the hollows and the foxes bark from the dry hills?

Once again the alcalde arranged a conference, and a cavalcade of automobiles was organized to light the way. After much assembling, we set out, several cars in front of me, very many astern, and in this manner, riding along at my twelve-mile-an-hour pace, my escorts led me into the center of Pilas. Here I was bountifully received in the town plaza by another crowd, given dinner at a local restaurant, lubricated with much tinto and sherry, and then escorted to the only pension in town, a tiny room off an enclosed courtyard.

Near dawn I heard a hideous coughing and braying and thought the Devil himself, accompanied by a herd of red-eyed Romero bulls, had burst into the room. But it was only the family burro, enclosed in the courtyard outside my window, greeting the day.

The next morning, having bid farewell to my saviors, I rode on to Roccio and then headed for the coast and the town of Torre de la Higuera. The only place I could find near enough to the entrance to the Coto was a corrugated Quonset hut where workers constructing a new hotel (a sign of things to come) were staying.

The Coto DoÑana is made up of vegetated dunes, known as the cotos, interspersed with wide grassy marshland, and to the south a line of so-called “walking dunes” that move slowly northward each year. Wild boar, red deer, a few fallow deer, foxes, an odd weasel-like predator called the pharaoh’s rat, and the dreaded Pardelle lynx inhabit the cotos. Vast collections of graylag geese, widgeon, stilts, spoonbills, coots, and gallinules feed in the marismas, or marshes, along with flocks of thousands of flamingos who settle here as they move between their nesting grounds and the Camargue in France. And above the whole region, almost any time you glance skyward, you can see kites, and vultures, marsh harriers, and even the rare Iberian eagle.

As it turned out, the road into the research center in the park was sandy and almost impossible to ride on, so I decided to hide my bicycle in the brush and hike in. After an hour of walking, this too grew tedious, so I headed into the brush to look for a high spot to take my lunch. The land was dry and characterized by sharp hilly dunes covered with juniper, Besom heath, and gorse, interspersed with bracken hollows and a few cork oaks and umbrella pines. It would have been very easy to get lost in the tangled thicket, and indeed within twenty minutes I wasn’t sure where I was. I could see a particularly high dune south of my position, so I worked my way through the bracken hollows and the thickets. Halfway to the hill there was a sudden scrambling at my feet, coupled with hideous squealings and snortings, and a family of baby boar burst from the brush around my ankles and scurried into the thickets. This was followed by a deeper, more ominous squeal as the great mother trotted off behind them. I considered myself lucky. Far more dangerous than the resident Pardelle lynx, more to be dreaded even than the purported lions is the boar sow with young. I had heard terrible stories of slashings and gashes from the tusks of these things.

Safe at last, I climbed to the top of the hill, found a good outlook, and sat down for an alfresco repast.

Even here, well away from the marshes, I could see rising and falling flights of ducks in the distance, and above in the sky the slow drift of a marsh harrier or kite. There were warblers and unidentifiable sparrows in the thickets, and I could hear chips and chirps of other species sounding out all around the hill.

Migration in these parts begins in late February, and now, in late March, it had passed its peak, but there were still a lot of birds around. Actually, migration for many of these species probably began back in late January in Africa, where they had wintered. Their northward flights in fact have nothing to do with warming weather in Europe; birds are no better predictors of weather patterns than any other species, and considerably worse than weather forecasters. The thing that starts them moving is not weather, but the angle of the sun as it rides along the great road in the sky that astronomers call the ecliptic.

As the light begins to increase in late winter, the changing length of day induces changes in the internal hormonal rhythms in a variety of migratory species. This in turn causes a phenomenon the Germans call Zugunruhe, a sort of premigratory restlessness that affects birds during seasons of migration. Ornithologists know of this because of experimental work that was carried out on a sparrowlike species known as the brambling. Researchers captured bramblings and kept them in aviaries and then artificially shortened the length of day throughout the normal spring migration period. Without their normal seasonal cycles of light and dark, the bramblings must have believed it was a very long winter indeed and failed to exhibit the migratory restlessness that they would normally have been feeling at that time of year. Furthermore, they did not experience the gonad enlargement that takes place in the spring mating season. Once they were put back into natural light, however, they began to get restless and accumulate fat, as they normally would do just before undertaking the hardships of migration. All this, as the researchers proved, had to do with the angle of the sun and the amount of light that occurs in the different seasons.

Back on the road to the research station, after extricating myself from the thickets, I heard a loud popping and sputtering from behind and turned to see a much beaten truck rocking toward me, carrying in its bed the hives of bees. The kind driver offered me a ride and dropped me off at the station, the palatial hunting club of a former local grandee. Here I met with Torg, the Danish bird bander, a quiet man in his thirties with blond hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He and I talked about the migration of that year, of the various threats to European bird populations, and he broke out a bottle of tinto, uncorked it and set it out on a wooden table. There were no glasses, so he took the first drink in the Spanish style, that is, he held the neck of the bottle above his mouth and chug-a-lugged the wine without putting the bottle to his lips, an art of drinking I had never mastered in spite of the fact that I had lived in southern Spain. I said as much, and sucked from the bottle like any normal lush. Torg did not seem to mind.

Torg had a pet egret that had been pacing around the tiled floor as we talked. In between drinking bouts, Torg spotted a gecko on the wall and swatted it to the floor. His sharp-eyed pet was on it in a flash, its spearlike beak darting and its wings propelling it forward. The egret held the gecko squirming broadwise in its bill for a second and then deftly flipped it around and swallowed it headfirst.

“I do not like to kill,” said Torg. “But is this not life? You eat, you are eaten.”

Torg offered to take me around the reserve in his Land Rover to look at some of the blinds he used. As we were leaving, he mumbled something about bringing someone along and pulled up to a little stucco house. A svelte Spanish woman opened the door and leaned against the jam with her arms folded. She wore the wide-brimmed Cordovan sombrero and high boots and tan riding pants and had the large, hooped golden earrings of the local women. In jest she threw her hip to the side and lifted a shoulder when she saw Torg. “What is it that you want, big boy?” she said in Spanish. (Torg and I had been conversing in English.) He politely introduced her to me as a fellow researcher named Mercedes and the three of us crowded into the Land Rover, with Mercedes in the middle squashed over onto Torg, thigh to thigh.

We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around on the rutted roads, stopping at blinds, counting egrets, watching the flights and flocks of gadaney ducks, whimbrels, spoonbills, storks, herons, eagles, and kites, and admiring the great cumbersome nests of the increasingly rare Iberian eagles that bred there. At one point while we were walking, another little pack of devilish boars broke out from the brush and crossed the road.

“Run,” said Mercedes. “Danger. Save me Torg.”

Torg nodded seriously and looked away.

Toward late afternoon they gave me a ride out to my hidden bicycle, and I walked out to the road and headed south for Torre de la Higuera. On my way to the road, there were some mean-looking dark clouds in the south, and by the time I got back to my place, heavy rains began to fall. They continued to fall throughout the next day so I rode down to a bar on the coast that had the luxury of central heat and spent the afternoon drinking hot chocolate, trying to warm up. The weather station on the television in the bar pointed out that there was a cold wave throughout Europe, and heavy rains in the south.

For another two days the rains continued and I stayed on in my little cubicle in the Quonset hut surrounded by blue-clad workers, trying to warm myself at the charcoal brazzeros, which provided the only source of heat. Finally, rather than endure this stillness and cold any longer, I set out for Seville to return to the warm bosom of my old pension near the post office and the motherly care of Anna.

Three

The Virgin and the Minotaur

Holy Week had begun in Seville and the streets were jammed with dark processions.

Beginning on Palm Sunday an atmosphere of gloomy sanctity pervades this normally ecstatic, hand-clapping city and a religious sensibility settles over the towers of the Giralda and seeps downward into the squares and narrow streets. Even in the Triana district, where the gypsies live, especially here in fact, there is an aura of spirituality. Everywhere, lining the sidewalks and crowding into the streets, families dressed in their finest dark clothes push toward the squares and plazas in front of the local churches, waiting for the arrival of the processions of penitents who emerge from the open doors of parish churches throughout the various districts of the city and proceed through the streets, carrying towering floats depicting scenes from the last days of Christ. Here, in bright, realistic costumes, are Roman soldiers, hideous bleeding scenes of the crucifixion, complete with ruby blood drops, and the most popular of all: the bejeweled, silken-gowned statues of the suffering Virgin, some adorned with pearl tears. The floats are preceded and followed by lines of robed, medieval figures dressed in peaked witch hats and hooded masks pierced with eye slits, and led through the labyrinth of narrow streets by marching bands of coronets blaring out Moorish tunes in minor key. Here, in our time, is past time. There is an ominous, dark air to the event, a remembrance of the Grand Inquisitors and the rigors of the Inquisition.

The floats are not drawn by motorized vehicles but are carried on the shoulders of men obscured behind heavy purple drapes surrounding the platform. The great challenge of these processions is to navigate the high, wide floats around the sharp curves and corners of the narrow streets, especially the Serpiente, the main street, where crowds push and gather and cheer the float onward. Occasionally the carriers of these weighty platforms rest, and at these times from underneath the dark drapes sweating men emerge, their shoulders and white undershirts stained with blood from the weight of the floats, their heads wrapped in white protective towels. Exhausted, half-shaven, these are the mules of this ancient ritual, the true penitentes.

These processions lumber through the streets from Palm Sunday to Easter, and during this time the whole city comes to a halt. The event is organized by parishes or confraternities of men from different districts who meet throughout the year to plan and collect the funds to maintain the floats. All of the floats are elaborate, and whenever they are brought out from a church for their procession, crowds gather in front of the doors to watch. At these times, or just before, a woman will sing a saeta, a haunting aria to the Virgin. This song is also performed in a sad, minor key and, by tradition, is sung without electronic amplification and the crowd remains silent in order to catch every phrase. Of all the fifty-two confraternities, of all the processions and of all the many Virgins in the city of Seville, the most famous is the Virgin of the Macarena, who spends most of her life in the parish church of San Gil. The saca, or bringing out of the Macarena Virgin, is to most Sevillanos the pinnacle of the Holy Week, but in typically Spanish fashion, it is an event that occurs, not at some convenient daytime hour, but late at night, usually around one or two in the morning.

I had been to a number of Holy Weeks in the past, but since I was back in Seville on the day they were to bring out the Virgin of the Macarena, I decided to go again. Unfortunately, this year the event was scheduled for four in the morning. It had rained much of the day and I had caught up on sleep after dinner at my usual hangout, a place called the Alcazares, and I wandered over toward the square, stopping for a sherry now and then, and taking several coffees to keep myself up. In front of the small white church there were thousands of people. Soon a hush fell over the crowd; the front doors swung open and there she was, dressed all in white, her jewels and crown glittering in the spotlights. She stood unmoving, while from the left side of the plaza, the figure of a small woman appeared on a balcony and all eyes turned. A deep silence fell on the crowd. Never, in my experience, had so many people remained so still. The small woman extended her arms toward the statue. The air was frozen. And then the saeta—the arrowsong—pierced the damp air and flew toward the heart of the Virgin. It began in mid range, soared to a high note, and then dropped back to contralto, and wound through the crowds. Then the Virgin began rocking and twisting; she angled through the double doors and moved into the square. The crowd parted as she flowed through the plaza and disappeared down one of the narrow streets.

Solar fanatic that I am, I could not help but notice that the golden halo fixed at the back of her head glinted and gleamed in the light, very like the sun.

Mary was the virgin mother, the descendant, we are told by the mythologists who study this sort of thing, of the ancient goddess of the earth, not quite banished to obscurity by the male gods Zeus and Jehovah. But although she may be an earth mother, the Magna Mater of the old paleoreligions of the Iberian peninsula, her most resplendent feature, and one that characterizes the Virgin and her child and all the Christian saints, is that golden halo of sunlight, an ancient remembrance of the source of all religions.

None of this is surprising. Spain, although one of the most Christian nations on earth, retains some of the most primitive elements of the old primordial pagan religions, filled as it is with sacred processions, in the style of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the Panathenaean processions to the Parthenon and Bacchanalian celebrations in the form of the Feria, which follows on the heels of Easter.

When I first came to Europe, out of the cold strictures of the Protestant north, I landed in Algeciras, and somehow, quite by accident as I recall, ended up in Seville in the middle of the Feria celebrations. I was nineteen years old and not unfamiliar with wild parties, but this was a party that began at dusk and went on all night, and every subsequent night for the next ten days. The event rivals, maybe even surpasses, some of the great festivals on earth—the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio, and the Palio in Siena.

Feria begins, as did many of the exuberant celebrations of the pagan world, with the sacrifice of a bull toward dusk on the holiest of the holy days in the Christian year, Easter. The Sunday corrida before Feria is the command performance for Sevillian society. The women don their prized antique mantillas and traditional spotted and frilled dresses, lay on much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and brandish elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and a restless air of excitement spins through the stands. The major-domos arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville corrida as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero fincas. Water men circulate with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater hawking red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bullfight favorites, such as “El Gato Montes.”

Then, into the center of the arena, stride the gladiators, dressed for the occasion in their bright, solar-inspired “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses bearing the high-speared picadores, and as the band plays the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades.

Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a tension settles over the crowd. Silence descends and waits like a crouched cat. Suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, with his great spearpoint swinging horns, his shiny coat and his gleaming bright hoofs. He halts in mid arena, paws the sand, his eyes searching, his enormous horned head turning left to right, looking for the enemy that has trapped him in the small corral over the past few days. He trots around the ring, sniffing the air, pawing and snorting, and then, as bulls will do, he selects an area of the open space, his so-called querencia, or favored site, which he will defend to the death.

Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. The altar boys, or arena workers, scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the horsed picadores, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls, steps out.

He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight-backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerinalike killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who charges down on him again and again, his head lowered to better hook his opponent. Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros jab colorful barbed darts in his shoulders, ducking and dodging his flashing horns as they do so. Then the horse-borne picadores lance the bull’s neck muscles as he charges repeatedly into the sides of the padded horses, occasionally lifting them off their feet. Finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until, standing sideways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.

The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The dark, bloodied Minotaur staggers, sways, and collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon.

The crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and exits, his work completed.

Little wonder that this primitive rite has been the subject of much literature.

The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, caught up as I was, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and primal gods and goddesses, I perceived the bullfight in historical terms. As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to those of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures, this one was somewhat balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.

It is argued that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early twentieth century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with bull worship and one of the rituals of this veneration involved a dangerous dance in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed the ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers that he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the latest explanation, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray, is that the bull images in the palace of Knossos are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull-leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda, who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.

According to MacGillivray, the configuration of stars depicted on the wall paintings would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. The recurring image in Cretan art of two steep peaks, which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull, was a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivray argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and that, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax, labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillivray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles, represents the equality of day and night.

Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars, astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.

This view fit nicely with theories that related the early depictions of spirals and mazes engraved on cave walls and on Neolithic stone artifacts to the passage of the sun as it spiraled around the earth during the four seasons.

The bull fight is only one of the Spanish Easter rituals that evolved out of ancient traditions. Although the official date for the celebration of Easter was set by the Christian church in the ninth century, the early festivals associated with the Resurrection previously took place at the time of the vernal equinox and were tied to pagan fertility and agricultural rites. Among the ancient Greeks, the first day of spring was connected with the cults of Adonis and his Phrygian counterpart, Attis. The beautiful boy child Adonis was loved by both Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Zeus resolved the conflict by decreeing that Adonis should spend winter in the underworld and summer above ground with Aphrodite.

His Eastern counterpart, Attis, was a young shepherd boy beloved by Cybele, the Magna Mater, or Mother of the Gods, the greatest of the Asiatic goddesses of fertility. Like Jesus, Attis had a miraculous virgin birth. Both Attis and Adonis died young. Adonis was killed by a wild boar, and in some versions of the myth Attis castrated himself and bled to death beneath a pine tree. The tree became his symbol and was brought out during his festival day on the twenty-second of March. In Greece the death of Adonis was commemorated on earth by the blood-red windflower or scarlet anemone, which sprang up from the earth in those places where the drops of his blood had fallen.

Both Adonis and Attis are reborn each spring and their death and resurrection were celebrated in Greece and later in Rome in a mixture of mourning and festivity. Waxen images of Adonis or Attis were paraded through the streets, accompanied by music and cymbals and singing. In Rome the cults of Attis and the followers of his goddess lover Cybele developed ecstatic processions in which celebrants danced wildly through the streets, working themselves into a bloody frenzy of lamentation. Priests of the Attis cults sometimes castrated themselves during these frenzied processions.

The early Christians adapted the Adonis rites to the Easter celebrations of the resurrected Christ. Waxen images of the dead Christ were brought out from the churches and carried along the streets in elaborate, festive processions. In the early centuries of Christianity in Rome the coincidence of the resurrection of the gods, Christ, Attis, and Adonis, was a matter of great debate, with the pagans accusing the Christians of imitating the miraculous resurrection of the vegetative gods Adonis and Attis, and the Christians contending that the pagan rites were a mockery of the true faith. But both Easter and the Adonis cults have even deeper roots.

Two of the earliest historically recorded deities, the Babylonian fertility god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar, were closely connected to the solar year and the seasonal cycles. In the Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, Tammuz died each year in autumn, and all the vegetation died with him. The lamentation of his lover Ishtar, the goddess of fertility and life, who was associated with the cycles of the moon, brought him back to earth in the spring; the flowers bloomed, the birds returned, and life appeared once more out of the dead land.

In fact much of this probably predates even Sumeria and may have taken place in prehistory at the very dawn of agriculture. The seed is buried in the cold earth, and around the time of the vernal equinox, in what must have seemed sheer miracle, the green shoots of life sprang up from the dead soils, fostered by the warming rays of the spring sun. No wonder there was cause for celebration.

The ritual Easter day slaughter of the bulls in Seville marks the beginning of the ten-day party of Feria. But since I had been before, I decided to leave Seville and spend Easter someplace else. I said goodbye to mother Anna, who wrapped me in her arms and rocked me from side to side and made me promise to return, and rode out through the rolling hills and fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir River toward the town of Lora del Río on my way to Córdoba.

Near the town of Alcalá I hit one of those terrible cobbled roads that nearly rattled my poor old Peugeot to death—one of the problems occasionally associated with travel on back roads, although far better than the major trunk roads with their storms of truck traffic. Toward dusk, I saw ahead of me the spiky turret of the Church of the Assumption towering over Lora del Río, and found, to my surprise, a good hotel on the town plaza. That evening a crowd gathered in the plaza below my hotel window and I went out on the balcony to see what was happening. On a balcony just opposite my room a woman in traditional dress stepped out. The doors of the church swung open and a statue of the suffering Virgin, all decked in silk and jewels, moved out to the street as the crowd hushed. The woman extended her arms toward the Virgin and then split the air with the most piercing, haunting saeta I had ever heard. The arrow of the song darted through the air toward the float and pierced the heart of the Holy Mother, and when the song was finished the crowd was too moved to applaud.

The road to Córdoba ran along the Guadalquivir River valley through a patchwork of greening spring fields with fresh-growing wheat and sunflowers interspersed with groves of orange trees. It was sunny and warm, and vast, round-bellied cumulus clouds rose all about the horizon beyond the river. At one point, pedaling along, thinking of nothing but the moment and listening to the shushing stridulations of the cicadas and the chirping of sparrows, I rounded a bend and beheld a fairy tale landscape lifted directly from the pages of a storybook. Ahead of me, at the top of the steep, jagged hill, were the towers and turrets of a Spanish castle.

The road twisted around the hill to the high battlements, and as I ascended I came upon other knights, crusaders, and pilgrims wending their way toward the heights. This was still a holiday and I supposed that many young people come out from Córdoba to visit the site. In low gear, I slowly pumped upward along the narrow road, stopping periodically to catch my breath, when suddenly there was a terrible, grating racket as my pedals slipped and my derailleur let go. I found myself stranded on the side of the steep hill.

By this time, I was too close to the castle to give up, and since there was nothing much I could do here to fix it, I walked the rest of the way and selected a quiet spot on one of the parapets to think things through. The landscape below the castle stretched southward in the afternoon sun, the slow winding river passed just below the heights, an expanse of fields dotted with copses of trees stretched to the horizon, and all around me, I could see the winging, darting forms of martins and swallows. In time I was joined by some Spanish students who gave me much advice, and even attempted, knowing nothing about derailleurs and even less about mechanics, to fix the problem. One of the young women said I should just give up and take the train to Córdoba and get it fixed in the morning.

“You do not want to spend the night in this terrible place,” she said.

I wondered why, and she explained that here, in the thick walls of this heavy, imposing castle, were the ghosts of those who had died in the dark interior dungeon.

“You can see them at night,” she explained. “They come out in the form of bats and flit around the towers where they died.”

That settled it. Following their instructions I coasted down the hill and walked or coasted my poor wounded horse to the station and took the train to Córdoba.

After some searching, at one hotel I was told, with a conspiratorial wink, that I could, if I would like, stay in the annex. I was not sure what I was getting into, but since there was no place else apparently, I agreed and was told to go to a certain bar near the river. The barman would give me a key and show me said annex.

I found the barman, a pleasant rounded fellow.

“You are staying in the annex?” he asked, incredulously, as if it were a hovel of a room.

I explained that, yes, I had agreed to stay in the annex. He shrugged.

“Follow,” he commanded.

He opened a door behind the bar, and we ascended three flights of narrow dark steps that stank of old cooking to a little landing. He opened another door and ushered me in.

Here before me was a luxurious light-filled room with a huge double bed and French doors giving onto a landing with a view over the river and the promenade. Wandering up from the river in the late afternoon light were small throngs of people headed for the evening round of tapas, and beyond the banks the huge, welling cumuli were rising over the lush fields and rolling hills on the other side of the river.

From roughly the tenth to the twelfth century, Córdoba was the intellectual center of Europe. It is, among other things, the site of the Mezquita, the Great Mosque, the third largest mosque in the world, although it is barely distinguishable now on the exterior and has been transformed into an odd, Islamic version of a Christian church. The city is the birthplace of the Roman playwright and philosopher Seneca and also the birthplace of the Jewish philosopher and doctor Maimonides. It was, furthermore, the home of the great Islamic intellectual Averroës, who was a contemporary of Maimonides. They both lived at the end of the ninth century.

Unlike Granada, the other surviving Islamic center in Spain, post-Moorish, Christian era Córdoba has swept over or left in ruins much of the splendor that was the former city. Nevertheless, enough remains in the form of little plazas and fountains and narrow streets and surprising little monuments to the great past of Cordoba to give one the sense of what once was here. As I wheeled my bicycle around the narrow streets in search of a derailleur, I passed the Mezquita, which was just above my annex, and decided to pay a visit.

I had been here once before some years earlier, and remember kneeling in the grooves on the stone flooring against a wall on the Mecca side of the mosque worn there by some four hundred years of faithful who knelt in this spot each day. For all its interior splendor, the glory days of the Mezquita had come to an end in the 1520s under the reign of King Carlos, who permitted the newly instituted Christian hierarchy to enclose the mosque in a Christian cathedral. Like a good tourist, I crossed through the courtyard of orderly orange trees and entered into the dark forest of the interior. Here, stretching off into the vast rooms and side chapels were the myriad pillars and arches and rounded domes of the original mosque, all topped and striped in red and carved with the glorious capitols of a rich past, the relics of Byzantia, Persia, Rome, Greece, and Syria, all of it now half obscured by the dark-walled chapels containing gloomy sixteenth-century portraits of suffering Christian saints. Originally the walls were open to the surrounding courtyard, but the Spanish builders had purposefully enclosed the mosque and sealed off the natural light and the air that once flowed freely through this holy site. The idea was to focus attention on the representation of Christian saints, and the icons and crosses of burnished gold, and to obscure the Moorish past, the alabaster niches and domes of fiery purples, greens, and gold, beset with roseate stones among the abstracted geometric squares and triangles intertwined with ornate vines.

At the height of the Caliphate, this mosque was surrounded with gardens and fountains and singing birds. Light and air spilled in through the open walls, the interior would have been filled with worshippers who would arrive here each day to face Mecca and pray. The Caliph himself would come to the Mezquita each Friday to lead the prayers, gauge the state of mind of his people, and revel in the glories of his collected art.

By the beginning of the ninth century, Córdoba had half a million inhabitants, with some seven hundred mosques and three hundred public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. Streets were paved and lit. The houses had marble balconies for summer cooling and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter and were adorned with gardens, fountains, and orchards. Paper, still unknown elsewhere in Europe, was everywhere, and there were bookshops and more than seventy libraries. Students from France and England traveled to Córdoba to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars to learn philosophy, science, and medicine. In the great library alone there were some 600,000 manuscripts. This rich and sophisticated, cosmopolitan society maintained a tolerant attitude toward other faiths. Jews and Christians lived in peace with their Muslim overlords. The culture actually had a literary rather than religious base and there was little or no Muslim proselytizing, although nonbelievers did have to pay an extra tax.

The Moors were also great mathematicians; among other things we can thank them for our numerals and for the concept of zero, which did not exist in other parts of Europe until after the twelfth century. They had also developed astronomical tables and were excellent celestial observers, in fact many of our star names, such as Deneb and Altair, are Arabic. They also brought north their theories on astronomy, and although they had an astronomy of their own by the time of the Caliphate, in A.D. 575 they had assimilated some of the theories of Aristotle and the Greek astronomer-philosopher, Ptolemy, who was born around A.D. 85 in Egypt and died about eighty years later in Alexandria.

Ptolemy’s major work, the Almagest, presents in detail the mathematical theory of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, based on an earth-centered system first described by Aristotle. According to the theory, the fixed stars—as opposed to the wandering stars, that is, the planets—rotate around the earth every day in vast concentric circles, along with the sun and moon. Ptolemy used geometric models to predict the positions of the sun, moon, and wandering planets, using combinations of circular motions known as epicycles.

It was through the teaching centers of Córdoba that Ptolemy’s so-called “Great Compilation,” which established the celestial workings of the sun, entered Europe. The system was obviously logical. The sun rose in the east, circled above the earth, and set in the west, so it seemed clear that the sky itself was circling. This theory had been brought to Cordoba by Averroës and made available to the Christian West via the translations from the Arabic into Latin.

The first translations, completed in 1185, were circulating at Oxford and the Sorbonne during the late twelfth century. The documents were further interpreted by European scholars, and were generally accepted, even though it was obvious to the discriminating mathematicians and astronomical observers that there were errors. The Europeans pored over the other translations from the Arabic of the Greek mathematicians, as well as the Arabic commentaries on the original sources, and by the end of the twelfth century the Ptolemaic model was established as the standard for the next four hundred years in Europe. It was not questioned until Copernicus came along and, through mathematical computation, began to seriously examine the accuracy of the Almagest. And it was not until the invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century that Galileo was able to establish scientifically the heliocentric theory that we accept today.

I was not having luck finding a derailleur in the city of Córdoba. In spite of the fact that the Easter holidays seemed to have come to an end, very few shops were open and the few bicycle shops seemed to be permanently shut, judging from the apparent age of the “closed” signs posted on the door. The one place that was open did not carry a derailleur. The concerned man who ran the place suggested that I perhaps go back to Seville, but knowing Seville, I suspected that I would run into the same problem. I said as much. He shrugged.

“Perhaps Madrid, then,” he offered.

This was an interesting proposal. I had been dreading the ride through the long, windy, dry plains of La Mancha and I knew that local trains had compartments to store bicycles, trunks, and even the occasional goat, so I decided to take him up on his suggestion. Every other living being in the city of Córdoba had the same idea it seemed. The trains were jammed and the only ticket I could get was a night train that left, in typical Spanish style, at 2:30 in the morning.

Four

Dark Star

From Córdoba, I had telephoned an old friend in Madrid who graciously met me at the train in the morning, offered me a bed, and promptly went off to work, leaving me to catch up on sleep. Later we met at a tapas bar off the Puerta del Sol.

Part of my appreciation for the sun came from summer visits with this man when we were children, in fact he was one of those who would fervently mumble prayers to idolatrous gods during my father’s interminable church services. Timothy Griggs was the only son of a small-time Broadway actor and a British actress who had made a name for herself on the London stage in the 1930s. My friend was attempting to live the docile life of a good bourgeois and, as far as I could determine, was generally failing. He had left the country, married a woman from Valencia, and settled in Madrid, where he supported himself by writing advertising copy. He was a tall, slightly portly fellow, with a brush-cut moustache and a Royal Air Force haircut, and he wore the clothes of a Yale graduate and spoke Spanish with an American accent. I noticed that in English he had somehow developed the fine, theatrical British accent of his dear departed Mum. Furthermore, married though he was, I gathered that he was still his father’s son and had not been entirely able to desert his past; he was out on the town every night.

I had lived in Madrid as a student on a narrow street not far from the Puerta del Sol, a plaza that had been named, I learned, for a gateway to the city that once stood at the eastern side of the plaza through which the rising sun shone.

From this center, old Griggs and I set out to explore the city, visiting some of my old haunts and stopping in at some of the new places that he was familiar with. We began at a flamenco club I had known where old men from Andalusia would gather on Thursday nights to drink sherry and sing to one another. Then we went around to the rooming house where I had stayed and paid a visit to the women who ran the place. They were from the south and were right out of a play by García Lorca—three pretty spinsters dressed in black, still living with a powerful old widow of a mother who always wore a veil of dark lace. They rarely left their quarters, except to attend Mass or lay flowers on their father’s grave. Like the old pension-keeper Anna in Seville, they too used to mother me, bringing me my favorite dish of eggs, pampering me with hideously sweet candies and sherries on Sunday afternoons in their dark parlor, and forever pinching my cheeks and sides and telling me that I must fatten up. Now they made us sit with them again while we drank cream sherry and talked of the old days in Madrid.

The old days in Madrid did indeed seem better, as they claimed. When I was last there, the traffic was not so heavy, the trolleys still ran, and the Puerta del Sol, although no doubt much in decline from its former years when it was the center of the city of Madrid, and thereby the center of Spain, and by extension the center of the known world, in a mere ten-year span had become a commercial hub, no different than Times Square or the commercial center of any modern city.

My first day with Griggs was becoming a tour of the streets of a lost youth for both of us. It was now seven o’clock, an hour when all good Madrileños flock to the tapas bars, and the two of us began to partake of sherry and vino tinto and seek out those bars that offered the best dishes. Crowds were thicker than I had remembered, and louder, and cars were polluting the narrow streets with noisome exhaust. But the old Spanish energy that had so impressed me as an innocent abroad was still boiling, and the gypsy beggars in their bright skirts were still plying the streets. The matchbook sellers were gone though, and there were no more impoverished old people selling lottery tickets and individual cigarettes to the nightly revelers. Probably a better thing, I said to Griggs.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I liked the old days when you could stumble into a bar, fall in with a group, drink all night and end up in the theater district at dawn dancing with fat putanas and acrobats.”

One night, Griggs told me, a few months after he arrived in Madrid, he had found himself in such a situation and was elected to become a sort of high priest in a black mass.

“I was half drunk, don’t you know. And new to this country, and they liked my clothes and carried me off to some cave. Here they were singing wildly, and there were many dwarfs and gypsies dancing flamenco and a great deal of hand clapping and foot stamping and smoke. Some great-bosomed painted lady stood on a table and sang one of the old zarzuela numbers and later they got the idea to crown me king in one of their cuadros, as they called them. They pulled off the tablecloth, placed a chair up on the table, and set me there with a bowl for a crown, the tablecloth as ermine cloak, and a carving knife as sceptre. They began bowing and scraping before me, and extending their arms in supplication and the acrobats were doing flips and juggling with glasses and knives and dropping them, since they too were drunk by now. Then things started to get out of hand, they began to make obscene gestures toward me and suggestions, and even encouraged the dwarfs to perform unspeakable acts with one another ‘to entertain his majesty.’ I announced that the time had come to leave and made my exit. They tried to keep me there, but in the end they hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me to the street. Walking backward, bowing formally and excusing themselves, they returned to their debaucheries.”

Griggs ordered another round of tintos from the barman, snapped up a deep-fried blackbird from a bowl on the bar, and, in the Spanish style, ate the whole thing, bones, head, beak, and all, holding it by the legs.

He stared off into the middle ground of the street for a minute, in remembrance.

“I say,” he announced, “would you like to go there, tonight? I haven’t been back since I married, wonder what it’s like.”

I could see where this was heading.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m trying to lead a healthy life, ride my bicycle every day, eat good food each night, worship the sun every day. Anyway I want to hear more about your Black Mass, sounds like a perverted solar ritual, just the kind of thing I’m researching on this trip.”

“You look healthy enough,” he said. “You look too healthy, if you ask me. We should go out on the town again.”

I said I’d think about it at dinner and we went over to the Plaza Mayor and found a good restaurant under the arcades where we shared a roast suckling pig. I was hoping he’d forget our evening plans, and in fact after the third course he began reminiscing about our old friendship in the United States and what each of us had been doing since college days when we had lost track of one another. He thought my expedition a mad lark and began grilling me on its purpose.

“You mean to say you’ve got some idea you’re going to find the essence of the sun on this trip?” he asked.

“It’s just a pilgrimage. You know all about pilgrimage here in Spain, Santiago de Compostela, the romerías, the gypsy pilgrimage to Roccio and all that.”

“Yes, but where’s your center? Pilgrims are always going to some actual place.”

“Well, I’ll find it. It’s somewhere north of here, at the end of the rainbow.”

“By God, I’d like to do that. Throw it all over, hit the road, as they say, ride all day, quench one’s thirst by night, free at last.”

I was dreading what was to come next.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, pensively. “What if I were to come with you?”

“You’d hate it,” I said. “Up every morning, ride roads with dangerous trucks, sleep in cold meadows.”

“Freedom.”

“No. Rain. Days of rain. Broken equipment. Flat tires. Look at me, I’ve lost weight. I’m gaunt with hunger.”

“Well, maybe just a jaunt. A week or two. I’ve a bike somewhere.”

I nodded. I couldn’t say no to my old friend, but I figured he’d forget by the next day.

He went off to work in the morning, and I began scouring the city for a derailleur, which by late afternoon I had found and installed. I went back to the apartment and had coffee with Griggs’s wife, Desdemona. She was a pleasant woman with a wide circle of women friends, who seemed much amused by her American husband. At home in their third-floor apartment, she and Griggs played very well the role of the quiet bourgeois couple, setting out a fine table and offering me sherries in cut glass. But I could tell it was only another act in the theater of Mr. Timothy Griggs and for all I knew, the life of Desdemona as well—she had darting black eyes and a worldly air. He brought up the idea of joining me again at dinner and Desdemona seemed to like the idea very much, possibly to be rid of him for a few weeks.

“I’ll join you at Burgos,” Griggs said. “We’ll ride out to Santiago in the pilgrim style. Fix our hats with cockle shells like true mendicants and ride through winds and rain,” he announced.

“It will indeed be rainy, probably windy too, but really, I’m not going that way.” I said. “It’s too far west. I want to get up into France by April.”

“Well then we’ll meet at Hendaya, go up to Biarritz along the coast and stroll the promenades in the old style. I shall wear white flannels.”

“Not what I had in mind, Griggs, I was going to follow the old Santiago pilgrim route north.”

“There’s a great beach there, though. Sun. It’s one of the old-fashioned sun spots of decadent Europe.”

“I know, but I want to keep moving. I want to get to Scotland by June.”

“Scotland?” he shouted. “Why in God’s name would one want to go to Scotland? But never mind. I shall meet you in France, in Bordeaux. We’ll ride up through the Médoc and drink at the vineyards.”

There was no dissuading him, so I arranged to call him in a week to see if he still wanted to come, and promised to meet him in Hendaya and ride up along the coast for a bit.

Early the next morning, a gray day with lowering clouds in the north, I set out once more, dodging trucks and buses to get to the narrow road heading toward the old university city of Salamanca. I was thinking of Gil Blas, the picaresque hero of the eighteenth-century novel that I was supposed to have studied here in Madrid. He too had set out for Salamanca in his youth with forty ducats and a mule, and had encountered many people and had had many adventures along the way. Mine was not so auspicious a beginning however. An hour into my ride, hardly clear of the city, the sky opened and it began sheeting with wind and rain. I took refuge in a small rest stop with gas pumps and a bad restaurant where I ate suspiciously undercooked pork sandwiches and waited for the heaviest of the rain to stop. Around midafternoon I made another attempt, only to be soaked again. I pulled in to a roadside bar, fully drenched. The barkeeper became most concerned and made me a hot chocolate, which she laced with brandy.

“Drink,” she said. “On the house. We don’t want you to die here. It’s the storm of the century.”

In fact it was a horrendous deluge, the streets and side ditches running with muddied waters. Burros in the fields stood with their heads lowered, not even bothering to feed, their coats black with the wet. Birds fell from the sky with the rains, traffic died on the roads. For all I knew the seas were rising over the lands to envelop the earth.

I called Griggs at home and got Desdemona.

“Come back,” she said. “There is a train at four. I will meet you, Timiteo will be so happy. He wants to talk more about his upcoming bicycle trip.”

Every day for the next four days I tried to leave Madrid. And every day it was the same story. Heavy rain, cold wind from the quarter in which I was headed, and rumors of more rain to come. I took advantage of the hospitality of Griggs and Desdemona and spent my days sheltering at the Prado and the other museums of Madrid, including the Museum of the Americas.

Among the many plundered artifacts in the Museum of the Americas is a document known as the Madrid Codex, one of four surviving Maya codices. The codex consists of 56 stucco-coated leaves of pounded-bark paper, painted on both sides and describing the rituals and divinities associated with each day of the 260-day Mesoamerican sacred calendar, which meshed neatly with the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus. It was from these documents, as well as the written descriptions from the conquistadors themselves, and now the extensive archeological evidence, that the story of the complex, solar-dominated Mesoamerican cultures came to be understood.

Anyone with any sensibility who has traveled in the former domain of these various cultures and looked at their statuary and paintings and temples with any depth cannot help but feel that of all the civilizations that have come and gone on this earth, these groups were indeed some of the most enigmatic. Their art revels in monsters, it glorifies scenes of war and conquest, the torture of captured soldiers, human sacrifice, and death. Their temples, especially those of the Aztecs, were crusted with the dried blood of ages of ritualistic murders, their walls lined with racks holding rows of skulls, actual skulls, and also carved friezes of death’s heads on the walls outside the temples, still evident in our time at ruins such as Chichén Itzá. Even under the benign, green sun of the Yúcatan and the natural energy of the solar-driven tropical forests that surround and still threaten to overwhelm these temples, the horror lingers on. Whatever one may think of these distant, mathematically advanced, ingenious people, the fact remains that the darkest passage in the entire 50,000-year history of the human relationship to the sun occurred among the Toltecs and Aztecs of the Yucatan Peninsula and central Mexico in the first five centuries of the second millennium.

The Aztecs were the last of a native American high culture that had evolved out of the Olmec civilization, which had developed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico around 1500 B.C. and worshipped as one of the prime gods a sort of jaguar man, or werejaguar. The Olmecs were followed in the third century A.D. by the great civilization of the Maya, the most refined of these groups and often compared to the civilization of fifth-century Athens. Although the Chacs, or rain gods, were important for the Maya, it was the celestial deities, the sun, the moon, and especially the planet Venus, who formed the trinity of their religion. The regular appearance and disappearance of these heavenly bodies became an organizing principle and critical element of their spiritual life. In fact the Maya were almost obsessed with time and celestial events. Their complex calendars and almanacs and their measurements of time were thoroughly integrated with their religious practices and the movements of the sun, moon, and planets. They worked out one of the most accurate calendars that has ever been known and were able to measure and calculate time past precisely, as far back as four hundred million years.

Each night, according to the Mayan cosmology, the sun descended into the deathly underworld, where he also reigned. Here he took the form of a dark jaguar god and when he came up each dawn he carried with him the lingering insignias of death, a pale weakened figure. It was this aspect of the sun’s daily journey that eventually emerged as one of the dominant metaphors of the two cultures that followed.

By A.D. 900 the civilization of the Classic Maya was in decline and the more warlike, aggressive Toltecs began to take over the Valley of Mexico to the north, where the city of Teotihuacán was located. Here before the arrival of the Toltecs was a vast cultural center with over 100,000 residents, complete with apartments, artisan workshops, markets, and temples. The ritual center consisted of a surround of temples that could hold up to 40,000 people during their festivals. The central edifice was the great Pyramid of the Sun, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. It was located at the end of the aptly named Avenue of the Dead.

Although decidedly different from the Maya, the Toltecs appear to have taken on some of their cultural attributes, possibly having learned of them from the Mayan elite who may have fled the ceremonial cities to the south. For example, they adopted the Mayan solar deity, only now, under the Toltec system, when the sun came up each day, he rose as a skeletal figure, gaunt, ill-nourished from his night journey, and clearly in need of sustenance. That sustenance turned out to be human flesh.

Last in this sad history was the arrival from the north of the Aztecs in 1325, an even more warlike people than the Toltecs who built the city of Tenochtitlán on an island in Lake Texcoco, the site of present-day Mexico City. They eventually gained dominion over most of the native tribes and chiefdoms in the region.

The Aztecs believed that they were living in a period of time overruled by the Fifth Sun, Tonatiuh. There had been four other sun eras before, each of which had perished, destroyed by either wild animals, wind, fire, or flood. The Fifth Sun would perish too, the Aztec priests had prophesied, under the violence of an earthquake, but he could be sustained by continued sacrifice, which required in turn almost continual warfare to obtain victims. These were usually enemies captured in battles or gained as tributes from vassal states, which is why the Aztecs never fully conquered many of the surrounding states. They needed a steady supply of ritual sacrifice victims and the elite concluded, wisely, that if they used their own people for sacrifice they could risk an uprising or a massive walkout, as perhaps had happened with the Maya.

All the Aztec gods had to be fed with human sacrifice, but the sun and his associate, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, were the hungriest gods of all and lived on blood. Victims selected to feed the sun were frog-marched or dragged up the terraced steps to the very heights of the ceremonial temples; below in the plaza crowds gathered to watch the sacrifice. The victim was stretched over a stone slab and held down by four priests while a fifth plunged an obsidian dagger into his chest and withdrew his pulsing heart to feed to the sun.

The motivation behind the ritual sacrifices was the concept of what the Aztecs called tonalli, the animating spirit of all living things, something akin to mana of the South Pacific, or manitou of the Eastern Woodland Indians of North America. Tonalli in humans was believed to be located in the blood, which the Aztecs believed was concentrated in the heart when one becomes frightened, which is why the sun so hungered for the heart. Without this offering, all motion would cease, even the movement of the sun; so the sacrifices were absolutely necessary to assure the continuation of life on earth.

Not all the Aztec gods were as hungry as the sun. The benign wind spirit, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was a gentle god who was able to sustain himself on snakes and butterflies. Quetzalcoatl had deserted the Aztecs for the time being, or had been expelled in a dispute with another god over the necessity of blood sacrifice, but their legends held that he was coming back and would redeem the people. The Aztec priests were careful chroniclers of time, and through astrology and calendar work they claimed to know exactly when Quetzalcoatl would return. The glorious event would occur in the era of the Fifth Sun, in the year Two Rabbit. On the Julian calendar that year would have been 1519.

In that very year, in the great palace at Tenochtitlán, the fiery king Montezuma received messengers from the coast. Castles had been spotted offshore, floating on the sea. These castles had landed on the shore, the messengers said, and had discharged humanlike beings, or godlike beings in the shape of humans, some of them mounted on the backs of magical animals with flowing tails, long manes, and big narrow ears. Montezuma ordered his priests to cast their oracles to determine the nature of these aliens. Were they from the spirit world? Were they gods? Was it, as predicted, Quetzalcoatl himself?

The nobles grew restless. Montezuma, it is said, fell into a depression and retired to his quarters. He instructed that gifts be sent to the coast to appease the newcomers, whoever they were, and settled back to await their arrival.

We, of course, know who they were. Hernán Cortés had landed on the shores near Veracruz.

When I emerged from the Museum of the Americas, the world of the hungry god of the sun was suddenly obliterated by the smells, light, and noise of modern Madrid. The indifferent crowds of people, the cars, the exhaust even, seemed a welcome relief from the dark world of Mesoamerica. Furthermore, the benign southern European spring sun had banished, temporarily, the ominous rain clouds and was filling the Retiro Park with a silvery light. I couldn’t resist a walk and purposely got myself lost under the scented flowering of the horse chestnuts.

That night Griggs and Desdemona had a dinner party with a couple of friends who wanted to practice their English, and I had another late night of drinking and eating. Over dinner we all got into a heated discussion in a mix of Spanish and English over the meaning of the epic meeting of the two powerful imperial cultures of Spain and Mexico. Griggs, Old World imperialist that I took him to be, tended to argue the Spanish side, while their two guests, Charro and Pelayo, who were both from the north and left-leaning, tended to favor the oppressed Indians. Charro launched a passionate and unique argument at one point, claiming that the Aztecs were relatively harmless in comparison to the Spanish, and that the numbers of sacrificial dead were overestimated. The Spanish put anyone who wouldn’t convert to the sword and sent them down to hell, she pointed out.

“The sacrificed of the Aztecs,” she said, “they would turn into hummingbirds after death and fly up to the sun for eternity. And anyway, if the priests did not sacrifice people, the sun would not rise. This was a known fact. We would do the same thing if we believed that. I would anyway.”

“Yes, but would you be willing to be a sacrificial victim?” Griggs asked.

She shrugged. “No se,” she said.

“Here’s another thing,” Griggs said. “They kept people in cages before the sacrifices, like cattle. Cortés freed them.”

“Then he kill them if they no convert,” Pelayo said quickly.

“What about this sacred heart of Christ?” I asked. “Isn’t it interesting that both cultures opened the chests and revealed the fiery, sunlike heart. Odd coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Please, let’s stop all this talk,” Desdemona said. “If ever two cultures deserve each other, it is the Spanish and the Aztec. How do you say in English, ¿Que el diablo cargue con los dos?”

“A pox on both their houses,” Griggs said with a flourish of his wine glass.

The hours in the Museum of the Americas, the discussion over human sacrifice, and my immersion in the whole Spanish experience in the New World kept me awake for a long time that night. Mainly I was thinking about an account I had read on shipboard from Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of Mexico that recounts the events surrounding the final days of the Aztec nation.

In February of 1519 Cortés sailed from Cuba with a force of some six hundred men, twenty horses, and ten cannons and worked his way along the coast of the Yucatan. Within months he had subjugated the natives, captured the town of Tabasco, and obtained captives and even gained allies. He then began negotiations with Montezuma, and in August marched inland toward the capital.

By then Cortés had a mere four hundred soldiers, whereas Montezuma had nearly 80,000 warriors in the city. But nevertheless, Montezuma decided to play the waiting game rather than attack this mysterious force. Hearing news of the approach, he planned to welcome the stranger into Tenochtitlán in order to determine his intentions. But as the Spanish grew closer, Montezuma seems to have changed his mind and sent out gifts of food and cloth and female slaves, and offers of gold if the Teules, as the Aztecs called the Spaniards, would turn back to the coast and not approach the city.

Cortés marched on. By November he came, finally, to the vast city complex.

What the Spanish beheld had never been seen before in the New World by Europeans. There, in the middle of a wide lake, was a shimmering island city with white towering walls of vast buildings with a major causeway linking the city to the mainland. Other causeways connected the various parts of the city, and there were multiple towers and shining palaces and airy apartments with spacious rooms and courtyards set with flowering trees. Bridges interconnected the causeways, and there were floating islands of gardens and orchards, with a wide diversity of trees, native roses, and the whole of it alive with singing birds.

The Spanish soldiers were overwhelmed by the splendor of it all. Some thought they had fallen asleep and had come into a dream, or a waking dream, and others thought they were seeing a legendary city out of the romance Amadís de Gaula, a popular literary work of the period.

As the Spaniards came into view, a great crowd surged out from the city on foot and by canoe to marvel at the newcomers, for they never before had seen so wonderful a thing as a horse. Then a brilliantly attired contingent of caciques and footmen came forward, greeted the Spanish, and instructed them to halt on the main causeway. Montezuma, the great chief, would come forth to greet them in person.

In time he appeared, borne on a golden litter under a canopy of green feathers and carried by robed servants. He was a man of about forty, in fine form, well groomed, with light bronze skin and flashing eyes and attired in bright feathered robes and shod with sandals of gleaming gold.

After a magnanimous exchange of gifts, Montezuma welcomed the newcomers with much ceremony and led the company of four hundred soldiers into the city in a grand procession. Forthwith, in review, marched armed warriors, and elaborately costumed troupes of dancers, masked stilt walkers, frolicking clowns, and lines of maidens bearing flowers. Following this display the Spanish were lodged in the former imperial palace where Montezuma’s father had lived.

The astonishment and delight experienced by those first Spanish visitors soon turned to horror when they witnessed the vast scale of ritual sacrifices that were taking place in the city. Before them rose the blood-stained pyramids, vast pagan temples of doom, whose walls were crusted over with dried blood. Inside the temples were long racks of skulls of the victims, proudly displayed. Nowhere in the literature of Europe, perhaps nowhere even in the Western imagination, not even in the Medieval images of the sufferings of the damned or the disasters of war, had the world witnessed such a scale of calculated horrors.

Over a period of weeks, there followed elaborate discussions and negotiations between the Spanish leader and the Indian king, mainly centering around religion and gold. Montezuma, in one of those curious surprises of history, seems to have been strangely humbled, perhaps because he still believed that Cortés may have been a god. Over the next month he was put under house arrest and eventually held hostage while Cortés negotiated for more gold. The Spanish soldiers had at first been given free rein in the city, but by the beginning of the next summer, partly because of the healthy suspicions among Montezuma’s family and the Aztec caciques of the Spanish motives, the mood in the city changed dramatically. Finally there was an Indian uprising.

Sensing trouble and realizing the end may be at hand, on a dark, rainy night in June, Cortés and his Indian allies attempted to escape along the causeways. In the chaos of the rain and darkness many Spanish were killed and forty prisoners were caught and placed in cages to be sacrificed. This glorious idea of a public sacrifice of the all-powerful Christian Spaniards to their own powerful sun god, Tonatiuh, caused many Aztec warriors to give up the fighting temporarily and return to the city for the ceremony, and in the confusion Cortés managed to escape. He retreated to the coast and began immediately to rebuild his forces.

At the end of that summer he returned with a full force of Indian allies and laid siege to Tenochtitlán. He constructed thirteen brigantines and had them dismantled, carried over the mountains, and reconstructed just outside of the city. Then he launched an amphibious attack.

Vast flotillas of war canoes sallied forth from the watergates of the city, but the light canoes of the Indians were no match for the larger, better-armed sailing vessels, and the battle began to turn in favor of the Spanish. Day by day, Cortés came closer and soon breached the walls and broke into the city. The Spaniards and their Indian allies filled the canals and causeways; they leveled the odious temples of death; tore down palaces and laid waste to the spacious dwellings of the nobles; and when, after eighty days, it was all over, the marvelous city lay in ruins. Broken spears littered the roads and the houses were roofless and the walls stained with the blood of battle.

After his victory, Cortés wrote home to Spain. In his letter he expressed regret for having had to destroy what was once, as he wrote, “the most beautiful city on earth.”

The heavy rains of Madrid came back in the night after dinner and continued throughout the next day until late afternoon. At dusk the sky cleared and before heading out for our nightly rounds of tapas and dinner, Griggs and I went up to the roof of his building. His apartment was located in a high section of the city, which itself sits on a plateau, and we had a good view of the evening sky. Wild bands of horselike herds of clouds with streaming manes were riding across the plains to the west, and beyond the city I could see the rain-freshened green springtime of the countryside. I was anxious to be off.

As we watched, something brushed the back of my head, just a hint of a breeze really, and a bat flitted over the roof, circled, and came back. Then there was another one, and then, beyond the roof on the other side of the streets above other roofs, more bats. Everywhere we turned, there were bats, little dark forms flitting and diving and whirling in tight little circles above the cosmopolitan city.

“I hate those things,” said Griggs.

But I was happy to see them, it seemed a portentous sign, and I made plans to leave the next day.

The following morning was sunny and warm. To save time, I strapped my bicycle on the back of Griggs’s car and rode with him to the outskirts of the city, where he dropped me off. I unhooked the bike, secured my gear, restrapped my lunch and a good bottle of rioja Griggs had given me for the journey, and bid him farewell. He watched me sadly.

“I would love to go with you,” he said. “Seriously. I’d as soon jump aboard and face the trials of the road than go to work today.”

“Well just drive up to France and I’ll see you there,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sincere, but I said it anyway. “I promise to call when I get there. You come.”

He shrugged. “I will,” he said.

The last I saw him he was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette, watching me pedal off.

In one of those moods in which anything seems possible, I headed into a part of Spain I had never before visited and was ready to explore anything. My ancient bicycle seemed to have sprouted wings, and as I sailed onward I felt capable of flying over the dreaded mountain passes of the Sierras and the deep river valleys that stood between me and my goal beyond the wall of the Pyrénées. The road was smooth, and within a few miles I began riding through the old paisaje of Castile, with small farms here and there, and little gray brown villages, some with a small bullring, and roadside stands that sold roasted chickens. The sky was cerulean blue, there were little networks of clouds high up, shimmering with light, as in a Fragonard painting, and the weather, finally, was warmer. The wind shifted and was blowing up from the south, speeding me on my route. A fine day for a good cycle, a most excellent outing, fair winds and low hills, and the smell of grass and fresh-turned earth, and it was all brightness and light, and smooth sailing all the way, until I felt the dreaded wobbling instability that I knew meant one thing—flat tire.

Not to worry. I dismounted, carried the bike up into a pasture, and set about changing the wheel, only to discover that somehow with all my focus on the derailleur I had forgotten to get a spare. I tried to patch the split tire but the break was too wide. And I sat there in the pasture in the warm spring sun for a long time, trying to figure out what to do.

I had always loved the city of Madrid. When I lived there, I was in the habit of walking down a side street to a favorite café to take a coffee and sit in the sun. I spent long days in the Retiro Park watching the ducks and daydreaming, reading, and attending boring afternoon lectures on El Cid that would cause me to fall into a sort of half-conscious state of dormancy in which images of Babieco the horse and red-turbaned Moors would float before my mind’s eye. Then around seven I would head for the tapas bars for the evening. It was a good routine, a quiet life, but I wouldn’t wish to have lived that way forever. Nor would I, after my current sojourn there, wish to see Madrid again for a decade or so. But I seemed doomed to be stuck there.

The logical thing would have been to return, get the spare, and leave again. I was only about ten miles away. But then Griggs would discover me and insist that I stay on, or worse, prepare to come with me. I would lose days, having already lost too many days. In the end I limped back to a roadside bar I had passed, ordered a coffee, and chatted up the owner. Were there any bicycle shops nearby. No. Was there anyone around who could repair tires. Yes, but he was out of town. In the Spanish style, word of my dilemma got out around the café. Many advisors appeared to help me with my plight. But all of them—unfortunately—had the same answer. You must return to Madrid. About this time, an energetic little man in a white delivery truck pulled up and sailed into the café and greeted everyone. He was a known regular and soon joined the advisory council. He too said I must return to Madrid. But unlike the others, he offered to take me there.

I gave up and called Desdemona.

“Timiteo will be so happy …,” she said.

Things went downhill from there. Griggs, good soul that he is, claimed he had arranged to take time off to meet me in France, and said, further, that it would not be a problem to change the dates, and said furthermore that he would drive me over the mountains and deposit me in France, and that we two could pedal along the coast of southern France, stopping at the little seaside towns to eat and drink, and it would be a glorious time and that by driving over the Sierras rather than pedaling, I would live to tell the tale. This much I questioned, as I had noticed that Griggs had adopted the Spanish style of driving.

But in the end, I caved in, since it did make sense. And in any case, I had never set out to test myself in a marathon bicycle journey from Andalusia to Scotland. I was a solar pilgrim, not a long-distance bicycle racer.

That night we went back to the Plaza Mayor and ate at Botin, the most famous restaurant among American literary tourists because it was featured in the last scene in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Jake and Brett have lunch there in an upstairs room and drink rioja alta and then go for a ride in the hot light of the Madrid summer. Griggs had stuffed pork and a bottle of rioja, I feasted on kidneys and drank sparingly.

Two days later, having outfitted Griggs with the proper equipment—more or less—we left for France.

Five

Half Course in the Ram

I’ve been on some hair-raising roads in my life. I’ve driven the Amalfi coast in southern Italy, around vertiginous bends with sea cliffs that drop a thousand feet. I have been on similar roads on the coast in the south of France, between Nice and Menton, and even worse roads in the interior of Corsica. Once I rode up the ill-maintained twenty-two bends of a washed-out road to a tea plantation perched high on a peak in the Western Ghats in southern India and lived to tell the tale.

But I don’t think I have ever been so terrified on a road as I was with Griggs in the Sierras of northern Spain. In this case it was not so much the road or the heights; these were generally civilized, and well-maintained compared to some other mountain passes. It was the barbarian Griggs, who seemed to have imagined himself on the Paris to Cairo race and took the mountain passes and the curves and the downhill tracks as if he were attempting to overtake Mario Andretti himself. From time to time I insisted on having him “rest” for his upcoming bicycle journey and drove part of the way myself. But he was annoyed that I drove so cautiously.

“Hurry up,” he would shout. “Pass that slow bastard.” “Overtake this truck or it’ll slow us down at the next pass.” Do this. Do that. Turn here. Stop. Go. He never slept during his enforced “rest” periods and wouldn’t relax. But, alternately spelling each other in what amounted to a marathon road race, we sped through mountain passes and deep valleys, crossed the Sierras under the vast, brooding Miranda de Ebro, and somehow managed to get to San Sebastián, still counting ourselves among the living. From there we headed up the coast and crossed the border at Hendaya.

At St.-Jean-de-Luz I found a quiet room over a restaurant and we spent the rest of the day walking around the town, strolling the beach and sampling the local cafés. That night we celebrated our arrival in France with a five-course meal—local mussels and a fine spinach soup, a baked white fish whose name I never could manage to translate, a puff pastry of potatoes and leeks, and a crème brûlée for dessert. Griggs took a cognac after dinner. And after that we went down the street to a long zinc bar and took a coffee and Griggs nursed another cognac. There were two pretty German women at a table behind us, and he kept turning around and nodding to them. They bowed back, coolly, and he tried some German on them and they smiled weakly, and went back to their conversation. So Griggs ordered another cognac, sipped it approvingly and turned and toasted them. Once more, ever so politely, they nodded and forced a smile and I said, finally, “Give over, Griggs, you’re a married man, and a gentleman, and I won’t be part of this. I am on a pilgrimage, not a lark.”

The next day, we wheeled our bicycles out to the street, loaded our gear, and rode out along the coast smelling the salt air and trying to recover. Now it was Griggs who lagged behind. He had an old three-speed thing with a straw basket in front of the handlebars, and as we pedaled up the coast, he grew puffy and red. I slowed down to allow him to catch up, and then pedaled onward, then waited, and then rode off again. Barely clear of St.-Jean-de-Luz he suggested we stop for a coffee. That done, we pedaled on for a few miles, and he suggested we take a little drink of something. Two miles down the road, he suggested we stop for “elevensies,” as the English phrase it, and after that he wondered what I would think about an early lunch.

We were headed for Cap Breton, but at this rate it was clear that we wouldn’t make it. On the other hand, I was rather enjoying the pace, so I suggested we go over to the beach to rest and look for restaurants. Here we found a pier with a crowd of old men fishing from it, and we wandered out and watched the gulls and the action, such as it was. This done we pedaled along the shore road until we came to a little square with a promenade, and many outdoor seaside restaurants, one of which seemed suitable to Mr. Griggs. He ordered a plate of fruits de mer and a carafe of the local house white, and tucked in. Then he thought he liked the look of the cold langouste at the next table and ordered one. And then he thought we really should share a plate of the famous Arcachon oysters, a local specialty. I picked at the oysters, watched the gulls circle just over the promenade and the little children and nannies, and young couples with active dogs, and an old town drunk in a traditional French striped sailor’s jersey and baggy blue trousers who commented on the parade of people to himself from his parkside bench.

We had coffee and paid the bill.

“Time to push on,” I said.

“Leave? Already? How far is it to Cap Breton? Aren’t you tired from all that riding?” Griggs asked.

We had made all of four or five miles I believe, and this was some of the easiest bicycle territory I had experienced, flat lowlands through sheltering pines that blocked the wind. I persuaded my companion to ride on.

But when he arose from his repast he was stiff and hobbling.

“Work it out, Griggsy,” I said, jokingly. When we were in school together we had a coach from Alabama who would always say that. Some poor child would be writhing on the field of battle with a sprained ankle or a broken leg, and he would tell him to get up and “work it out.”

“No, this is serious,” Griggs said. “I am grievously wounded.”

“I mean it, just keep moving, it’ll get better, same thing happened to me when I started out.”

Bravely he hobbled to his bike and mounted up, only to begin shouting again.

“What is it now?” I asked.

“My poor arse.”

“Work it out,” I said.

He didn’t laugh this time.

But he was a brave soul, old Griggs. Injuries notwithstanding he pedaled on, albeit far behind. I would ride ahead, stop, look back, and there he’d be, plodding along willingly. Against my recommendations, he was dressed in a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun away, but, as I told him it would, the wind kept catching it and so he tied it on with one of his string undershirts which he knotted beneath his chin. He wore his white flannels and had started out in a tennis sweater, which he had now stripped off and tied around his waist. As he pedaled along, his collared shirt came untucked and the shirttails flapped in the breeze so that what appeared behind me was a wide white seabirdlike figure. Glancing back at him, as he struggled on the road behind me, Sancho Panza came to mind, save that Griggsy fancied himself a member of the nobility, an old knight in the style of Don Quixote.

“Slow down, for Christ’s sake,” he said at one point when he caught up to me.

I was riding at about half my normal speed.

In time, riding on like this, stopping often to take a little something, we reached the Cap Breton and the town of Hossegor by nightfall. Here we found a small hotel and looked around for dinner. Griggs was somewhat less ambitious about eating now; he reviewed the menu and selected a plate of baked small fishes in garlic sauce, which he savored with a good Bordeaux, followed by another good Bordeaux from a different vineyard. The wine refreshed him and he and the waiter got into a discussion of good vintages and bad winters and rainy springs and the noble rot and the problems with getting people to pick the grapes when the right time comes. Then he got into a fish discussion, and then he ordered a dessert and cognac and a coffee, and then another cognac, and then he went so far as to suggest we take a stroll along the beach. Then he stood up. He gave a cry and nearly crumpled to the floor.

Solicitous waiters rushed over.

“What is wrong with the Monsieur?” they wanted to know.

Griggs was leaning on the back of one of the chairs, moaning.

“It is nothing,” I said. “He’s an old soldier. It’s a war wound.”

“Which war?” they asked enthusiastically.

“Don’t listen to him,” Griggs said.

We explained his predicament and they helped Griggs out of the restaurant, and slowly, he limped back to the hotel. Like an old man, he mounted the stairs step by step, holding onto the rail, fell into his bed in his clothes and promptly slept.

I lay awake wondering how to get out of this quandary.

The next morning over coffee Griggs solved it for me.

“I say,” he began. “I’m not in the shape I used to be, as you can tell.”

“Well such is life,” I said. “Time is marching on.”

“No I mean it. I can hardly walk. Much less pedal. My arse. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I would,” I said.

“Listen. I’ve a thought. You’re interested in the old pilgrim route to Santiago that goes through the Pas de Roland are you not? Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well it’s steep, you know, very steep. Precipitous. I’ve driven through there. Rough country. High hills.”

“I know. I’ve read about it.”

“No place for a cyclist. Hills like cliffs. Narrow roads. Sheep flocks appearing out of nowhere. You’ll be killed. Probably a lot of bandits and there are said to be bears in the region.”

There were in fact bears in the area. But no bandits as far as I knew.

“Look, I don’t think I can go on with this bicycle thing. I’ve wounded myself, I’m afraid. Overdone it. There’s a little train line back to St.-Jean-de-Luz. I’ll take the train back, get the car, pick you up, and we can push on into the hills.”

I had thought earlier about taking that route. I wanted to pick up the old medieval pilgrim route that led to Santiago de Compostela and follow it northward wherever I could, but I knew about the steep hills, and since I was falling behind on my schedule as far as the summer solstice was concerned, I had planned to go up to Bordeaux on the coast; furthermore, it was southeast of where we now were—the wrong direction.

“I’ll drop you at the base of the Pyrénées, in the foothills,” Griggs said, “easier riding. Mainly, I know a good little restaurant in the town of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port where we can have a fine meal. Very good cheese there. Sheep cheese.”

I dreaded driving with Griggs, as much as he dreaded riding with me. In the end I cut a deal.

“I’ll do it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Let me do the driving in the mountains.”

That settled, I packed my things and began immediately on the return journey while Griggs walked and rode over to the nearest station to find a train. We agreed to meet back at the hotel where we had stayed the previous night.

All over southern France there are ancient pilgrim routes that lead out to the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela. Some pilgrims came down on an inland route from Paris, specifically from the old Place Saint Jacques and thence along the Rue St. Jacques, which is still there today. From Paris they flowed south to Orléans, then Tours, Poitiers, and on to Bordeaux, where they climbed the foothills to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Others meandered south from Bourges, through Nevers to Limoges and Périgueux. Some pilgrims came south by sea from England and the north of France, landed at Bordeaux, and headed south from there. Some flowed across southern France through Provence from Italy, or drifted down from the high mountain town of Le Puy. Others came north from Madrid, or arrived by sea at the port of San Sebastián. The land routes swirled like a funnel all across southern France, narrowed down, and ran the Pyrénées at Roncesvalles, the Pas de Roland, the site of the great epic battle recounted in the Chason de Roland, and then entered Spain and converged at Puente la Reina. From here they turned west and flowed out in various tracks to the shrine.

Shortly after the death of Christ, the Apostle St. James traveled to Iberia to spread the gospel. In the beginning he did not have much success, in fact he had only eight converts, all told. But one night in Zaragoza he was aided by the miraculous appearance of no less a figure than that of the Virgin Mary, who was still living in Jerusalem at the time, but was transported to Zaragoza by the phenomenon of bilocation, in which an individual can be seen in two places at once. James gained many converts after this appearance, and after six years returned to Jerusalem, where he was captured by Herod and beheaded. According to the histories (or the legends, depending on which source you choose) his followers stole his body and brought him back to Iberia, landing on the coast of Finisterre, the End of the Earth, the westernmost point in Europe and a region not yet converted to Christianity. The followers of St. James buried him inland at a place under the control of a pagan queen named Lupa, the Queen of the Wolves. Over the next few generations the site was forgotten and overgrown with forest.

Some eight hundred years later, a pious hermit named Pelayo took up residence near this isolated territory. One night his solitude was shattered by a chorus of angelic voices soaring in the upper airs and the world around him began to brighten. He looked up and beheld a brilliant light, shining over the land like a night sun and illuminating especially a single spot in the lonely, wooded region where Pelayo was dwelling. The good hermit surmised that there was some powerful spiritual being at its source and went off to notify the local Christian bishop at Padrón. Recognizing the signs, the bishop ordered the trees and rocks removed and had the area excavated. Here, beneath the earth, the workers discovered two graves and an underground crypt. The bishop pushed the stone lid aside and there lay the body of St. James the Apostle himself, fully clothed, his head miraculously reattached, his ancient raiments unsullied, and his body fresh and uncorrupted after his eight-hundred-year sleep.

Soon after the discovery, the bishop had a new chapel built over the crypt and within a few decades the site became a destination for pious Christians. Legend holds that Charlemagne came here to pay homage during his wars against the infidels, and in some versions it was he himself who had the chapel constructed. Over the next two centuries, as the reconquest of Spain progressed, the burial place of St. James became established as a shrine, and by the eleventh century it ranked with Jerusalem and Rome as a pilgrimage site. At the height of its popularity during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, more than half a million travelers a year followed the difficult high roads out through Galicia to the shrine. A grand cathedral was constructed there in the thirteenth century to honor the site.

Because it was first identified by a star fall, or at least an extraordinarily bright object shining in the night, the place became known as Campo Stellae, in Latin. St. James, Santo Iago in old Spanish, was shortened to Santiago, and the name of the place became Santiago de Compostela. The route that led to this shrine was known in English as the Way of St. James. But it had other names. Some who followed the route called it the Way of the Stars, or la voie lactée, the Milky Way. If you crossed the Pyrénées at Roncesvalles and followed the setting sun, or by night, the Milky Way, eventually you would arrive at Compostela. Although the shrine was a burial site, the legend was clearly related to celestial events.

Santiago emerged at a crucial time in Spanish history and soon became a patron saint in the effort to evict the Moors. Sometimes he even personally joined in the battle. At Clavijo, during one conflict, in which the Christians had been driven back from the field by the Moors, he appeared out of the clouds on a white horse, his sword raised, and entered into the battle with his fellow Christians, beheading infidels left and right. He appeared at other battles after that, always charging into the fray in a fiery form, out of the sky, his flashing sword raised, and inspiring the Christian soldiers to fight on. The Spanish would shout out his name when they entered in the field to encourage his appearance, and because of his aid he was sometimes known as Santiago Matamoros—St. James the Moor Killer. He always came down from the sky on a white horse, and was often associated with lightning and thunder. Santiago joined the Spanish at many other encounters, even as far afield as the Americas. Soldiers of Cortés invoked his name when they laid waste to Tenochtitlán in 1519.

There is much discussion in church history and the literature of Santiago as to who, exactly, James the Apostle was. In some stories he is the son of a Galilee fisherman named Zebedee and a woman named Salome, who was a sister of the Virgin Mary. His brother, John, was also an Apostle, and the two of them were favorites of their cousin, Jesus, who bestowed upon them an honorific name, Boanerges, which means “Sons of Thunder.” The choice of epithet is pointed. So is the image of the white horse that Santiago always rode.

The Romans had been living on the Iberian Peninsula for three centuries by the time of the events surrounding the arrival of Santiago at Finisterre, and quite naturally they brought their gods along with them. Although the local pagans were not entirely converted, nor for that matter conquered—especially in the wild highlands of Galicia—they did take on a few of the Roman gods as their own. Among them were the twins Castor and Pollux, the offspring of Leda and the god Jupiter, who was also known as the Thunderer and often associated with light. One of Jupiter’s earlier names, Lucetius, means “the light bringer,” and this is connected to the word diu, or “bright.” One of his twin sons, Castor, descended from heaven to live on earth, and according to mythology he always rode down from the sky on a white horse. Once on earth he became the protector of humankind and would sometimes enter into battles on his white steed, accompanied periodically by his brother, Pollux.

As with so many of the Church legends, none of this was of concern to the half million devout Christians, who each spring during the Middle Ages took up their staffs, donned their traditional wide-brimmed pilgrim hats, affixed the scallop shell symbol of Santiago to the brim, and set out. But there was perhaps a deeper, more primordial logic to explain the overwhelming popularity of this site.

Except for the Spanish, who adopted him as their patron, St. James was not as charismatic nor important a Christian figure as Peter, Paul, or Jesus, so there’s no really strong reason that St. James should have been so important in the Middle Ages. What has to be taken into account in the story of this pilgrimage is the geography of the site. Santiago de Compostela is located at the westernmost end of the wild mountains of Galicia, an area characterized by the emblems of a pre-Christian Europe, menhirs, megaliths, and stone circles. It is situated at the uttermost end of Europe, the end of the earth, or finis terra in Latin. Pilgrims setting out from Paris and sites north wound southward with the sun. At Puente la Reina they turned west and followed the path of the Milky Way out through a landscape reminiscent of the dark wood at the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which marks the gateway to the afterlife and salvation. They walked on beneath the stars, and at the end of the journey, at world’s end, they came to the place where the sun left the earth each evening.

The pilgrimage did not necessarily end at the cathedral at Santiago; there was one more stop. Pilgrims would carry on along a narrow finger of land to a little chapel at Finisterre. After struggling down through rural France, having crossed the Pyrénées, having fought off the wild dogs and bandits, and walked the rough terrain and hills, through rain and blistering heat, they followed the path of the sun to the west and arrived at the gateway to the next world. In short, the long journey was a remembrance of the ancient processions undertaken by pagan oblates and priests and even the Pharaoh himself in mimicry of the sun’s path through the heavens.

There is some evidence for this in the iconography of the pilgrim route through France. In many medieval churches along the Santiago route, there is a carved stylized image of a flower, and scholars of the subject believe the floral symbol is no flower at all, but an image of the sun. More to the point is the scallop shell.

According to the legends, St. James is associated with the scallop shell because of an event that took place when his disciples were carrying his body to Galicia to be buried. As they were approaching the shore, they saw a wedding party on the coast. As they watched, the horse of the bridegroom bolted into the sea. All presumed the rider drowned. But he rose from the waters draped in scallop shells. In another version, a mysterious knight appeared on a cliff and rode into the sea for no apparent reason. He too rose festooned with shells. Santiago pilgrims adopted the scallop shell as their symbol as a result of these legends and began decorating themselves with the emblem. It also appears on churches, hostels, and road signs all along the route.

But there could be another explanation for this odd choice of a seashell as the symbol for a saint. Of all the shells in the sea, the pattern of the scallop matches perfectly the rays of the rising or setting sun.

After Griggs left on the train I decided to take a slight detour and follow an inland route back to St.-Jean-de-Luz. I picked up some cheese and bread along the way and around noon stopped at a pond to take a break. The cuckoos were calling from the woods on the south side of the pond, there were chaffinches along the roads, wagtails along the shore, and a few whispering little things up in the pines and oaks that I couldn’t see to identify. I was just south of Les Landes at this point, one of the largest forested sections of France, a region characterized by dry, sandy soils, and covered with pines. Although there are still a few wild sections, and although the entire forest is protected, the coast in this section is more or less developed with many little seaside villas and small tourist towns, tucked behind the dunes. But inland, on the back roads, there is a certain quality of peace and tranquility, which, after my sojourn with Griggs, and the seeming impossibility of escape from Madrid, was more than welcome. I lay back on the bank of the pond, listening to the birds and eating my lunch and thinking about my upcoming journey into the mountains with Griggs, and the fact that I would have at my disposal a car, a means of actually getting higher up into the Pyrénées than I had intended.

The whole border of France and Spain in that section is a vast international park, with high roads and snowy peaks, and as long as we had the car, I thought I might try to persuade Griggs to take me up into the park. I was thinking in part of the quality of light one encounters in high places, especially in snowy regions, the almost blinding sun in such areas. This got me into a whole train of thought about light, and Santiago, and Jupiter, and how often the word light enters into the language in this region, as in the name St.-Jean-de-Luz, St. John of the Light, which brought me back to St. John’s brother, James—aka Santiago—and halos, and star falls, and the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and then I suddenly realized I was going to be late, and forced myself to leave.

Griggs was not at the hotel when I arrived, but I was told he had checked in and was somewhere around town. I knew just where to look and went down to the main harbor square in St.-Jean-de-Luz to find him. There he was sitting in front of the café with the zinc bar, nursing a demi of beer and looking at pretty tourist women, as I expected.

We left the next day for St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roncesvalles. As soon as we cleared the coast, heavy clouds began rolling in from the mountains and a light rain began to fall. We drove up to Sare, via Col St. Ignace, and then began a long climb through wooded hills and green pastures dotted with white sheep, the famous brebis who gave their milk for the delicious cheese. The roads were black and slick with rain, and wound above the high banks of rushing streams with mists rising above them and drenched leaves of drooping herbaceous plants. At one point we came to a pulloff and walked back through the woods a short distance to a great rocky waterfall, where we ate some oranges. I wandered off to look at flowers while Griggs smoked his morning cigarette, and then we began climbing again, passing through high pastures and small stone towns with narrow streets. It began to rain hard and in the high peaks there were shreds of whipping gray clouds over the deep green higher pastures. Ever winding, we worked our way upward toward the pilgrim town of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. At one point we stopped for a coffee at the little town of Espellete, and like good tourists, guided by Mr. Griggs, who had been here before, went into the little galleried church, where, by tradition, men sat on one side and women on the other. From Espellete, at my insistence, we took a little side trip down to the Pas de Roland, where the gray, chattering river Nivelle ran between two rounded wooded hills. Around here somewhere, according to the Chanson de Roland, the retreating Christian armies were slaughtered by the infidels.

There was in fact a historic battle here, but apparently it was the Basques who killed Roland and not the Moors.

On the way back to the main road, I saw a wild band of small horses with thick manes come running out of the woods and cross a field.

“Pottocks,” Griggs said. “The local wild ponies. Hard to catch.”

After many more turns, some of them hair-raising, we came into the town of St.-Jean and pulled into the main square.

Griggs got out of the car and began sniffing the air.

“The good restaurant is around here someplace, can’t remember which one it was though.”

The air smelled of rain and wet stones, woods, and woodsmoke, tinged with cooking fires and a touch of garlic.

Griggs insisted on finding just the right place so we agreed to meet later and I wandered off to find the welcome center for pilgrims that I knew existed in this town. It wasn’t hard to find; there were little scallop shell symbols on walls and street corners and once you knew to look for them, they led to a small door on a back street. Inside I met a lean-faced old man whose job was to welcome the pilgrims, give them information, and direct them to free lodging and food. He told me that, for some unknown reason, the pilgrimage was regaining in popularity after a seven-hundred-year period of quiescence.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “These are not Christians. Bulgarians come here.”

My thoughts were that many Bulgarians were Christian, but I kept that to myself.

“You look at this guest book. Koreans, Japanese, Finns. Even Californians, and none of them Catholics,” he said. “Catholics don’t care anymore. Not many of them anyway.”

He himself had made the pilgrimage four times in his life, once for every season, and we chatted on about the miracle of the star fall—which is what interested me about all this.

“The miracle is not the star fall, nor St. Jacque. The real miracle of this pilgrimage is that you do it. You walk all day, dead to the world each night, feet aching, muscles aching, blisters bleeding. You go to bed and sleep in peace. You get up in the morning. And then—mirabile dictu—you start walking again. That is the real miracle.”

Griggs was down at the main square by the river, pacing around, waiting for me. He had found his restaurant and was ready to eat, so we went in, stamping off our wet shoes, and were ushered into a large, airy dining room with white tablecloths and a fine setting of crystal and silverware.

Griggs studied the menu for a long time and then commanded that I have the trout almondine, which seemed a rather boring, normal choice, but he said he knew this place and the trout was local and fresh and I could not go wrong. I was eyeing the snails by way of appetizer, but he insisted I have a leek and spinach omelet. Both of these he had had here before, he claimed. Then he set about the wines, which took even longer.

“We must drink something local. I am thinking to try this Jurançon, you can smell the flowers of the Pyrénées in it, they say, but we must start with a glass of Gaillac, perhaps, or maybe just champagne. What do you say? Or a kir? Then the Jurançon, or perhaps a bottle of Sainte Foy, I see here, then we’ll have a little Monbazillac for dessert. What do you think, won’t this be a fine meal?”

As I expected, after all his wines and the heavy lunch, Griggs suggested a nap in the car and I left him lolling there, the seat back, his nose in the air and his arms folded comfortably over his chest, while I went out in the drizzle to walk off the meal. I wandered up a side street, saw a little bridge over the river, and then spotted a trail along the riverbank and headed for it. Everything was wet and fresh, and cold, and the banks were rank with nettles and sparkling leaves and old wet stones. One after another the houses dropped away and then gave out altogether and finally the trail cut away from the river and up into the green hills. After an hour of walking I turned around and came back, and in the village, plodding along a street that entered the town from the north, I spotted a true pilgrim.

For whatever reason he assumed I was a fellow pilgrim and asked if I had been to the center. He seemed a fine old road warrior. He had long gray hair, a trim white beard, and was dressed in heavy brown corduroys, a good pair of walking boots, a red scarf, and a jaunty Tyrolean hat. Suspended from a leather thong around his neck, I saw the telltale scallop shell.

He said he had come down from Paris and had been on the road for two months now, stopping periodically to rest with friends. He told me he was seventy years old and had made this pilgrimage two other times in his life.

“This will be my last,” he said. “And I’m in no rush.”

We chatted on about the legends of Santiago and bad dogs on the route, and trucks, and I asked him, eventually, if he was driven by the spirit to make this arduous journey.

“You joke,” he said. “I hate God. You live as long as I do in this unfortunate century, you see what I have seen, you learn that God is a pig. He hates us.”

“And yet you make a spiritual journey?” I was actually somewhat shocked by his speech. Most other pilgrims I’ve met are relaxed, adventurous souls, or serious, religious folk, driven indeed by a spiritual quest.

“I am trying to teach God a lesson,” he said.

He winked and made to move on, and then added that he also simply enjoyed walking.

“I’ve nothing else to do. I live outside Paris. My children, they have children, and their big adventure in life, what is it? To go to a movie. The stores, shopping. Boring!” he shouted, flinging his arm out in dismissal. “I was in the war, in the underground, took big chances. After that, what more can there be to a life. I have to walk to keep from being bored.”

This was now mid April and, as Chaucer wrote, the young sun had in the Ram, his half course run, and the warm winds were blowing in from the south, and birds were singing, and the sweet rains of spring had started and bathed the roots and engendered the flowers blooming by the roadside, and all those of an adventurous spirit were longing to go on pilgrimages. Here in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, it was the beginning of the season. From now through to November, bedraggled, modern wanderers would struggle up the slopes to the town, coming down from all the traditional starting points, from Paris, and Le Puy, and Vézelay, to cross the Pyrénées at Roncesvalles. The purists walked all the way in one stretch. But according to the man in the welcoming center, since many of the pilgrims had regular jobs, they would sometimes make the trek in stages, down through France in one year, halfway out to Galicia in the next, and on to Santiago in the third year. Some spent a whole year coming from wherever they were starting. Some came on bicycles, a few rode horses, some drove, some took a combination of buses and trains, and walked in between. But no matter how they made the trip, most of them started in April.

As Chaucer made clear, there is a celestial connection to the idea of pilgrimage. The sun, in its annual circuit, moves through the great circling band of constellations that make up the Zodiac. By spring it enters into the Ram, and by the time it is halfway through, the northern European spring will be well advanced on earth.

Pilgrimage is among the most ancient and universal of religious rituals. There is some evidence that even before the Neolithic era, before the appearance of permanent settlements, nomadic hunters would make periodic journeys to certain sacred sites, to groves, or caves, or springs, to pay homage, and these trips were made at certain times of the year. As the annual journeys became more formalized, it may be that they evolved into a sort of sympathetic magic in which the transit of the sun through the Zodiac was replicated. It is known that in ancient Egypt, especially during times of danger, during eclipses, for example, the Pharaoh would circumambulate the walls of the city in a mock imitation of the sun’s journey to assure its safe passage through the eclipse. Later, as I said, the cyclic transit of the sun was symbolized by a spiral image, and this evolved into the maze image, or labyrinth. By the Neolithic era, these mazes, cut in turf, or laid out in stone on the earth, were used as sites for ceremonial processions or dances, the circular weaving, recycling pattern that imitated the seasonal voyages of the sun, moon, and stars.

In the Christian era, both the maze and the pilgrimage were well ensconced in church doctrine, so much so that symbolic maze patterns were laid in stone on church floors, some fixed with Zodiac images. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries maze paths or even hedge mazes were laid out in monastery gardens. Here, the monks would walk daily, in meditation, recreating in miniature the long rambles of a seasonal pilgrimage. Each year at Chartres and other cathedrals monks would walk the labyrinth laid out on the floor of the cathedral at the time of the vernal equinox. As they walked they sang and tossed a leather ball back and forth to one another in imitation, according to scholars, of the solar disc.

During the Middle Ages, the primal celestial connections to these sacred journeys were mostly lost, except for vague references in literary passages, as in the Canterbury Tales. But the idea of pilgrimage itself, of a journey in spring to a sacred site, increased in popularity. Some pilgrims were sent on their journeys by church officials as a form of punishment for some sin. Some went by way of self-punishment. Most simply felt the need to walk and set out. It was one way of breaking the boring routine of daily life, or a means of escaping a bad marriage, or an unpleasant home life. And it was, for many, a genuine spiritual quest, a way of purifying the soul.

By late spring, pilgrims coming down from northern Europe would begin to come through St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the last town before the pass at Roncesvalles. The residents would watch for them from the heights, and when they spotted a band approaching they would ring the church bells of the town to welcome them and guide them. Traditionally, as soon as they heard the bells, the group would begin singing as they climbed the slopes and entered into town. Some troupes would go through the pass in the next valley over the Col de Cize. Some would go through at Roncesvalles. But no matter how they crossed the Pyrénées, once in Spain they would converge on the town of Puente la Reina and then walk out across the dry plains of northern Spain and thence into the rains of Galicia to Compostela, which they would reach by the end of summer, around the time of the autumnal equinox.

How they got back is not recorded.

Six

In the Hall of the Mountain King

I found Griggs still in the car, sound asleep, his mouth lolling open, snoring loudly. It was raining again, and I got in the car and inadvertently woke him.

“What’s our plan?” he said. “Shall we take a coffee?”

It seemed a good idea, so we found a warm café and nursed an espresso while we figured out what to do.

It was now late afternoon. I was for pushing on into the mountains, but Griggs thought we should stay in town, find another restaurant, and wait out the rain, then go the next morning. He agreed that a trip up to the Pyrénées National Park would be a good idea so we found a suitable room, and then still having some time before dinner, drove northward out of town, along the old pilgrim route toward St. Palais.

As soon as we got clear of the village we began passing the green rolling hills of the Basque country, the white-fronted, timbered houses, with blood red trim, small towns, and between the towns the rolling pastures dotted with sheep.

I wanted to know more about these interesting local sheep and happened to spot a shepherd off a side road we were taking up to the pilgrim town of Ostabat, so I pulled over and greeted him. I asked him what breed these were, and a great broad smile spread over his face revealing a row of broken, rotting teeth. “These,” he said proudly, “are the maneches. There are two kinds, red-headed maneches and blackheads. These here are my blackheads.”

They were a handsome bunch, long thick wool with ringlets and piercing black eyes and black faces. The sound of their bells filled the air all across the pasture. I wanted to talk more about his maneches, but Griggs began calling. I think he was getting hungry already, but I did manage to ask the shepherd about pilgrims, and did they pass through here.

All summer, he said, one after another, a strange parade. Some came through who could speak an ancient form of Basque, he said. This surprised me since I thought Basque existed in a linguistic world of its own.

“They come from the Orient,” the shepherd said. “From Japan. But they know Basque. A big group just went by, up to the town.”

We drove on and came to the tiny stone village, mostly closed up except for some women cleaning the small pilgrim church and placing flowers on the altar. I asked them about Japanese pilgrims who could speak Basque, and they laughed and said that all types would pass through here, but never had they seen such a thing as a Japanese who could speak Basque.

“No one can speak Basque,” one of them said, “except the Basques. Who told you about these Japanese?”

I explained, and they chatted to each other for a minute in French and then switched to Basque and then began laughing again.

One shook her finger at me.

“That must be Auron who told this. Never believe Auron. He’ll say anything.”

We pushed onward to St. Palais, with Griggs beginning to wonder if there were perhaps a good restaurant there. But all we found was a sad café and no good stories. Old men looked up from their tables when we entered, and stopped talking, as if they had been conspiring to overthrow the French government.

Once the men grew more comfortable, I asked them if groups of pilgrims came through here.

Too many, they said. A dirty bunch. The local women take them in, though, and feed them. Then they steal from us.

“I thought they were religious folk.”

They lifted their heads and rolled their eyes, in disbelief.

We seemed to have run out of adventures, so we drove back to St. Jean and then began cruising the streets looking for a new and exciting restaurant.

The next morning was clear and we began climbing once more, eastward toward Oloron through splendid alpine scenery. After the town of Anudy we began to see true mountains, spiky white towers and rocky outcroppings and deep gorges, hanging with dank, wet ferns, and angry waterfalls. This was not a country I could ever have discovered on my bicycle; the roads were precipitous and slippery and narrow, and there were wild passes, half blocked in some places by rocky outcroppings that jutted out over the road.

In time we came to the tiny village of Les Eaux Chaudes and thence to Gabas, near the Pic de la Sagette. Here we found a small hotel and booked a room. As usual Griggs wanted to look for a restaurant and have another long lunch but I persuaded him to buy some ham and cheese and sausage, a bottle of wine, and push on into the high peaks. At Col d’Aubisques, I made him get out of the car and take a walk on a little trail that led up into the peaks, tempting him with the joys of a picnic in splendid surroundings. Reluctantly he debarked, and taking my binoculars, we hiked upward for a while and found a dry rocky flat area. He was lagging behind, and came up to the site breathless, and red-cheeked.

“By God you walk fast,” he said. “Why so fast? You’ve got to pace yourself, don’t you know.”

In other company, I’m a known dawdler.

“Eat up Griggs. I have chocolate for the hard climb after lunch. See that peak behind me? We’ll scale it this afternoon.”

The peak was an unassailable, jagged needle, rising above steep snow slopes and rude gorges.

“Surely you jest,” he said. “But what is that thing making its way up the peak?”

I trained my binoculars on the thing and saw what must have been a chamois crossing the lower slopes.

“Brown bear,” I said.

Griggsy’s eyes widened considerably.

Our lunch consumed, and most of the bottle drained, we made our way back to the car, and pushed on to the Pic du Midi d’Ossau. We were now in snow, and stopped for another hike, tracking upward for a half a mile or so, Griggs lagging again, wetting his street shoes and pants in the softening snows. In time we came to a south-facing spot clear of snow and matted with dry grass.

“Rest here, Griggs, while I scout the region.”

Obediently he sat down and then lay back with his head on a warm rock. I walked on, following a lead through the light snow and climbing higher toward a narrow pass at the top of the slope. Halfway there, I looked up and saw a dark form emerge in the sky above the ridge and begin circling the valley above the spot where Griggs lay. I got a look at it and realized it was a golden eagle.

Along with the ever-present choughs, a red-legged bird related to crows, I had been seeing hawks, kites, common buzzards, vultures, and at one point (I think) a rare and endangered lammergeier above the ridges, riding on the updrafts of sun-warmed air that rose up from the valleys below. In other areas during migratory seasons, but most especially in the autumn, soaring birds such as hawks and eagles take advantage of these thermals in their long overland flights. They wait all morning on their night roosts for the sun to warm the air, then, by midmorning, they fly off to the rising columns of warmed air and circle upward. Once the lift cools and weakens, they soar off to the south along the ridges, losing altitude all the way, but not wasting precious energy. When they come to another sun-warmed thermal they ride upward once more, circling to stay within the column. Sometimes hundreds of these birds will collect in one updraft, a phenomenon called a kettle among birders. In this manner, drifting downward, rising up again and soaring forth, they roller coaster southward all day, until nightfall.

I climbed onward, but the snow was getting deeper and it was not easy walking; the damp began to penetrate my shoes, so after a few detours to follow animal tracks I went back down and rousted my companion, tempting him with the thought of a brandy in a warm café.

The sun here was brilliant, almost blinding as it reflected off the snow, and I noticed that the redness of my friend’s cheek was not due solely to his unaccustomed exertions. He was getting a sunburn.

I had been out on the road for nearly a month, riding in the open sun each day, so I was already tanned. But old Griggs, who was a troglodytic sort in any case, favoring the night over the day like many Madrileños, was getting the worst of it. He had been sleeping with his face up to the sun and was already red.

Looking down at poor Griggsy there, all burned, his hindquarters sore from the bicycle ride, fatigued, his legs aching from the hike I had put him through, made me feel sorry for my old friend. I used to tease him a lot when we were children (never mind, he teased back with devilish ferocity). But I felt bad for him mainly because he was such a willing, enthusiastic sport, game to jump into any lark, and then, only when he was in the midst of it, having second thoughts. I extended my hand to him, and helped him to his feet. He hobbled down to the car without complaint.

Over the course of our time together, it had occurred to me somewhat paranoically perhaps that my old friend Griggs was possibly now working as a CIA agent. Yale was, after all, the traditional breeding ground for this itinerant species, and Griggs had lived all around the Western world without apparent means of support, with odd jobs in the offices of foreign journals, insurance work, trade, and now, as he claimed, advertising in Madrid. I had teased him about this mercilessly while we were in our various watering holes and restaurants, and he always denied it, as of course he should have. But now, I felt, if he was indeed CIA, it was all part of the same thicket he used to get himself into when we were children together. Jump in and find yourself in deep water.

Why the CIA would post someone in Madrid in that period of time did not in any way fit my theory, however.

We drove slowly back down to Gabas, stopping often to look at birds, and then went to look for a café.

The next day was also clear, and I thought Griggs might like to have a look around the trails and road near the Pic de la Sagette, so after an obligatory stop for a second coffee, we began weaving northward on the narrow roads and then climbed again to the de Pombre wildlife refuge. The road was closed, so we got out and walked down the Gare de Brousse and thence higher and into snow, this time mixed in with cleared patches where flowers were blooming. The earth was cool and soggy, but the sun was hot, and the air fresh and moist, and there were deciduous trees and rushing streams, which we crossed, leaping from rock to rock to get to ever higher pastures. On the bank of one of these streams I saw a dark little water ouzel bobbing along and managed through much cajoling and directions to show it to Griggs.

He had apparently recovered from his various ordeals.

“By God,” he said at one point, “you seem to have taken the right path in life. This is marvelous. Health-giving. Just what I need. We should climb on till nightfall, scale that peak ahead. Feed on chocolate in the true mountaineer fashion.”

“I’m going to quit smoking—” he announced, “—after this.”

Once again the snows grew deeper and when we came to another south-facing cleared area, we sat down on the grass to rest. Ahead of us were sweeping snow pastures melting back to reveal patches of fresh green pasturage, interspersed with patches of snow-flattened brown grass and a hint of alpine flowers. Below, grumbling and roaring, was the stream we had crossed, and all around the valley we could hear the voices of other streams and waterfalls gushing. Silently, above us, flights of choughs, buzzards, and black kites would drift over the valley, dark patterned against the cerulean blue of the spring sky, and below us I could see little rising and falling drifts of sparrows and buntings. I sat there with my glasses, scanning the deep crevices and slopes, and spotted another chamois bedded down in a sheltered hollow. I tried to show Griggs, but he couldn’t seem to find it.

“Shall we be off,” I said.

He rose and crumpled again.

“Seem to have stiffened up there.”

“Work it out,” I almost said. But sympathetically I suggested we descend and look for more adventures.

“Perhaps there is a café up here somewhere,” he said vaguely.

Back in the car, we drove on and came to the entrance of a cable car that led up to the Artouste ski area, at Pic de la Sagette.

I asked a couple who had just come out from the car what was at the top and, as I expected, they said there was a restaurant at the peak. Griggs, when he learned of this, was all for heading up, but I actually wanted to do a little more walking as it was still morning, not really time to start in on one of his seemingly eternal eating adventures.

“Why don’t I just go up, scout it out, get a table and meet you there,” he said.

This seemed a fine idea, and I set off while he waited for the next cable car.

I walked up the road for a while, and then turned off and began to climb through the alpine meadows, seeking out the cleared sections. This was, if anything, a more beautiful valley than the one we had been in the day before. The sun now was downright hot, and the snow was melting back from the grassy patches minute by minute, literally. I became aware of the tiny alpine wildflowers that had bloomed underneath the actual snow cover. One of them looked to me like the tiny red-stemmed Soldanella of the Swiss Alps. In some clear patches I found blue gentians and the tiny green leaves of some species of montane or tundralike willow. On the jumbled rocks of a sun-warmed scree, I saw bell-flowers and more species of clinging small-leafed willows, and the little cluster of flowers called alpine cushion—known as cuscinetto by Italian alpinists.

All these flowers were tiny, but colorful, and all of them have developed strategies for surviving the extreme temperatures of the high altitudes. In some the buds of the flowers form underneath the snow cover and bloom when they hit the warming rays of the sun. Some even bloom under the snow to get a jumpstart on the season. On clear, warm days during the previous summer, they stored the energy of the sun in their leaves to form the buds for the spring blossoming. In the warm seasons, when there is no snow cover, they need to capture every available hour of sunlight to get ready for the next year. Speed is of the essence for these energetic little plants; and the whole point is to produce a flower, and then, often through color and the patterning on the petals, induce some wandering insect to land and pick up the pollen and spread it around the meadow to other blossoming flowers of the same species. Timing is everything. No doubt here, in this high country of late spring snows and chill nights, there are many individual flowers that bloom futilely, unvisited by even so much as a gnat.

I sat back on the grass and stared out at the impossible blue of the sky above the white peaks, at the dark, somewhat ominous dagger peaks free of snow, the white rolling slopes, the periodic flocks of choughs that would emerge from a mountain wall, cross the valley, screeking and creeking, only to disappear around the mountain on the other side. I felt a solar-induced peace of mind settling over me, a sort of rhapsody of the heights, and were it not for my social responsibilities I would have stayed there for the rest of the day, feeding on landscape. I had not been in such radiant country in years, and looking out over the snowy peaks, gleaming now in the morning sun like the halls of some celestial temple, I could understand why so many ancient cultures associated mountain peaks with their most powerful gods.

The great sky god Zeus and his company of fellow deities lived on the top of Mount Olympus, and his early Roman equivalent, Jupiter, had many shrines located on hilltops and mountain peaks. The Native American people had the same reverence for mountains; their many wind gods are associated with mountains, and throughout Asia there are many Buddhist and Taoist shrines and temples located on mountaintops. Of all of these, the ancient primordial religion of Japan, Shinto, was most deeply associated with mountains, in particular a singular peak, perhaps the most famous mountain in the world, Mount Fuji.

There are many gods in the Shinto religion—too many some would say. The earliest are obscure primal deities associated with chaos and creation, and there are gods of the earth, and gods of the sky and rains and thunder and wind, and gods beyond counting who preside over all things good and evil in human affairs, birth, marriage, death, riches, poverty, strength, and disease. But out of all of these myriad spirit beings emerged a goddess whose worship developed into a national religion, the goddess of the sun, from whom, supposedly, the supreme ruler of the nation claimed descent.

The sun goddess, the beautiful Amaterasu Omikami, was born in Japan, according to one account, from the left eye of the primal creator Izanagi, but she chose to live in the sky. From her there developed one long, unbroken “Succession of the Sun” that made up the ancestral line of the imperial rulers of Japan. Early in the history of the world, the whole of creation almost came to an end because of a nasty trick played by the devilish storm god, Susano, who was constantly tormenting his sister, Amaterasu, and destroying her good works. One day he threw down from heaven a flayed, piebald horse, a thing so hideous to look upon that Amaterasu fled into a cave and sealed the door behind her. As a result, the high plains of heavens grew dim, darkness swept over the earth, and demons and evil spirits and goblin devils emerged and ran to and fro, scattering chaos and ruin. The eighty thousand Shinto deities grew disturbed; they congregated in the riverbed of heaven and held a council to figure out how to entice Amaterasu out of her cave, for if she did not emerge, surely the young world would perish.

Finally they devised a plan. They lit bonfires and set up an eight-foot mirror in a tree to reflect the light toward her cave, and then they held a dance and began to shout and cheer, and they were so entertained by the erotic dancing of the beautiful young goddess, Usume, that they began laughing, and the laughter rolled across heaven and earth. Inside her cave, Amaterasu could hear the commotion, and wondering what it was all about, opened the stone door slightly. Light spread over the land. She grew curious and emerged further, and then one of the gods came forward and took her hand and gently led her out and then stretched a rope of straw across the cave entrance so that she could not go back in completely nor close the stone door.

Now every day she comes out of her cave, but every night she goes back to rest, and at these times an ominous darkness falls over the land.

The best place to see Amaterasu, when she first emerges from her cave, in fact the most sacred site in all Japan, is the summit of Fuji. Each day, for centuries now, pilgrims have ascended to spend the night at the summit to greet Amaterasu as she rises out of the sea.

Long before I was born my father lived in China and used to travel to Japan every summer. On one of these visits, he made the pilgrimage up Fuji and he used to entertain me with bedtime stories of his ascent. This was in the years before there were trolley and bus routes most of the way up and it took him two days of hiking over rocks and loose volcanic sands to make the summit. There were little way stations on the route that would feed and house the pilgrims and he spent the second night on the summit, sleeping on the cold floor of a temple with other pilgrims, waiting for the sun. As is often the case on Fuji, dawn was gray and clouded, and only a dull milky light spread over the land below him. I have a photograph he took on his way back down of a group of fellow pilgrims, struggling up the steep slopes toward the summit. Interestingly, like pilgrims to Santiago, they wear wide-brimmed hats and carry long staffs. These latter are issued to climbers at the base of the mountain and were traditionally stamped with kanji signatures at way stations set up along the ascent route. I still have the one he was given.

After he returned to this country, my father maintained his connections with China and Japan, and when I was growing up Chinese and Japanese visitors would sometimes stay with us. I can remember learning a few words from these seemingly exotic figures. I have vague memories of one of them telling me of a Shinto morning greeting of the sun. Upon rising, according to Lafcadio Hearn, who collected the traditions of Japan, “the worshipper washes his face and rinses his mouth, and then turns to the sun, claps his hands, bows, and pays obeisance—‘Hail to thee this day August One.’

This morning ritual has uncounted parallels, not only in other religions of the world, but also in the animal kingdom. According to the Malagasy, the lemurs of Madagascar also worship the sun. Lemurs gather in clear sections of the forest, or on exposed tree branches, face the sun, lower their arms, and twist their palms outward to receive the rays of the first light each dawn. They also loll their heads from side to side, and squint toward the sun. The local tribespeople say they are worshiping, and that lemurs are the ancestors of the Malagasy.

Female sun deities are not common in historical mythologies, but they may have been more common in the early Paleolithic and Neolithic cults, and vestiges of a female solar goddess endured in some traditions even into the nineteenth century. Often they are associated with mountain caves. In Ireland, just before the advance of Christianity, there was a Celtic goddess known as Brighde, who was a bringer of warmth, fire, and summer and was associated with the sun. Every year, in winter, she was imprisoned inside an icy mountain by a one-eyed hag. Even underground, however, her warmth spread and Brighde was believed to be the source of thermal springs. Christianity subsumed the myth of Brighde and changed her into St. Bridget. There are also stories of female sun goddesses in Siberia, and among Native American people, and, curiously, the German word for sun, die Sonne, is feminine—it is masculine in most other languages.

During the 1920s and into the 1930s there was a theory among mythologists and folklorists that many of the European folktales, those that appear in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, were in fact metaphors or allegories for the solar transit and the cycles of the seasons. One example is the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

In spring, the young virgin Red Riding Hood sets out through the dark wood to deliver wine and cake to her ailing grandmother. The wolf spots her and then proceeds to the grandmother’s house, eats her up, dons her clothes, and lies in bed to wait for his next meal. After the now well-known exchange (“What a big mouth you have grandmother,” little Red Riding Hood says, “All the better to eat you up with,” says the wolf), Red Riding Hood is consumed. The wolf promptly falls asleep and begins snoring. A passing hunter hears the unusually loud snores, becomes suspicious, figures out what has happened, and cuts open the wolf, freeing Red Riding Hood and the grandmother.

Images of the sun and light and seasons are suggested throughout the story. The young virgin sun travels through the dark wood collecting flowers to bring to the moribund crone, but is consumed and imprisoned in the darkness of the wolfs belly—“It was so dark in the wolf’s belly,” Red Riding Hood says to the hunter after she was freed. The virgin spring is reborn from the belly of the dark winter wolf.

According to mythologists, there are other ancient story cycles in which a solar goddess is trapped inside a dark cave, and there is an interesting cycle of folktales associated with bears that may have some relationship to the solar cave story.

Bears have appeared in the folktales and legends among virtually all cultures that live in the Northern Hemisphere, and in some areas, among Siberian tribal people, for example, and North American Indians, they are worshipped as gods. They even appear in folktales as far south as Greece.

The bear, like the sun, disappears each year in winter and emerges in spring, and like Amaterasu and Brighde, he enters a cave for his winter hibernation. When the bear comes out in spring, light spreads over the land, the days lengthen, and the world comes alive. Bears, of all the animals, the North American Indians say, are the most godlike, and also the most human: They are plantigrade walkers, that is, they walk flatfooted like a human being; they can walk on two legs; and they are even said to revere the sun.

The Swedish ethnologist Ake Hultkranz collected a story from a Shoshone elder who claimed he was hunting one day in the spring and at sunrise came upon the tracks of many bears, which he followed. He found the bears gathered around a tree, performing, he said, a sun dance. They had made a great circle around the tree and they were taking four steps forward, four steps backward, and singing in their growling way. The Shoshone man told Hultkranz that the bears were praying for their children. The Pawnee say that when bears dance they stand on two legs, face the sun, and lift their paws toward it. In this way, they say, bears gain their power.

Well into my mountain reveries I realized I was getting hungry, and although I did not have a watch, I judged it was well past Griggs’s lunchtime so I wandered back to the entrance to the cable car, bought a ticket, and, like one of the mountain choughs, ascended the steep slopes to meet my friend for lunch.

I found him, as I knew I would, sitting outside on a terrace of the restaurant, enjoying an aperitif, regarding the tribe of skiers that traipsed to and fro among the tables in their shiny high-tech gear. They were wearing, in my view at least, truly ugly clothes, had covered their eyes with wraparound dark glasses, covered their heads with ski hats, and had smeared white patches of zinc on their lips and noses to keep the sun at bay.

I greeted my old companion.

“Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I’m starving, but I have to tell you this is a profoundly boring menu here, there’s literally nothing to eat. You might try the crêpe, and there’s an omelette au nature that might be passable, although I doubt it, steak and frites, as usual, and no wine to speak of, and furthermore this is a snotty bunch up here too. All sports. No sensibility. No taste for the finer things in life. We should go down to Biarritz and find a reasonable place.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“Moi?” he asked incredulously.

It wasn’t the drink that was flushing his cheeks. Griggs was looking horribly burned now, and I was considering worrying about him. The sun at these altitudes can be truly damaging and he was a fair-skinned type, what with his English Mum and his father of mixed northern European stock, he was particularly susceptible. The air was genuinely thin up here, and the sun off the snowfields was blindingly bright.

Sun damage is a known danger for climbers in higher altitudes, but in our time the situation has gotten considerably worse because of the thinning of the ozone layer. The ultraviolet radiation streaming toward earth off of the sun, as well as the deadly X rays, are either reflected or absorbed by a protective layer of ozone that encircles the globe about six miles above the earth. Normally, the ozone layer is constantly created, destroyed, and remade over the course of a year, but in the 1980s scientists began accumulating evidence that this thin shield in the stratosphere was being depleted by certain chemicals used on earth.

I ordered an omelette and a green salad and a glass of white wine and settled back to watch the promenade of skiers and diners. It was not an evocatively poetic site, although the open air of the terrace added a certain spice to the otherwise plain food. Alpine choughs were soaring across the slopes below the restaurant in dark, roving flocks. Some of them had collected on the roof of the restaurant and were scrounging around on the slopes behind the buildings. The skiers and diners seemed to be in near constant motion, not unlike the choughs. It was an oddly busy place given the fact that we were now as high as we would get in the Pyrénées.

Up here in this glacial wilderness, there were no green plants visible; we were stuck between black rock, white snow, and blue sky. I began to long for the green misty pastures of the lower grounds, sheep, the fostering earth, and the bands of staff-bearing pilgrims singing as they ascended the slopes to St.Jean-Pied-de-Port, their jangling bells mixing with the gong of sheep bells. Griggs was restless too.

“Let’s go,” he said, even before his requisite coffee. “Let’s leave here and drive up to Paris. Let’s get drunk and go up to Pigalle with the Italian tourists and we’ll get rolled by Algerians and fight back and get stabbed and end up in bad hospitals and get stitched up. Anything but this. We must descend into lowlands and squalor. It’s too healthy up here.”

I think I had left him alone in the bar longer than I realized, poor fellow.

Seven

Sun Song

On the following Monday, having bid farewell to my old friend, who was having such a good time that he vowed to rejoin me, I set out once more on my northern pilgrimage, following the same road I had taken out of St.-Jean-de-Luz the week before. The weather had improved, it was now warm and humid, and the back roads smelled of rich pine woods and sea air, and once more there was no wind, so the riding was easy. There was no traffic to speak of either, and I began weaving to and fro across the flat road, singing and pedaling, pedaling and singing, and thinking of Bordeaux and wine and food and half wishing old Griggsy would be there when I arrived to find good restaurants and take care of the wine orders. I did know a similar type in Bordeaux, an expatriate Englishman, but he was a poverty-stricken aspiring writer, and there would be no high living as long as I was around him. He had offered me a bed though.

Near Cap Breton I stopped in a field of clover, hid my bicycle, and walked away from the road with my usual lunch of bread, onion, sardines, and tomatoes, and found a little grove beyond the field. Butterflies were rising and settling in the clover, the hot smell of earth rose around me, and I settled down to eat and drink. No rush, no responsibilities, nowhere to go, and nothing to do but ride and eat and eat and ride. The open road, as Griggsy might say. Freedom.

After lunch I fell asleep, and when I woke up, a little old man in a beret and blue coveralls was staring at me, leaning on a cane.

“You are not of here, Monsieur?” he said in formal French.

“No, I am passing through on my way to Bordeaux actually.”

“Bordeaux,” he said disparagingly, indicating that Bordeaux was not a good place to go.

“In fact, I’m headed for Scotland,” I added.

“Scotland!” he shouted. “Why on earth would anyone want to go to Scotland. Do they have food there?”

I presumed that since the people of Scotland had been successfully breeding for more than ten centuries, they must also be feeding. I said as much, politely, in so many words, and he shook his head incredulously.

“Scotland is a long way from here. Are you on the right road?”

I was not by any means on the right road for Scotland. But I explained that I actually preferred France, so I wanted to take my time getting to Scotland. This satisfied him and he made to leave. Then he asked me if I had been in the war.

“Never,” I said. I’m not sure what war he meant, though.

“Eh, bien,” he said, and saluted me and made to leave once more. Then he came back.

“This bicycle in the bushes. It is yours?”

I said it was.

He looked back at the place where my bike was hidden.

“I had a bicycle like that once,” he said, sadly. “But times change.”

“This is true,” I said.

“It was a good bicycle.”

“So is this one; I’ve ridden a long way on this bicycle. All through southern Spain.”

He didn’t respond to this. I believe he was reliving better times on his old Peugeot. He snapped his head to the side and clucked. I was waiting for a good story. How he arranged to meet his lover by moonlight by the canal I had passed and had ridden through the pines under the brindled moonshadows of the branches, but had a flat and couldn’t make it and had walked the rest of the way, arriving at dawn to find her asleep in the woods. They had consummated their love as the sun rose above the clover fields to the east.

I waited.

Perhaps he was in the underground—he was about the right age. Perhaps he was selected by his village to carry an important message to de Gaulle’s forces who had landed nearby, blackfaced at Hossegor. He rode through the pines at midnight, slipping past the Vichy guards. Some became suspicious and gave chase, but he pulled off and hid in the shrubbery until they passed, then resumed his mission.

I waited.

“Was a good bicycle, mine,” he said.

“How so?”

“Just good.”

Silence.

“Every day I ride to the bakery and get the bread.”

“Hmm.”

“Now I am too old to ride.”

“Were there any Nazis down here?” I asked. It was a dangerous question; he could have been a Vichy collaborator for all I knew.

“No. No Nazis, not here.”

He stared in the direction of the bicycle.

I offered him some cheese and a sip of wine, but he said he must be off. So I collected my things and walked back across the pasture with him to the bicycle, hoping he would begin talking. But he only stared down at me as I packed everything up.

“Where are you headed, though?” he asked.

“Scotland.”

“Ah, oui, Scotland. That cold country.”

Leaning on his cane, he watched me ride off. I hate missing stories, I’m sure he had one, but I had to get to Scotland.

For the next two or three days I rode on along the coast, passed Vieux-Boucau and on to St.-Julien-en-Born, where I spent the night. This was a flat country of endless pines, with occasional lumbering operations and sections of forest where the locals were tapping the trees for turpentine. Little sulphur butterflies, pearl crescents, and coppers were fluttering at the roadside, and there were periodic clearings where I could rest in the sun, sedated by the hot smell of pine. There was still no traffic at all and I resumed entertaining myself by weaving to and fro on the empty road and singing loudly. Once, thinking myself alone, riding on in this manner, no-handed, declaiming and shouting and weaving, I glanced over into the woods and saw a group of timber cutters resting on the ground, smoking, white handkerchiefs tied on their heads like bathing caps. They stared at me incredulously.

I grabbed the bars and rode on, subdued.

At St.-Julien-en-Born I found a small pension with a tiny courtyard and a private entrance to my room. The night was warm and sultry, there was a crescent moon between the tree limbs, the crickets were singing, and a periodic breath of wind rolled into the little room carrying the odor of the night fields and raising the lace curtains sensuously. I fell asleep to the sounds of the countryside and dreamt I was home on a little porch bedroom where I used to sleep in the summers at my family’s place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Around twelve or one in the morning I was awakened by a beautiful warbling song just outside my window. The song consisted of a series of sultry trills and eerie, fluted whistles that bubbled along, built to a crescendo, halted briefly, and then started all over again. It was a song I had read about all my life, but had never actually heard—the long sad complaint of the fabled nightingale. This bird would sing softly for a while, then stop, then start again, and as I listened a phrase came to me: “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.…” I lay awake trying to remember who wrote the lines. I attempted to summon up Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” but all I could come up with was “already with thee, tender is the night” and “O for a beaker full of the warm south,” and something about light-winged dryads of the trees. Quandaries of this sort can keep one up all night if you let them and I was soon swept into a wakeful review of world literature involving nightingales, beginning with the sad story of Procne and Philomela, two beautiful sisters who ended up as birds, Procne as a swallow and Philomela as the nightingale.

I thought of Juliet and Romeo arguing over the birdsongs at the end of their fateful night together, the harmonious madness of Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s drowsy owls and nightingale, swan song’s, and gull mew, and Anglo-Saxon gannet cries, and on and on into the night.

It was a fine night for no sleep, however. The warm air, the smell of the vegetation, and the languorous song of the literary nightingale were entrancing, but I realized I’d be awake all night if this kept up and tried to banish Keats and the dryads, and all of the warm south. Every time I would start to drift off, the nightingale would start up again, I would wake, and my reveries would continue.

There are not many birds that sing by night—the loon of North American lakes, the mockingbird, and of course owls. In Europe the nightingale is the most famous nightsinger, although the sedge warblers and even the skylark will sound off periodically. Unfortunately, this beautiful singer is rarely found anymore in England, except in the south.

The disappearance of the legendary singers, such as the loon and the nightingale, and the decline of the full-throated dawn choruses of North America and Europe are some of the saddest losses brought on by the multifarious environmental ills that beset the modern world. Birds still try to sing at dawn, of course, but any older person who has lived in the country or well-aged suburbs will tell you that they don’t sing as fully as they used to. And yet birdsong was once the essence of poetry. The nightingale alone could fill pages of critical analysis.

Birds don’t think of poetry when they sing, of course. They are thinking nasty thoughts, like “War” or “Territory” or “Sex.” But if indeed they are considering the matter at all, they are also thinking “Light.”

Although birds call and make noise throughout the year, most do not sing in winter. They reserve the organized combination of notes they produce to attract mates, identify and broadcast their territorial boundaries, and advertise themselves as good mates for spring, the mating season. And in the birdly mind (actually in the birdly gonads), spring begins on their winter grounds with the increasing sunlight, as early as February.

Ornithologists have conducted elaborate and detailed studies of the role of light in the inducement of song, one of them undertaken by the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold, who, using a sensitive photometer, measured the relationship between morning song and light intensity. He uncovered some interesting but logical facts about birdsong. For example, a cloudy dark dawn will delay the onset of singing, and a bright moon will start birds singing sooner. Other naturalists have documented the fact that different species begin singing at different times as the dawn light increases, a fact that was well known to those in the past who lived closer to nature than we do. Even in so crowded a place as sixteenth-century Verona the residents were familiar enough with the different hours at which birds would begin singing to tell time by the song. We know this, or can guess at it, because Romeo and Juliet knew by means of birdsong when their night together was coming to an end. Romeo thinks he hears the lark and dawn is breaking. Juliet says it was the nightingale, and that it is not yet day. Romeo persists, and then they see the streaks of light lacing the clouds in the east. The song of the nightingale has ended. The lark begins to sing and their night of love has come to an end.

(They also knew a thing or two about resounding metaphors: “It is the east,” Romeo opines, “and Juliet is the sun!”)

There is a schedule, more or less, of birdsong, even after the first light. Robins start off the dawn chorus in North America; they begin singing as soon as they wake up. European robins delay their singing by a few minutes. The European blackbirds wait even longer, and the chaffinches longer still. It all reverses at dusk, and some of the most beautiful songs, such as those of the wood thrush and the veery, emerge from the mystery of the North American eastern forests long after the sun has set.

If ever there is any question as to the role of light in birdsong, one has but to spend time in the field during an eclipse. The year before I left on my solar transit, there was a full eclipse of the sun around three in the afternoon. I went out as the light began to fade and noticed all around me the onset of bird calling, chirping robins, cardinals whistling sadly, titmice sounding off, and the little “phoebe” whistles of the chickadees. The calling and singing continued as the moon crossed the sun and the darkness increased. Then, for about eleven minutes, the woods were quiet as night. As the sun slowly reappeared, the calling began again.

It was an eerie event, the first time I had ever been in a full eclipse, and it was not only the birdsong that created the bizarre natural environment but also the strange, ghostly light hanging over the woods and fields, a haunted coppery dusk at three in the afternoon.

Up to that time, all I knew about eclipses was a scene from some old racist jungle movie in which the captive white explorer, who is about to be burned at the stake and eaten by the restless natives, knows that an eclipse is about to occur and orders the sun to disappear just before the fires are lit. Terrified, the natives free him. He then commands the sun to return and is declared a god.

Experiencing the real thing, I could understand why so rare an event as the disappearance of the sun, or even the moon, would cause consternation among preliterate people. Many elaborate rituals evolved during eclipses to encourage the sun to return. In North America, the Ojibway people used to shoot flaming arrows at the sun to rekindle it, and one of the northwest tribes, the Chilcotin, would desert their huts, pack up for a long journey, and then circle the village as if traveling, thus encouraging the sun on its passage through the eclipse.

In the past, much of the magic and the sky observation and the development of astrology and, later, astronomy began as a means of predicting eclipses. In the earliest eras of civilization, astronomers in both China and the Near East had worked out the astronomical schedules by which eclipses occurred and were able through their record keeping to announce the event. Part of the power of the priestly classes sprang from this nearly incomprehensible ability.

The next day I rose late, took a café au lait with a few hunks of buttered bread with jam, and then rode at a leisurely pace through the pines toward Arcachon. By late afternoon I came to the Dune of Pilat, a vast mountain of sand, much dominated by tourists, but relatively clear at the time since it was still off-season. I climbed the dune, sat there watching the sea, scanning Cap Ferret on the other side of the bay, and decided to push on, feeling more and more crowded by summer houses and tourist shops and roads. It was clouding up now, and a little colder, and by the time I got to Arcachon it was raining, so I found a small hotel, docked my bike, and made the best of it, although there is nothing sadder than a summer resort area, off-season, in a cold rain. I went to a restaurant and tried to drown my sorrows with Arcachon oysters and hot fish soup, but it didn’t work. I needed Griggsy and his long drunken discourses.

It was still raining the next day, but I set out through the now seemingly dreary pines for Pyla, pedaling along amidst the whir of passing cars and trucks. By the time I got to the town it was sheeting down and I stopped in a café to warm up. There was no apparent rural road to Bordeaux on the map, and I knew from previous experience that the land between the coast and the city was flat and tedious and that approach to the city itself was a hideous termite nest of ugly roads. So, taking a cue from my Madrid experience, I called my friend and told him I was taking the train to town that afternoon. He gave me directions from the station and said he would try to prepare an evening meal.

When I had first come to Europe as a young and innocent student, I had spent a few months in Nice and had fallen in with a crowd of fellow student vagabonds from various parts of the globe who would collect every day in a small café on a back street and eat each night in a cheap restaurant run by a fat man with a pet rabbit named Doudoule, who ranged freely among the tables begging salads. Derek was one of the group, a rather lost fellow who was working on his novel (nothing rare about that, it should be said, everyone was working on a novel, including me). Sad soul that he was, this Derek had somehow attracted his opposite, a lively, blue-eyed girlfriend from Paris named Geneviève, who accompanied him everywhere. They were forever splitting up and then getting back together, and when Geneviève moved to Bordeaux, Derek, like a loyal dog, had followed. She commanded him to live apart, however, and found new company.

Derek’s quarters in Bordeaux were actually far better than those he had had in Nice. It was a narrow, somewhat dark little spot with a courtyard and a tiny kitchen, but a warren of small bedrooms upstairs, where I was escorted by the shuffling Derek, who greeted me wearing slippers and a bathrobe, even though it was four in the afternoon.

“Sleep here,” he commanded, pointing to a narrow palette on the floor.

He had put on a little weight since I last saw him and wore horn-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose and was unable, or did not bother, to control his hair.

That night we went out to dinner with Geneviève and her new gentleman, an amusing fellow named Bertrand, who during dinner tried to convince her that veal meat came from an animal called the veal, which was raised in mountain pastures along with sheep. She was a city woman, born and raised in Paris, but she knew enough to realize, insistent though he was, that this was yet another one of the fantasies with which he amused himself. Derek plodded through his soup and fish and slurped his wine, while Geneviève and her gentleman bantered.

Geneviève had not changed at all, even after eight years. I remember her well from sunny beaches at Juan les Pins, where some of us would repair to bask. I had only been in Europe a few months when I first met her, and most of that time in Catholic Spain where, among certain classes at least, it was still the custom for proper young women to be accompanied by an older female escort when you took them out. I remember my pleasant surprise when, at Juan les Pins, Geneviève and her friend Suzie stripped off their tops to sunbathe. You could still be arrested back in America for that.

Truth be told, while in Nice I had rather envied this Derek and his relationship with Geneviève; I coveted her myself. What I remember best about her were those sunny afternoons at the beach, usually without Derek, who would stay at his café table writing. I had come to Nice out of the dark squalor of New York City—the narrow, windy, litter-strewn gray streets where the sun rarely penetrated. I was working there to get the money to go to school in France, and I left in darkness in a thankless snowy March and arrived in Nice in late May just as the spring sun was reaching its full force. The first day in town I went down to the little rocky beach below the promenade and leaned back against the seawall and blasted out all the evils of a winter in the city.

Bordeaux, by contrast, was turning out to be reminiscent of March in New York. Another period of rain set in so I stayed put for a few days and sniffed around the city, sometimes having a drink or lunch with Geneviève, mostly trying to avoid my living quarters.

On one of these excursions, in the local history museum I came across some fresh news on an ancient Roman cult that I had been interested in ever since I began my solar obsessions.

Some years back workers in Bordeaux were excavating a foundation for a new parking garage when the backhoes burst into an underground chamber. Inside was a sarcophagus with a carved figure in a Phrygian hat seemingly emerging from a stone. He held a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. Other figures were discovered in the chamber, and the artifacts and the statue were identified by archeologists as one of the many underground sanctuaries of a late Roman cult known as Mithraism.

According to the tenets of this cult, the god Mithra, who was born out of a rock, was a solar deity, a sort of Promethean intermediary between the god of the sun and humankind. The cult arrived in Rome, brought east, it is speculated, by Roman soldiers or prisoners from Syria and Persia. Scholars theorize that the cult, with its solar-based tenets, was an offshoot of the Zoroastrianism in which the god Mithra was a mediator between the god of the sun, Ahura-Mazda, and the evil god of darkness, Ahriman. But recent scholarship suggests that the cult was an original and new faith, similar to Christianity, which had appeared in Rome at about the same time. The two cults share many attributes, and as Christianity gained in power, the established church began to see the Mithraic cult as a blasphemous parody of their own practices. In fact the opposite may be true; Christianity seems to have adapted its rituals from the earlier cult, including its solar origins. One of the reasons Biblical scholars are so interested in Mithraism is that the cult holds the promise of shedding new information on the cultural dynamics that led to the rise of the Christian faith.

Jesus and Mithra share the same birthday, for one thing, the 25th of December, which is also of course the time of the winter solstice, when the god of the sun, who has been in a slow decline since the end of summer, overcomes the god of darkness and the length of the days begins increasing. Another contemporary Roman cult, the sol invictus deus, the Unconquered Sun, established (reestablished, actually, from earlier gods) by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274, shared the same holiday. Both Christians and members of the Mithraic cults would meet in small hidden, underground chapels, both practiced baptism and the use of holy water, and both celebrated with communion ceremonies of bread and wine, as well as communal meals. The followers were consecrated in both faiths, believed in the immortality of the soul, and even thought of themselves as soldiers of their faith. In Mithraism, many of the adherents were probably soldiers, although unlike Christianity, it appears that only men were admitted. There was an elaborate multitiered initiation process in Mithraism in which the initiates moved upward through a series of seven grades to full membership. One of these, the second highest, was called the Sun Runner.

The typical mithraeum or chapel was a small rectangular subterranean chamber, about 75 feet by 30 feet with a vaulted ceiling. An aisle usually ran lengthwise down the center of the temple, with stone benches on either side on which the cult’s members would recline during their meetings. On average, a mithraeum could hold perhaps twenty to thirty people at a time. At the back end of the aisle there was a statue or bas-relief of the central icon of Mithraism: the so-called tauroctony or “bull-slaying scene” in which the god of the cult, Mithra, is shown in the act of killing a bull. There were many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Mithraic temples in the Roman empire. The greatest concentrations have been found in the city of Rome itself, and in those places in the empire (often in the most distant frontiers) where Roman soldiers—who made up a major segment of the cult’s membership—were stationed. Since they were all underground, as the development of modern Europe proceeded, more and more of these ancient temples turned up, as in Bordeaux during the construction of a modern-day parking garage.

One of the best preserved of these mithraea is an exposed underground chamber in Ostia Antigua just outside Rome in which an opening in the roof of the cellarlike chapel is arranged so that at certain times of day the sun will penetrate into the depths and illuminate the images of Mithra killing the bull. In most of the images of the bull-slaying scenes Mithra is accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, and the scene is depicted as taking place inside a cave, not unlike the mithraeum itself. This image was always located in the most important place in every mithraeum, like an altar, and obviously held great significance.

The current thinking is that the bull-slaying scene is an astronomical star map, not unlike the Cretan bull-leaping frescoes at Knossos. This interpretation is based on the fact that every figure found in the standard bull-slaying scenes has a parallel among a group of constellations in the Zodiac. According to this theory, the bull represents the constellation Taurus. The dog is Canis Minor, the snake, Hydra, the raven is Corvus, and the scorpion, Scorpio. Mithraic art in general is often associated with astronomical imagery—the Zodiac, various planets, the moon, individual stars, and, of course, the sun.

Recent interpretations of this arcane and seemingly obscure, insignificant religion are now taking the imagery a step farther and arguing that the solar god Mithra conquering the bull is a celestial prediction of future ages and a symbol of the power of the conquering sun—he who shifts and controls the cosmic sphere. Given the pervasive influence of astrology in the Greco-Roman period, a god possessing such a power would clearly have been eminently worthy of worship. Since he had control over the cosmos, he would automatically have power over the astrological forces determining life on earth, and would also, like Jesus, possess the ability to guarantee the soul a safe journey through the celestial spheres after death.

Mithraism was not the only solar cult to arise in Rome in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ. Often these new religions arose as a result of visions experienced by a given emperor, the best known of which was the supposed conversion of the emperor Constantine at the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge in A.D. 312. Legend holds that during the battle—or in some versions in a dream the night before the battle—Constantine saw a cross in the sky directing him to march under this sign if he would be victorious—which he was. Curiously, however, there had been a similar conversion some forty years earlier when, during a battle, the troops of the emperor Aurelian saw a vision of an ancient and all-powerful Syrian solar deity, El Gabel, and emerged victorious from the battle. Aurelian interpreted this as a sign and modified the cult to establish a new solar-based religion in Rome, the cult of sol invictus, the Unconquered Sun, which soon became the official religion of the state. A temple of the Campus Agrippa was dedicated to this god on December 25th in the year A.D. 274, the feast day of Mithra.

The cult was dispersed following the death of Aurelian, and the next emperor, Diocletian, reinstated the old gods of the empire and began a campaign against other religions and cults, the first instance of religious persecution—pagans generally were more tolerant of other religions, and even willing to take new gods into their pantheons. In 303 Diocletian began “The Great Persecution,” which sent many Christians to the lions. All this ended with Constantine, whose mother was a Christian and whose father was a devotee of the Unconquered Sun. Things could have gone the other way. Not two years before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine was leaning toward the solar worship of his father.

The emperor Julian, who lived during this same period of religious turmoil in Rome, had a theory that the sun was a shield from a more powerful force that lay behind the visible entity we see in the sky. Julian was related to Constantine but he reinstated paganism upon his ascension to the throne and began criticizing Christianity. Although he preached tolerance, he and his associates recognized Helios as the sole god. He claims in his famous “Hymn to the Sun” that even as an untutored child he knew that the sun, Helios, was the only god. There were two aspects to Helios, the visible entity that rose every day in the east, but that was only a manifestation of the Invisible, the great source that lay behind the sun.

One day having a drink with Geneviève, we got into a discussion of poor Derek and his slow-moving progress on his novel. He had been working on said novel, or at least writing something, so he claimed (no one had ever seen a single line), for eight years, and Geneviève, who had become a sort of solicitous sister to him, was worried that if he ever finished, he would die. Or perhaps he would die if he did not finish. One afternoon we hatched a plan to take him out to Saint-Emilion to have lunch and drink some good wine and try to shake him out of his routine.

That weekend Bertrand drove the three of us out in his tiny Fiat, Derek and I squashed thigh to thigh in the back, our knees jamming the back seat. We stopped at a vineyard in Libourne and had a taste of wine, and then again at the famous Cheval Blanc vineyard, and then continued on and parked the car at the base of the town.

Saint-Emilion is another stop on the old Santiago route. Pilgrims walking down from Breton would halt there at the hostels, and I was interested to visit this place, not only for the wine. The town is located on a rise at the head of a cleft in the Dordogne River plateau, and the road rises up from the valley floor between two steep vine-covered slopes. It is considered one of the most beautiful of the wine district villages.

While the three of them ascended to look for a good place to have lunch, I got them to drop me off below the village and took a little walk along the country lanes that surround the town. Although the vines were still dormant, or just budding up, the good green earth was fresh and flowers were blooming or just coming into bloom on the verges and lanes around the base of the town. Here were the beloved flowers of the European spring—the primrose and the buttercup, harebells and gillyvor, Marybuds, and mints, spurge, and celandine, and little sweet violets breathing out from the banks and scenting the air as I passed. After three days in rain and city life, I felt the need to stretch my legs, and having found a little rutted track below the walls, I circumambulated the whole town and came up to the center on the east side, past vineyards and the arching ruined walls of an old church.

From the heights I could see many of the famous vineyards of Saint-Emilion. Lining the banks of the Dordogne River on the west were the vineyards of the Libourne; just to the north, out of sight, lay the district of Pomerol; and beyond that the great vineyards of Bordeaux; and farther still, the jutting peninsula that held the famous vineyards of the Médoc, Rothschilds, Margaux, and St. Estephe; and then to the south, the district of Armagnac; and the Bergerac district to the northeast.

Why France, particularly this section of France, should end up producing some of the best wines in the world is a matter of much discussion, but a great deal is owed to a combination of soils and sun. Wine grapes need a warm spring sun to form flowers and a fine balance between rain and sun during the summer to set and ripen the grapes to yield the proper combination of sugars and acids needed for wine. A cold rainy sunless summer will give poor, acidic wines, a hot summer will sweeten them. An early frost can disturb the formation of sugar and cause the acids to increase and create a condition called acid rot. Good years, which according to vinters are few and far between, are the result of just the right amount of rainfall and sunlight, and a proper range of temperature during critical periods of the growing season. A good vintage is a much advertised statistic when it occurs, but in fact a so-called “good year” may not mean for all vintages. Because of the wide variation in microclimates and the little dips and valleys, or the presence of a strip of sheltering woods or a local hailstorm or damaging thunderstorm, one vineyard may have a good year while another, less than a mile away, will not have the same conditions and produce a bad or poor wine. All this is serious business in towns such as Saint-Emilion.

Soil is the other variable; it plays an important role in the acidity, sweetness, or bite of a given wine and around Bordeaux the soil consists, generally, of a rough gravelly mix above sands and clays, hardly the good rich soils one generally associates with other agricultural products. But the soils too are related to the sun. One of the reasons that the gravelly soils in this district produce a good wine has to do with light. Generally wherever possible growers like to plant on south-facing slopes, and the combination of direct solar energy and the rocky soils acts to collect and hold the warmth from the sun. Furthermore, the vines are generally pruned in such a way as to take advantage of solar power. The grapes are grown close to the soil if possible, which means constant cutting back of the naturally sprawling, climbing vines; the closer to the ground the better the maturation, since the sun’s reflection from the warm earth adds to the direct sunlight during the day and during the night the absorbed warmth radiates back to the grape. This has generated the evolution of many different structures to grow the grapes on, varying from district to district to take advantage of the local environment and angle of the sun. In Saint-Emilion the vines grow along long fencelike wires, for example. Some vignerons, or wine makers, leave two distinct branches, one to bear, and one to make the wood for the following year.

Although there are many species of wild grapes around the world, the grapes used in winemaking were developed from a single species, Vitis vinifera, which was originally believed to grow wild in Turkmenistan, between Samarkand and the Caspian Sea, roughly the same area that gave the world the tulip. Grapes used for wine are smaller than the eating varieties of grape, and generally have large seeds, or pips, and thick skins. From this single species, breeders have created countless varieties; over one hundred are used for wine-making in France alone.

In March in Bordeaux, the foot of the vines are either exposed or covered, depending on the spring rains, and later, the way I understand it (I have this from Bertrand, who gave us a long lecture at the first vineyard we stopped in at Libourne), the roots are uncovered for fruiting. By June, little yellowish clusters of flowers appear on the vines. And after pollination by insects, these begin to set grapes and fill in. Then the mystery begins.

As in all green plants, oxygen is absorbed from the atmosphere through the leaves, combined with water taken up from the soils, and then changed into starch. Driving this engine of food production, the singular element upon which the whole process depends, is the sun.

The word for this mystic process, photosynthesis, tells the story: photo, Greek for light, and synthesis, the Greek verb to make or produce. It is arguably the single most important chemical reaction in the sustenance of life on earth.

The whole process begins inside the leaf. Generally speaking, in most green plants the flat leaf presents a broad surface to the sun so as to catch as much radiant energy as possible. And the leaves arrange themselves on the plant stem or trunk in such as way as not to obscure one another from the precious, life-giving light. On a single large plant, a maple tree, for example, there may be as many as several hundred thousand leaves, a surface of as much as half an acre, all told, and all the day long each leaf absorbs sunlight madly, eight to twelve or more hours a day, throughout all the days of the growing season.

Just below the surface of the leaf is a clear layer of cells arranged in such a way so as to gather the full power of sunlight. They are swollen with countless microscopic specks called chloroplasts, which are filled with green chlorophyll and are so concentrated that the whole leaf takes on the color green. These receive the first radiant energy of the sun. The chlorophyll traps that energy, transforms it, stores it, and then passes it along into the plant through an elaborate chemical process of electron transfers involving water and oxygen. The end result is that these substances are combined and transformed into carbohydrates, which is to say the sugars or starches that form the base of virtually all the food chains on earth.

By midautumn in the Bordeaux region the grapes are ripe and ready for picking, usually from mid September to mid October. The art of the making of the wine, as opposed to the luck of a good wine, comes in at this time, as it is up to the vigneron to decide exactly when to pick. He, and nowadays, also she, looks at the color, notes how the berries pull from the stalk, and checks the appearance of the pulp inside the grape. And then if the grapes seem close to fullness, the vigneron sends samples to the vineyard chemist who presses out the juice and tests it for sugar content. Sugar content is directly related to the amount of accumulated sunlight over the growing season, but it increases toward the end of the season as the grapes ripen, depending on the daily weather conditions.

I got interested in this question of timing and made Bertrand discuss it at length at the various vineyards where we stopped. As far as I understood it, as the proper day approaches the vigneron maintains an ever more watchful eye, checking the weather reports on the local television stations, checking hourly updates, and measuring the sugar content, day by day, depending on the amount of sunlight, or the amount of rain or cloud cover. Finally, as ripeness approaches, the vignerons measure the sugars even by the hour. And then, finally, after six months of growing, through sun and rain, and dangers of frost and withering hot spells, the hour arrives. The grapes must be harvested immediately.

Now the larger vineyards have machines that can get the grapes in quickly, but when I was first in this district years ago, in September desperate managers would offer work to any passing student vagabond in order to get the grapes in as fast as possible. Although I never had to do it, friends of mine told me it was difficult work, long hot hours, and your hands subject to nasty gashes and scratches with the curved knife used to nip the clusters.

In the old days of the great manors, the lords who controlled this part of France decided the hour or day of the vendange. Since the grapes would ripen at different times according to the microclimates or layout of a given vineyard, this would mean that the local peasants would often have to watch sadly as the grapes in their own vineyards rotted, while those of the manor vineyard were still increasing their sugars—or vice versa, the lord would declare the day of harvest and the grapes of the underlings would have to be picked while they were still not fully ripened. Fortunately, in the nineteenth century this so-called ban de vendange was abolished.

Geneviève and company were in the town square on the west side and had found a good table in the sun. Bertrand had selected a modest bottle of Château Ausone and was in the process of boring Derek with a long lecture on the vineyard, claiming it was originally planted by a local Roman poet named Ausonius, which sounded believable enough until Bertrand began elaborating upon the sins and perversities of this Ausonius. I was learning to hold suspect anything he said.

“Andiamo Derek,” Geneviève said after lunch, “Bertrand will show you the town.”

Derek grunted.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Geneviève blew out her lips with classic French dismissal.

“We know you’ll go,” she said. “It is this old dog here we want to roust out of his kennel.”

“I am not in my kennel, as you call it. I am writing. Every day, I am writing.”

“Ten years, he is writing,” Geneviève said.

“Eh, Derék, you want some coffee?” Bertrand asked. “Have a coffee, Derek. Then we take you into the catacombs below the church. If you like you can die down there. Many have, skulls line the walls. Sacrificed virgins. Holy waters.”

Reluctantly, Derek rose, very like a tired old dog, and shuffled after us. I could appreciate—somewhat—his reluctance; Bertrand and Geneviève were an energetic, enthusiastic couple, extreme in the French theatrical sort of way. They told me over dinner of a “superb” adventure they had had the year before in Mexico where they had hiked through the forests in northern Chiapas and been set upon and “captured” by long-haired, stick-wielding Indians dressed in long white robes. These were, I believe, nothing more than the peaceful mountain-dwelling Lacandon Indians, who lived in terror of outsiders.

“We were wonderfully frightened,” Geneviève said.

Saint Emilion, the hermit monk who was the founder of this little town, lived in a cave under the town, and later a church was dug out of the rock where he lived. There is a little stone bench where the holy man slept and Bertrand tried to make Derek lie down on the bench and pray to finish his book. He said it was a custom of pilgrims to this place.

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” Derek said in English.

Geneviève rolled her eyes.

We continued our tour: deeper and deeper into various tunnel-like halls that gave onto claustrophobic chambers set with altars and niches containing images of saints. Up on the surface again we went into a little aboveground chapel, and there, above a rose window on the east side, I saw an image that verified my current solar theories.

Rarely in early Christian art does one see the face of God depicted, and yet there he was painted on the wall over the window, in all his glory. His head was round and bright, his beard was a golden color, and from all sides golden rays speared outward in a golden burst and spread across the walls. In short, he was an image of the sun.

In the Greek pantheon, the original sun god, Helios, is similarly depicted. He evolved into the shining god Phoebus Apollo, who was born on Delos and early on was associated with light. His first name, Phoebus, means brilliant, or shining, and in time he took over the role of Helios and became the sun god himself. It is he who drives the splendid chariot of the sun that rises up out of the sea after Aurora, the Dawn, opens the gates of the east each day. He crosses the sky, arcing high over the earth in summer, following a lower course in winter, and then descends in the western sea each night, bringing his horses around through the underworld to his palace in the east to wait for dawn.

The great father, Zeus, is also associated with many of the attributes of a solar deity. He has a shining halo around him, stars encircling his head. He is the controller of thunder, the caster down of lightning bolts, and the most powerful force on Olympus. But according the mythologists, he is a latecomer in the Hellenic tradition, having arrived from the north with other male sky gods with the invading Indo-Europeans who moved down into Greece from the steppes of Europe around 2000 B.C. His name is thought to be derived from the sky god Daos, who was associated with weather and thunder and lightning.

Even Mary and her son, Jesus, retain a few of the old solar connections. They are often associated with light, and wherever they appear, from the earliest Christian art to current altar images in the Catholic church, they both are depicted with the old solar symbol of the halo. The best evidence of these solar connections is the earliest. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine began construction on a new basilica of St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill that covered over a cemetery that had been located on the site. In the 1950s, in the course of archeological excavations, the cemetery was uncovered and the earliest known Christian mosaic was discovered. The image depicted Christ as the sun. He was driving a chariot, wore a flying cloak that streamed out behind him, and had a rayed nimbus around his head.

“What do you think of the catacombs, Derék?” Bertrand wanted to know. We were seated in the sun again, having another coffee. “Don’t you feel better?”

“I did like it, in point of fact,” Derek said. “Most interesting. I shall place a scene from these catacombs in my novel.”

“Come with me next week. I’ll show you more,” he said. “I have to go to Sarlat. We can take a side trip to the caves, and I will show you more mysteries. I will show you the elephant. You know, the mammoth.” He made a long sweeping motion with his right arm, from his nose outward, imitating a trunk. “You can set a scene there, too. The killer, a known cannibal, lurks in the deep interiors of Les Colombelles, feeding on tourists.”

“There are no killers in my novel.”

“No killers? How can you have a book with no killers?”

Derek merely shrugged at so base a question.

“I’ll go,” I said, spontaneously.

“We know you will,” said Geneviève. “He’ll go anywhere, Bertrand.”

“Evidently.”

I could tell he wanted to carry on with Derek, but Geneviève wisely set us in motion and we paid the bill and drove back to Bordeaux.

I actually had been in a few of these caves when I was younger, but it was all I could do to carry on as we wound deeper and deeper into the narrow passages. I kept thinking of the sky and having bizarre paranoid thoughts about possible cave-ins and the deep mysteries—the horror, in my view—of such places. Why these early artists, probably shamans, wound their way so deeply into the earth to create these fantastic images, and how in fact they even lit the spaces to see what they were doing, is still a mystery. In the mid–1960s, archeologists and anthropologists, working in concert, managed to determine that there was an element of time involved in the creation of these images, a season when the natural world was changing and herds were on the move. Shamans would descend at these times to create the paintings as a sort of sympathetic magic to aid with the hunt.

Cave art, and cave dwellings in this cold, glacier-dominated section of Europe, was made possible by the discovery, sometime in the obscured “dawn of man,” of fire. Archeologists are still not clear when fire was actually tamed; some say as recently as 250,000 years ago in Europe, when, of necessity, Homo sapiens entering the cold climates employed it to warm the frozen meat. Newer arguments are pushing the event as far back as one million years ago in Africa. But no matter when it started, almost every culture has a story of a trickster who steals fire from the sun and brings it down to earth for the benefit of mankind. In the West, our cultural hero was Prometheus.

In the Greek system, the children of heaven and earth, the Titans, created the gods, who subsequently rebelled and defeated the Titans, partly with the help of Prometheus, whose name means forethought. The work of the creation of humankind fell to him, aided by his brother Epimetheus, whose name means afterthought. Epimetheus created the animals and, in his scatter-brained way, gave them all the best attributes—speed, strength, feathers and the ability to fly, and shells to protect themselves. When he came to the creation of people there was nothing left. So Prometheus went up to the sun, to the great shining palace where the sun god, Helios, the child of the Titan Hyperion, lived. Prometheus stole the fire of the sun and brought it back down to earth and gave it to humankind, the best and most useful gift of all the gods.

In another version, Zeus is the keeper of the eternal flame, the solar representation. Prometheus stole the flame and hid it in a fennel stalk and brought it back down to earth. But both versions have the same sad ending. For this and other acts of generosity, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day, whereupon it would grow back and be eaten again.

The twentieth century had its own Promethean myth. To some extent, in our time the old gods and heroes of the great mythic ages of the past are now the scientists. They attempt to break the codes of God, they make life artificially, and they have managed to steal and re-create the secrets of the sun. Early in the century, in 1902, the Curies isolated radium, the most powerful source of radioactivity, and work toward nuclear fission began. Radioactivity was believed by scientists to be the source of the long, seemingly eternal power of the sun. But by the 1920s physicists theorized that it was actually the fusion of hydrogen and helium that fueled the great fires of stars.

Research into atomic physics, as the scientists involved in the process well understood, had quasi-religious overtones, and the attempt to re-create the energy of the sun, to fuse atoms on earth, was also driven by a purported mythic battle, the conflict between the children of light (read the West) and the children of darkness (Communism), or so the conflict was characterized. In the autumn of 1952, here on earth, the dream was realized. The children of light gathered at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific to witness an experiment that had been set up on a nearby atoll called Elugaleb. On November 1st, dubbed the “Day of Trinity,” scientists working on the project in effect re-created solar fusion. As they watched, a vast fiery dome three and a half miles across rose in the air. After it settled—and dispersed—the islet of Elugaleb no longer existed.

President Truman, who had ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, said, without a trace of irony, that the weapon was created “for peace and security.”

Earlier, when the physicists detonated the first atom bomb, there was a remote possibility, expressed by some of the researchers, that the event would cause a chain reaction that would, in effect, ignite the world. The Greeks had a similar story. Apollo’s mortal son Phaeton one day deigned to approach the marbled halls of the sun and asked Phoebus Apollo for proof of his fatherly love. Apollo made the mistake of granting Phaeton anything he wished, so the rash youth asked to drive the chariot of the sun for one day. Apollo tried to convince him not to do it—the horses of the sun were a fiery lot who fed at night in pastures of ambrosia and were hard to control, even for the powerful sun god. But the rambunctious boy took the reins and shortly after Aurora threw open the gates of dawn, Phaeton urged the steeds forward and charged up over the horizon in a blazing stream of light.

Sensing an amateur at the reins, the horses immediately bolted. Phaeton lost control, and now free from their normal course, the horses of the sun ranged higher and higher up into the sky and headed northward toward the pole and the circling bears. The great serpent, who lies torpid around the pole star, grew warm and began to revive; the horses reared at the sight, turned and raced into the dangerous territory of the Zodiac. The snapping claws of the Crab grabbed at the chariot as it flew past, the Scorpion reached out and uncurled its tail to sting, the Moon drew back at the image of her brother racing below her, clouds and stars began to smoke and steam, and then in a disastrous course, the horses began a headlong dash for earth, cleaving the morning clouds in their dive. This was clearly the end of all that the gods so loved. The mountaintops of earth began to burn, the succulent plants dried and withered, deserts appeared in place of lush forests, the Sahara was created, trees burst into flame, whole cities and nations were consumed by fire, fountains and springs broke into a boil, snowy peaks melted, and the very earth caught fire and cracked open to reveal the dark lower kingdom of the dead.

All heaven was in a rage. The gods called out to Zeus to do something to save the world, and Earth herself pleaded with the great skygod to save her. And so he thundered and growled, rose from his throne, and came down from Olympus with a handful of lightning bolts. He sought out the boy. And then he drew back his mighty arm and cast his bolt. The lightning struck Phaeton and threw him from his blazing seat. He fell to earth, his hair flaming, and landed, steaming and smoking, in the river Eridanus in central Italy. The earth was saved.

The following evening, a Sunday, we all went out to dinner again at a small restaurant around the corner from Derek’s flat. It was not the best of dining spots in the city of Bordeaux by any means, but it did feature lamprey, a famous local dish. The dinner conversation, after the spirited repartee at Saint-Emilion, was lackluster, even a little sad. I had announced that I was leaving the next morning and none of us knew when we would meet again.

In the morning, wishing Derek the best of luck on his novel, promising to stay in touch, and leaving behind, where he would find it at his lonely dinner, a fine bottle of Margaux, I embraced my old friend, mounted my bicycle, and sallied forth toward fresh adventure.

I was headed north again, into the heart of the Aquitaine, where, for three hundred years, the troubadours and jesters and jongleurs wandered the same roads singing their poetry and paying homage to the fair ladies of that fortunate country.

Eight

Holy Light

Modern-day pilgrims who make the passage to Santiago on foot, or bicycle, or, as a few still do, on horseback, always complain about certain places along the route. This has been a tradition ever since the twelfth century. One of the earliest pilgrim guides, the Codex Calixtinus, written by Aymery Picaud, complained bitterly about the Picards and advised pilgrims to avoid certain spots. Nowadays pilgrims complain about the cities, Burgos, Perigieux, and, if they take that route, Bordeaux.

As a pilgrim of a different sort, I reserve the right to complain about Bordeaux. It took me nearly half a day to free myself from the octopus tentacles of that old fading city center. For all its past glory—or what there was of it—Bordeaux is still a port city. All it really has to recommend itself is good wine, and you have to get out in the country to enjoy that.

Once I was on the road in the countryside, I knew enough to avoid Poitiers as well, having been there before and having vague, bad memories of the railroad station and one of the worst meals I have ever had anywhere.

In between these two busy cities is the pleasant landscape of southwest France. I pedaled up through the Charente, past Cognac, and on into Poitou, through the general region of the pilgrim route that ran south from Poitiers and Tours. It was a country of long, rolling hills that seemed to go on forever and ever. Having surmounted one, I would rest, review the sweeping landscape of mustard fields and vineyards, and then like a bird soar down the slope to begin all over again.

As they moved south from England and Paris, the various pilgrimage tributaries would begin to assemble, and here in Poitou, south of Tours, the English route would join that of the various routes coming down from Paris. This area was much praised by the author of the Codex Calixtinus. Picaud claims that Poitou is the most fertile countryside of all and the people are energetic, elegantly dressed, and very handsome to boot. (It certainly helped that Picaud happened to have come from Poitou.) You would not have guessed this from the looks of a disheveled man I met standing in front of a café one afternoon.

“Boum, boum,” he said when he learned I was an American. “Pendant la guerre, vous savez? Boum, boum. Lafayette, nous sommes arrivés.”

He was referring to the fact that the French used to say that in the Second World War the Americans had arrived to repay the debt they owed to Lafayette for helping the colonies out during the American Revolution.

This man was not quite as drunk as I took him to be, and he invited me back to his house for a glass of something. Why not, I thought, as it was clouding up and threatening rain. He ushered me into a neatly kept little cottage set at the end of a narrow dooryard garden, blooming with tulips and daffodils. The house was decorated with lace curtains and many china bric-a-brac, and my host introduced me to his civilized prim wife, who wore a frilly apron and made tea and plied me with local candies and later a tiny glass of calvados. Her husband, rumpled and half-shaven, sat politely smiling and nodding at our parlor conversation.

They both liked Americans immensely because of the war and even had a distant cousin living in Maine. The husband would interrupt every time the word America was mentioned. “Eh, les américains. Vous savez? Pendant la guerre…” and at this he would tip his head, wink, and raise a thumb in approval. Madame prepared a little neatly wrapped packet of gâteaux for me to carry on the road, and they stood at the doorway and waved as I wheeled my bicycle down the little flower-lined stone path to the open road beyond their dooryard gate. I looked back just as I was rounding a corner and they were still there at the doorway, waving.

After days of pedaling I managed to round Poitiers without undue nastiness and head away from the city on an old Roman road that later became the pilgrim route, and then cut away from this to back roads heading north to Chinon and the Loire Valley. Poitiers was once a lovely city, dominated by a fairy tale castle and originally the site of a monastery founded by the early Christian saint the Lady Radegonde, who later became an inspiration for the troubadour poets who wandered through this region. The city itself is pictured in the illuminated fourteenth-century calendar Les très Riches Heures for the month of July, a clustered town, jagged wilderness mountains beyond, and in the foreground farmers cutting wheat with sickles. I knew better than to visit; however, I knew that inside that city in our time were narrow gray streets much fumed with the exhaust of automobiles.

North of Poitiers the rural France of legend resumed, an easy country of vineyards and pastures, with grazing cows and the smell of the sun on fresh-mown hay. This general district, south of Tours, the Aquitaine, the Charente, and east all the way to Provence, was the langue d’oc region in the days of the pilgrimages, a section of the world known for its music and poetry and, incidentally, for the earliest freedoms for women of the courts. Northward in the langue d’oil, the dictates of feudalism held sway, but here in the south, wandering troubadours and jongleurs entertained the populace with songs of love, dance, juggling acts, and magic tricks, much to the consternation of the church. This was the region Keats sang about in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” a country of dance and Provençal song, sun-burnt mirth, tasting of Flora and the country green.

Poor John Keats, locked away in his northern cottage, where but to think, as he wrote, is to be full of sorrow. Those of a solar persuasion may be tempted to suggest that there is a meteorological connection between culture and light. Heavy works of art and literature, gloom, melancholy, and introspection, seem to hang over those sections of Europe that are regularly covered with a seamless pall of gray clouds for most of the winter, whereas in the south—generally speaking—in the sun-blasted sections, ecstatic dances, music, poetry of love, and revels prevail—“O for a beaker full of the warm South” as Keats wrote, “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And a purple stained mouth.…”

No sooner did these thoughts cross my mind, however, than just north of Poitiers, the sky clouded over again and it suddenly grew colder. I forged on nonetheless, through the fields of yellow mustard and fresh green shoots of wheat, for Châtellerault and Lencoître. This was open country and a welcome relief after the endless pines of Les Landes and there were beautiful old stone châteaux and little villages with Romanesque churches and small farms set at the end of poplar-lined drives. At Châtellerault I made the mistake of staying in a youth hostel, which ended up to be an empty school, a large cavernous building of which I was the only inhabitant.

To make up for it I treated myself to a fine meal at a restaurant on the Vienne River. The sun was setting later and later each evening now, and a green cool light was fading outside the window beside my table as I sat down to eat. The waiters were chatty and friendly and recommended the trout, which turned out to be a wise choice. While I was eating, one after another, the shells of a local club nautique winged by on the river like silent, mysterious birds. The waiter gave me a cognac on the house after hearing my stories of the road and later in the evening a whole crowd of male jokesters came in for dinner. This was some kind of comedy or humor club, and during their meal one member after another stood in front of the tables and told a long complicated joke, each one of which raised a great deal of laughter and applause. Not a word from any of them could I understand, even though my French at the time was fairly fresh. It made the evening all the more absurd.

I returned to the empty school and spent a strange and fitful night, listening to the owl calls outside the windows and the creak of pipes, the slam of mysterious doors, and mice or rats scurrying and gnawing in the walls. At one point, I am certain, I heard footsteps approach slowly in the corridor, stop in front of my door, and then continue on to the other end of the hall, echoing as they receded.

I woke up early and saw the benevolent red sun rising through a grove of plane trees and spreading its kindly light in golden spears across the green grounds of the school. I went out immediately and breathed in the spring air. This was almost May, birds were trilling and fluttering in the upper branches and the shrubbery, the lilies of the valley, the muguet, were blooming under the trees and scenting the air, the dew and earth were fresh, and the evils of the darkness of the Zoroastrian god Ahriman once again had been conquered by Orzmud, the god of light and goodness.

Somewhere south of the town I had passed the northernmost border of the Moorish advance into Europe. There is a spot somewhere out in the green cow pastures that was the site of the battle at which Charles Martel inflicted the first defeat on the Moors. He couldn’t destroy their culture entirely, however, and the sung verses of the troubadours can be traced in this part of France directly to the sung verse traditions of Moorish Spain.

Shortly after I left Châtellerault I came to a very long annoying hill. There was a thin, sheltering forest on my right where cuckoos were calling, and to my left at the top of the hill I saw a decaying château, the type of place haunted by barn owls and ghosts, and seemingly deserted. Once I gained the top of the hill I noticed the gate for this place, a canted wrought-iron, much spiked thing in the Victorian mode. A low stone wall, much beset with shrubbery and young trees, surrounded the property, the winding gravel drive was overgrown with weeds and grasses, and the line of cypress trees was unpruned. Beyond the drive, I could see the gray brown façade of the building, its long narrow windows absorbing the light of this otherwise bright May morning and staring out at me like horrid sunken eyes. I rested by the gate for a while, and then, trespasser that I am, I decided to ascend the driveway to see who was home—assuming, of course, that no one was home but the owls and the pigeons.

The flag terrace in front of the heavy oaken door was rucked and weed grown. On either side of the terrace, the grounds fell away to the tangled briar-strewn slopes of the hill with the road beyond and, beyond that, more woods. It was a strangely deserted landscape for this part of the world, as if the plague had suddenly swept the area and no one had dared return. I stood for a while admiring the workmanship in the corbelled walls, the finely wrought spiky turrets, and the carved window frames and cylindrical towers. I meditated, as is my wont, on the sad beauty of things gone by, the rattling horse carriages that must have pulled in here and disgorged the perfumed, besilked ladies in tiny slippers, and the lecherous old seigneurs with roving eyes and gouted feet. Somewhere here on the terraced courtyard, or under the postern, I imagined d’Artagnan himself fought duels with the evil master of this place and skewered the old devil before he had his way with the beautiful daughter of some visiting dignitary.

This was France after all, and here I was in the heartland of the ancien régime. Maybe something of the sort did happen here. Why do we have to live always in this little prison of linear time that traps us in the current era? On the heels of these fancies, I turned back toward the drive and there at the edge of the terrace I saw what I first took for a ghost—a small wraithlike figure of a girl, about twelve years old. She was wearing a dark blue schoolgirl jumper and a ruffled white shirt, buttoned at the neck, and had on dark blue stockings. She had silky black hair, creamy skin, and black eyes, and she was holding in front of her a bouquet of wildflowers. I assumed she must be a resident of the old decaying château, but she seemed more a part of the spring woods and fields behind her, more a part of the nature than this emblem of death and decay. But she was alive, very much alive. I greeted her and she politely greeted me, and held out a muguet.

“For you,” she said, formally.

I must have hesitated slightly, and this and no doubt my equipage and my appearance tipped her off immediately.

“You are not from here, are you?” she asked.

“No, but are you from here?” I asked, jerking my head toward the château.

“No, the town,” she said.

Which town I wondered. I was now three or four miles outside of Châtellerault. I was about to ask when she dipped in a little curtsey and said au revoir.

“Thank you for the flower,” I said to hold her up.

“It is nothing.”

“No, it is very nice.”

“It is the custom,” she said. “This is the first of May.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, not realizing at the time that on the first of May in this part of France it is the custom to collect the muguet from the forest and give them to strangers.

“Well goodbye again,” she said, clearly trying to get away. She walked around the back of the château and made her way down through the overgrown pastures toward the road.

I couldn’t help but think of the fairy tale “Brier Rose” and the old brier-strewn château, the winding drive, the young princess, awakened. This image of her was encouraged by the fact that I knew someplace around here, a little farther north in the Loire Valley, there was a château that had served as the model for the story of Sleeping Beauty.

The old folktale begins with a curse from a witch who declares that the beautiful virgin princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. A wise woman intervenes and alters the curse. The virgin will not die but only sleep. The king, hearing the curse, has all the spinning wheels banished from the castle. But sure enough, on her fifteenth birthday, the beautiful princess makes her way to a small tower room high in the château and there meets an old withered crone, who is working at a spinning wheel. True to the curse, the princess pricks her finger on the spindle and falls asleep. So does the whole castle. The chickens go to roost, the pigeons tuck their heads beneath their wings, the scullery maids and the cooks drift off, nodding, the horses sleep at the carriage harnesses, and the king and queen of the kingdom fall asleep on their thrones. Their whole world enters into a period of cold dormancy. A brier hedge grows over the castle and the legend of a sleeping beauty within spreads over the land. Many brave knights attempt to get through the hedge but fail. Then finally a prince arrives at the hedge. The briers flower for the first time; the hero cuts his way through and places a kiss on the lips of the sleeping princess. She awakens. And then, one by one the entire castle awakens. The hens flutter and fluff themselves up, the pigeons fly from their roosts, the scullery maids and the cooks and the king and queen arise from their deep sleep.

In short, winter is over; the sun prince has returned to the land and awakened the virgin spring.

Back on the road I encountered more people out for their May Day stroll. There were many bands of noisy young students who were clearly more intent on holiday making than muguet gathering, and a few gentle middle-aged folks who still believed in the old traditions. I hailed a kindly looking older couple who were emerging from the woods beside the road with bunches of flowers and asked them about the château. They knew nothing.

“Deserted for years,” the man said. “The whole of our lives, anyway.”

I told him about the young girl. This begat a discussion between the two of them, in short staccato patois, to no effect. They couldn’t place her, even though they seemed to know many people in the town. So I thanked them and pedaled on, thinking about this old much ghosted landscape and the legends and the rich possibilities of this strange encounter. Maybe she did come out from the spirit world.

Traveling alone as I was, sometimes pedaling for hours at a stretch with no one to talk to, I had many opportunities to allow my thoughts to ramble, sometimes off into wild unchecked theories, such as my idea that depression, neurosis, and introspection are phenomena of sunless northern cultures whereas ecstatic, ill-considered hedonism comes out of sunny southern climates. My theory du jour was that the desert extremes of bright, hot, cloudless days, followed by black, cloudless, cold nights, month after month, year in year out, would naturally beget the concept of a singular, all-powerful deity among desert people such as the Israelites. Cultures of the forest and variable seasons and a diversity of plant and animal life, according to my theory, would develop religions that involve multiple deities.

As I pedaled along toward the town of Richelieu, the air warmed, the fresh earth was redolent with spring perfumes, and the chaffinches and sparrows were twittering by the roadside. I stopped often, just for the sake of enjoying the French countryside—the distant islands of woods where cuckoos called, the fresh-turned fields, the rolling hills of yellow mustard and red poppies, and the long straight roads lined with Lombardy poplars and dappled shadows.

When I lived in New England, every year, sometime in mid February, I would begin to hope for the end to winter, and every year, true to form, rather than a general warming toward spring, the weather would worsen, and I would begin to have long long thoughts of the South. By the end of the month these thoughts would coalesce into a genuine obsession, and I would begin to have dreams of the sun and green landscapes. Waking to the reality of February was always a disappointment.

This phenomenon of cabin fever, a term invented, I believe, by the Alaskan pioneers from the lower forty-eight, may be a fairly recent development in the human story. According to a friend of mine who has spent years in circumpolar regions, it is not a phenomenon that affects the Inuit of North America, or the Saami of Finland, or other long-suffering northern native tribal peoples. Having skirted on my journeying the well-known cave-dwelling regions of northern Spain and southern France, I could not help but think of our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, who endured a season of ice that lasted for generation after generation, with hardly a summer of relief. They and their conspecifics, the Neanderthals, migrated north or south following the advances and retreats of the past three glaciations that swept over Europe, Asia, and North America. Even in the more benign later eras, they were living on the heels of the retreating ice.

We are very fortunate indeed to be living in an interglacial period, a time in which the earth has been slowly warming as a result of the retreat of the last glacier, and an era (perhaps not incidentally) characterized as well by the rise of civilizations. In the past hundred years, however, this natural global warming has been speeded up dramatically because of industrialization. Whatever our own effect on climate may be, periodic warming and cooling trends that either melt or expand the amount of ice over the earth have been affecting the planet for more than 3.5 billion years. What is less clear is why.

The most popular theory is that the long-term fluctuations in the volume of ice are caused by slight changes in the past of the earth’s orbit around the sun, which cause, in turn, a redistribution of the solar radiation that strikes various regions of the earth. One theory for the cause of these changes suggests that the earth’s orbit alters every 100,000 years or so because of the gravitational pull by other planets. This pushes the orbit from an ellipse into a more circular shape, thereby changing the areas of the earth that receive the sun’s direct rays.

Another theory holds that the inclination of the earth to the sun changes. The earth is now tilted at an angle, but that angle changes slowly over a period of about 41,000 years so that eventually the duration of winter at the poles lasts longer. Furthermore, as the earth circles the sun, its path wobbles slightly because of the pull of the moon and the sun, which means that the poles will be tilted toward the sun at different positions in the orbit, altering the seasons. Because of these differing angles, winters could be decidedly warmer—or cooler.

Any of these slight changes could trigger the expansion of the ice sheets. The length of winter increases, snows are heavier each season, and then finally there is no longer any summer melting, the weight of the snows increases, and with nowhere else to go, the pressure forces the ice southward. Slowly, year by year, decade by decade, millennium by millennium, the wall of ice creeps outward around the poles. Plants alter their ranges as the cold increases, birds and mammals that feed at the edge of the snowy regions migrate southward toward open areas of grazing, and on their heels the little bands of fur-clad, spear-bearing Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hunters, our direct ancestors, followed.

The art and artifacts of these people offer a record of the changes. Warm weather species now found only in tropical regions, such as lions and rhinos, are depicted on cave walls in southern France during one period. Then images of cold-tolerant mammals, such as the woolly mammoths and reindeer, begin to appear. About eleven thousand years ago, the climate began to warm once more in southern France, the glacier retreated northward and upward to the high peaks of the Alps, and the benign deciduous forest returned to Anjou and Touraine and the landscape through which I was now so contently pedaling.

These winter dreams were soon supplanted by more immediate concerns, so I retired to a fine roadside pasture, sliced my tomates, onions, and sardines, tore off a tranche of bread, and uncorked a bottle of Sancerre I had bought to celebrate the first of May. Here, in the warming sun, I sat cross-legged, admiring the cows in a pasture on the other side of the road, and watching intently the sparse traffic pass.

Working over the wildflowers in the pasture were many honeybees. They would dash frenetically from blossom to blossom, drinking up nectar and packing the pollen baskets on their hind legs as they did so, and then fly off in a straight line, apparently with a clear purpose. I tried to follow the line or the angle at which they were coming and going. They seemed to be moving up the pasture from a low swale to my left, at the bottom of the hill and slightly behind me. Years ago I had learned to track bees like a native hunter. You follow their bee line, place a stone at the spot where you lose track of an individual bee, wait for another to fly past and follow that one, placing stones along the route. In this manner eventually you will come to their hive.

How the bees manage to find these flowers, return to their hive, and then communicate the location of those flowers that were filled with nectar was long a mystery to insect watchers. The problem was solved in the 1950s by the entomologist Karl von Frisch, who made a study of the strange tail-waggling “dance” as it was called that bees do whenever they return to the hive. A returning bee, having found a rewarding cache of flowers, will execute her dance while other bees gather round in a circle, watching. Then the watchers fly off and somehow find the flower patch and return with nectar and pollen. It occurred to von Frisch that the dance must have something to do with directions to the source. After years of observation, he noticed that bees are not as lively on cloudy days. In fact beekeepers will warn you that their bees are more likely to sting when it’s cloudy. Von Frisch calculated that the dance must have something to do with the sun. He learned through measurements and observation that the bees were using the position of the sun above the horizon as a fixed point or meridian. The dance was essentially a communication of the coordinates of the flower patch based on the angle of the sun above the horizon and the meridian line.

Below me on the road, speedy little Fiats and Renaults wailed past. Then I saw an old lumbering farm truck drive by with a few workers rocking in the bed, and then, headed southward, in a scene more reminiscent of one of the old French fairy tales, or medieval venta tales from la Mancha, I saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat clomp by on an old gray nag. He was dressed in brown corduroy and had a duffel bag slung over the horse’s rump. On top of the bag, swaying with the gait of the horse, a small, shaggy white dog was perched. I spotted the horseman immediately for a Santiago pilgrim, and dug into my pack for my binoculars to see if I could spot the characteristic scallop shell. But by the time I managed to focus on him, all I could see was his back. He swayed on by at an easy pace, slouched over slightly, his loyal companion balancing bravely on top of his equipage, periodically sniffing the air. I was sorry to have missed him.

This seemed to be a period of missed stories. First the reluctant storyteller, then the ghost of Sleeping Beauty, now the Santiago pilgrim. As I watched him plod off I began to feel a little lonely for the first time on my journey. I was headed for England where I had friends. But England was a long way off, and here I was, perched on a hillside in a French pasture with no one to share my Sancerre. I began to think of Paris and the Rue St. Jacques, where all the Santiago pilgrimages of the thirteenth century began. And then I began to think about all the other ancient streets on the Left Bank, and then I thought of my old friends there and the good times we used to have, drinking and carousing and ending up at dawn at Les Halles to drink one more glass at the zinc bars where butchers in bloodied aprons and late-night opera goers in evening dress all mixed together to eat onion soup. I could almost smell the cold dank air of the market and the musky odor of vegetables and see the old, now moribund heart of Paris. How sad it all was. Then it struck me that they must still be there, my friends, some of them at least. I could look them up. Paris: The City of Light. The Sun King, and all that dappled, broken light of the French Impressionists. One after another, fantasies of Paris crowded in until, feeling sad and rather nostalgique, I limped down to my bicycle and slowly pedaled off to look for coffee to improve my mood.

Late that evening, having dawdled along all day, I entered Richelieu and after some sniffing around found a place to stay. I then went out for a good country boeuf Bourguignon with a hearty Côtes du Rhône, followed by a fresh green salad and then, at the patron’s insistence, a plate of select cheeses. I had a coffee and, again at the patron’s insistence, a cognac, and after that a little chat with him about the old days and how much better it used to be in these parts. Then, feeling aged and overweight, I went out for a walk. There was a quarter moon rising between the spires of the churches of Richelieu, and the streets were dark and lined with plane trees, which, for once, had been allowed to stretch their limbs over the streets—unlike most small French towns whose good burghers generally decree that all limbs be pollarded each winter.

The town was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, whose family had come from this area. Once the Cardinal had risen to power during the reign of Louis XIII, in the early seventeenth century, he set out to establish a monument to himself and ordered the construction of a vast château and also a new town. For ten years, more than two thousand workers were kept busy constructing the buildings and laying out the streets.

Richelieu is now a very orderly sort of place, which reminded me for some reason of Savannah, Georgia. But even here, in the quiet French countryside, chaos lurked. At one point on my stroll, I found a beautiful cecropia moth pinned, for some unknown reason, but still slowly pumping its wings, to one of the plane trees. Worse things have happened in this part of France, of course, some of them instigated by Richelieu himself. He had all the competing châteaux in the region dismantled so as not to rival his own, and was not fond of Protestants—to say the least. But then Protestants were not fond of Richelieu, nor any other Catholics. They were both fond, it seems, of murdering one another, and this peaceful river valley, winding beneath the low wooded and pastured hills, saw some of the bloodiest atrocities during the wars of religion.

I got a late start the next day and rode toward Champigny sur Veude and then on for Chinon. By this time the bright May morning had declined and there were storm clouds in the north, above Chinon, just in the direction I was headed. About twenty minutes later I ran into showers, so I fished through my gear, brought out my poncho, and forged on, and by the time I could see Chinon in the distance, there were breaks in the clouds.

A bridge crosses the Vienne River that runs along the southern end of the town, and there beyond the bridge, arcing over the city in a vast half circle, I saw a magnificent rainbow. One end rose out of a green meadow in the east, swept upward over the town, and then descended into a collection of buildings to the north.

When I was a child growing up in the green American suburbs we used to make rainbows by twisting down the nozzle of a garden hose to a fine spray and then squirting the water against the sun. One friend of mine and I used to play for hours, barefooted on the grass, making rainbows and disproving (unfortunately) the old myth that there is a pot of gold at the end.

We had of course learned in school why rainbows form. Each droplet of water, as we were told, acts like a tiny prism. As light waves enter the raindrop they are slowed, and bent and broken up, revealing the range of colors from red to orange to yellow, green, blue, indigo, and finally to violet, the spectrum of the prism, in other words. The same principle is the cause of other celestial phenomena such as sun dogs, which are often seen at sunset and look like small bright versions of the sun itself, although not as brilliant. Under good conditions, that is, with the proper amount of moisture or ice in the upper atmosphere, you can see two of them, so that it appears that there are three suns in the sky. This may have given rise to the pagan and Hindu traditions of multiple suns.

More rarely the atmospheric conditions are such that there is a column of light near the setting sun, and periodically, often before a change in the weather, there may be a halo, or corona, or “glory” around the sun or moon, a sign that is often taken for an omen. The night before the famous mid-nineteenth-century wreck of the schooner Hesperus, off the coast of New England, for example, there was a silver ring around the moon. “Last night the moon wore a silver ring,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem about the event. “Tonight no moon we see.”

All of these celestial phenomena are caused by the refracted or reflected light of the sun, either by ice crystals or by uniform cloud droplets. While all the colors of the rainbow and corona are always present in full, unreflected sunlight, we can’t see them until they are split up by a prism and separated into the spectrum, which arranges and displays the colors according to their individual wavelengths. All light is waves, and all light on earth proceeds from a single source. Long before waves were discovered, mystics had discovered and honored this.

In ancient Jewish tradition, an emerald light surrounds God’s throne and beings in his presence were said sometimes to glow or shine with an interior light. Zeus had many of the same attributes, and later, Roman gods often appeared bathed in light and shining through a cloud. According to Christians, the son of the Hebrew god carried his father’s luminosity. Jesus appeared as a flame or fire, and once on Mount Tabor he was transfigured in front of his disciples into a column of pure light. In Roman and Hellenic art the heads of gods were depicted surrounded by a disc-shaped circle of light, the halo, or nimbus, a tradition found also in Persia and Syria. Some of these nimbi exuded actual rays, like the sun, some were mere circles of light, or halos, and some evolved into aureoles, or mandorla, which are elongated almond-shaped spheres of light that surrounded the whole figure of holy persons. The symbol of the halo, and also the mandorla, was adopted in the Middle Ages to portray saints and other divines and appears regularly in the Christian art of the Renaissance.

In the little Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome, there is a small fresco of the Madonna and Child on the eastern wall. There is nothing particularly unique about the image; it was executed sometime in the thirteenth century by an unknown artist, and it has all the traditional symbols and coloration of the Christian paintings in a thousand different churches throughout Italy. But the celestial symbols worked into the painting are striking. Both Mary and Jesus are surrounded by halos, of course, but the baby Jesus is also holding a golden sun disc in his left hand, and Mary’s blue mantle, trimmed in gold, is festooned with stars, one of which shines with particular brilliance.

The connection between a divinity or supreme being and light occurs throughout world religions. The mandorla is found regularly in Buddhist art and still appears even in the folk art of Hindu India. Hindu divinities shine or exude light from their foreheads, or whole bodies, or hearts. In various Hindu and Tibetan practices, a series of meditations on light have developed, the most basic of which is the sun meditations, intended to balance the seven chakras, or points of energy that are located at various spots in the human body. These chakras, according to eastern traditions, are formed of clear spinning balls of light, tiny suns within the body. During the sun meditation, the practitioner imagines a great external fire in the sky, and absorbs its warmth and energy. After years of practice one is said to be able to actually become pure light. In some solar meditations, the three suns are used to vitalize the chakras or nadis, the meridians that in many eastern traditions are believed to provide an internal structure inside the body. In one Tibetan meditation on light, five suns are imagined, two in the feet, two in the hands, and one at the base of the spine. In heightened states, these can combine into a column of fire; and in some states of a higher level of meditation they will stream upward through the spine and leave the body through the top of the head and spout forth in a fountain of golden or white light that cascades down the outside of the body and returns at the base of the spine, forming the mandorla. The Hindu holy men often went right to the source in their veneration of this sacred fire and stared directly into the face of god—the sun—for hours and subsequently went blind. The Jews knew better. One does not look directly at the face of god, nor even speak his name.

In many so-called primitive religions, the rainbow provided a bridge from earth to sun. Archeologists have discovered images from the late Paleolithic era painted or engraved on cave walls or pebbles and bones that depict the rainbow as a symbol of connection between earth and sky, and there are many extant legends and myths of pilgrims and questing heroes who ascend rainbows to visit (or in many stories steal from) the king of the sky, the sun. In one tradition, after a grueling five-day ritual, select members among the tribes of the Carib Indians were able to climb to the sky on a rainbow bridge with the help of a figure known as Grandfather Vulture. Aboriginal Australian medicine men of the Forrest River region used to travel to the sun on the back of a Rainbow Serpent, and in an East African myth, Kyazimba, a poor but honest farmer, travels on a rainbow to the land of the rising sun and meets the brilliant sun-chieftain who bestows wealth upon the poor pilgrim.

For twenty minutes I stood beside the road outside the town watching the changing sky and the coming and going of the rainbow, until finally the show ended and I pedaled over the bridge and went into town to look for a place to stay. Above a door on the Rue Diderot I saw a tiny sign for a pension and rang the bell. There was no answer. Just as I was about to push on, the door opened a crack, and I saw a glittering eye in the shadows. Then the door opened a little more.

“Monsieur?” a cracked old voice demanded.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for a place for the night.”

I thought I had rung the wrong bell, perhaps.

“A lodging for tonight?”

“Yes, Madame,” I said politely, backing away. “I must have rung the wrong bell.”

“You are looking for a room, then?”

“Yes, if you know of any.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“But one thing,” she said. “You must not make any noise.”

“No noise?”

“Make no noise.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here. No noise, though. Enter if you please.”

Given this beginning, I was not so sure I wanted a room in this place, but I followed her in. She was dressed in black, with a white ruffled collar, and had white hair pulled back in a bun and fixed with many hairpins, and she had a long crooked Gallic nose and bright black weasel eyes. I was certain that if I dared to take the room and made any noise that night she would either poison my coffee in the morning or, worse, cast a spell over me and turn me into a toad. But taking my heart in my hands, I followed her up the creaking stairway, then down a dark hall to a narrow oak door. Here she selected a long-shanked tarnished key from a large brass ring, and with her bony fingers, and a great deal of maneuvering, inserted the key in the lock, swung open the door, and stood aside.

Outdoors, the weather had cleared, and in the fading light beyond the streets great yellow and red streaks were fretting the sky. There was a tall French door on one end giving onto a small terrace and through this the yellowing light spilled into the room to reveal a huge canopied bed with a finely sewn counterpane, a high, vaulted ceiling above carved plaster cornices depicting angels and putti, and well-wrought dentils and fleur-de-lis along the sides. The walls were thick and plastered and musty, and there was an ancient armoire opposite the bed, also carved with putti and Greek warriors in plumed helmets. There was a single bed stand with spindled legs, and a single brass electric light on the table. Except for the electric light I might have been in the world of Catherine de Medici or Cardinal Richelieu.

The old crone stood beside the door, just outside the room, wringing her hands and eyeing me suspiciously as I looked around the room.

“Is the room to your liking, Monsieur?” she asked.

“It is beautiful,” I said.

“The price for this room will be exactly forty-two francs, twenty centimes,” she said, “but I suppose it is too much for you.” She wrung her hands again and tipped her head to the side, nodding sadly.

“No, no, no,” I said, “I think that would be all right, thank you.” Forty-two francs at the time was not a great deal of money, by any means.

“Very well then, you may have this room. But on one sole condition.”

“Yes, fine, what is that?”

“You must not make noise.”

“No, no, not me, I detest noise. Is it noisy here?”

“No, quiet, generally, but there are those …,” she said, nodding again. “One must take care, you understand.”

“Yes of course, Madame. I will be quiet here.”

“Good, that’s done, then.”

Chinon’s great claim to history is the fact that Joan of Arc stopped there to meet the dauphin. The young dauphin attempted to play a trick on her and disguised himself among his courtiers when she was ushered into his quarters. The legend is that she recognized him right away and even insisted that he was who he was after he denied his identity. It was at Chinon that she declared that the King of Heaven (she meant God, not the sun) had sent her to help the dauphin raise the siege of Orléans and would escort him to Rheims to be anointed king of France.

Chinon is a pleasant little town that is lined with gnarled trees that range above the clustered houses and is dominated by the towers and walls and oval keep of the great castle of Chinon. The local story is that Henry II died in this town and at one point during their stormy marriage met here at Christmas with Eleanor to try to settle the estates of their feuding children. These included Richard the Lion-Hearted and the bad king, John, who never managed England very well, did worse in Ireland, and was so hated by Robin Hood and his peasant associates. Richard took over the castle at Chinon after his father’s death and maintained it as an impregnable fortress until his own death, whereupon his brother John took control. But Philippe-Auguste of France envied it and laid siege for a year before he managed to drive the English out.

For years I had been fascinated by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was one of the exotic powerful women of history, who supported the arts and was a great manipulator of kings and their courts. It is said, among other things, that the power of the queen and the relative weakness of the king in chess games was established in Eleanor’s time. She was a poet and a great lover of the troubadours, and even established “courts of love” where ladies would put on trial the behaviors of their husbands and lovers.

After I secured my room, I went down to the river and took a little nature walk before dinner. Here I saw wagtails and a couple of sandpipers I couldn’t identify flitting on the grassy banks and stony flats, and also a great fat frog who arced into the river before I could get a good look at him. I wondered if he’d once been a hapless cyclist who got drunk one night and made too much noise at my pension.

Chinon vintners are said to make a fine, relatively unknown red wine and to celebrate the rainbow god I ordered a vegetable soup, sweetbreads, a specialty of the house of stuffed mushrooms, and a salad of fresh local greens. I ordered a bottle of the local Chinon red and tried to put off returning to my lodgings.

Near my table at the restaurant I saw an odd collection of well-tanned people dressed in jeans and work shirts, men and women alike. They looked American, or perhaps Swedish or English, but they spoke in a lilting language I couldn’t even begin to recognize. I sat listening, pretending to be attentive to my potage, but in fact trying desperately to sort out what this language could be. One of their party spoke good French with the waiters, the other was able to get by passably, although she had an American accent, and another spoke to the waiters in Spanish, also tinged with a foreign accent. Finally, one of them began speaking perfectly fluent American English, but what she said made no sense whatsoever. Something about her mother in Paris and her monkey. I would have liked to converse with this odd troop but they were just finishing their meal as I arrived and departed before I could engage them. One of their party, a short slim fellow, with blond hair and dark eyes, nodded politely as he passed my table and wished me bon appétit, even though I daresay he knew well enough that I was a fellow countryman.

Back at the pension, the concierge poked her head out from a lighted doorway at the end of the hall and eyed me.

“Monsieur has enjoyed himself?” she asked.

“Oh yes, I’ve had a fine meal, and now am ready for sleep.”

“Sleep well then.”

“I shall try. I saw a beautiful rainbow as I was coming into town. I’m sure I’ll have pleasant dreams.”

“Do not make any noise,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said.

I was happy to learn, upon awakening, that I had not been turned into a toad or forced to live in the body of a cockroach, like poor, abused Gregor Samsa. Near the bridge over the Vienne I found a café and after coffee set off into the countryside toward l’Indre River and the confluence of the Loire. The land here rose into long slow hills, flattened into plateaus, and then rolled down again on the other side, with straight roads running through pastures dotted with cows and yellow mustard and isolated small stone churches. Cuckoos called incessantly from the forests; at the verges the twittering of a thousand sparrows filled the air, and the larks above the mustard fields were ascending and trilling and then cascading down to earth again. Friendly country workers in rubber boots and baggy blue trousers shouted encouragements to me as I winged past on my loyal bicycle horse. As I rode through this gentle green land I was flooded yet again with affection for the apparent good spirit and good work of the enduring European peasant and his long-suffering, timeless relationship with the sustaining earth.

At a small café near the Château d’Ussé, close to the point where l’Indre crosses over La Loire on an aqueduct, leaning against a tree outside the café, I saw a row of four bicycles belonging, quite clearly, to some sort of fellow travelers. The bicycles were burdened with panniers and handlebar bags and draped with extra clothing laid out to dry in the sun. At a table at one edge of the café I saw the same group from the restaurant the night before in Chinon.

They watched me as I rolled in, and I selected a table far enough away so as to be polite, but not so far away as not to be engaged. The small, blond fellow who had spoken to me the night before appeared to be associated with a very trim, small woman with a short-cropped bowl haircut. The other two were larger and rangy. The woman was cut in the style of a nineteenth-century Gibson girl beauty with a loose cloud of chestnut-colored hair and high cheek bones, but she had a crescent-shaped scar running down her left cheek, like an old-fashioned Heidelberg dueling scar. Her gentleman friend was a dark fellow with black eyes and a brush moustache.

I pretended not to see them as I selected a table.

After a polite waiting period, the small man called over. “Didn’t we see you last night in Chinon?” he asked in French, politely granting me the privilege of having successfully disguised myself as a native.

“Yes,” I said in French, “I thought I recognized you. Where are you from, though?”

This was all a ruse, we knew each other to be foreign, but they were not as yet sure which language to speak.

“New York,” their leader said in English.

I thought as much.

They were a gang of friends, who, almost on the spur of the moment, they told me, had decided to spend the springtime riding through the Loire Valley. The woman with the dueling scar, Linda, had a mother in Paris, where they were now headed and where they were to end their trip. They appeared to be married to one another, although they all seemed suspiciously intimate. We chatted about our various adventures, as travelers will do, and they seemed decidedly unimpressed by my ambitious idea of pedaling all the way to Scotland. I explained that in fact I had already cheated and had taken a train through La Mancha and driven through the Sierras and part of the Pyrénées in a car. They understood perfectly. I believe they had been on previous bicycle expeditions and knew all about bad hills and wind. Wind, we quite agreed, was far worse than any mountain or hill. All hills have the advantage of a downhill.

They had been riding back and forth along the Loire for a week and a half, and were now about to head up to Chartres, and then on to Paris. But that day they were off to explore some château in the area that was owned, I was given to understand, by an eccentric friend of Linda’s mother. After a little more sociable chatter, they invited me to join them, and since I was in the famous valley of the Loire and had yet to experience the interior of a single château, I agreed. But first, they wanted to cross the river and visit the green park at the Château d’Ussé.

Riding single file we crossed over l’Indre River to the château on the other side of the bridge and settled in the park, killing time. Their apparent guide, the dark man, had done his homework. The Château d’Ussé, he told us, was supposed to be the setting for the seventeenth-century version of the fairy tale Brier Rose, collected by the French author Charles Perrault, who is best known for his Mother Goose stories. I related the story of the brier-strewn château I had encountered outside of Châtellerault, and they all agreed that the child must have been a spirit dweller of the ruined building. As we lounged there I told them more about my sun quest and the purpose of my pilgrimage, and I told them of the theory that many of the traditional European fairy tales were in fact metaphors for the transit of the sun through the heavens, and the battles between the forces of darkness and evil, and the victory of the benevolent giver of life, the sun, over the deathly forces of winter.

“That’s crazy,” the short-haired woman said.

“No, no, that’s a good theory,” their leader said.

“It’s crazy,” she countered. “Fairy tales are all about sex, everyone knows that. Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty. She pricks her finger, or whatever it was, and starts to bleed at the age of fifteen. Right? She gets her period, in other words, and then Prince Charming shows up and they do it for the first time and the whole world wakes up for her. That’s sex, man. That’s what it’s all about.”

This thesis begat a wild array of sex banter between them that helped confirm my theory that they were intimate with one another. To avoid further potentially embarrassing details, I carried on with my solar argument.

“The sun kisses the earth in spring, and the world wakes up after a winter sleep,” I said, modestly. “I mean, that’s the theory. The dead canes of the briers burst into flower when the prince comes.”

“Right,” Linda said to be polite.

“Could be, I suppose,” the short-haired woman said.

There was a brief silence.

“Shall we go?” the diplomatic leader said, standing up.

I wondered if they perhaps regretted having tied up with such a weirdo as myself.

I pedaled along behind them, not knowing exactly where we were going, and after about three miles we halted and consulted some directions that Linda had in a letter from her mother. We turned right on a small paved road and sailed on. After about a mile we could see the old château, rising in the distance at the end of a gravel road that ran between fields of poppies.

“There it is,” Linda said, “I hope he turns out to be a nice guy.”

“Hope he’s not one of those de Sadistes,” the leader said.

“My mother told me he is a little freaky but will manage to be polite to us,” Linda said.

“Yeah, well we know all about your mother …,” her husband said.

I was beginning to wonder what adventures I was happening into here.

It turned out the owner was only slightly eccentric. He was a small rounded fellow, with a large handlebar moustache, whose name was something like Brenôt, and he apparently made his living as a painter, although given the size of his house, a great rambling fifteenth- or sixteenth-century place complete with knights in armor and tapestries, and a few (and I suspect, faux) ancestral paintings, he must have had some money before he took up painting. He was in the process of restoring the château, he said, but it looked to me as if he had added a few ahistorical artifacts of his own. There was a huge stuffed great Dane at the head of one staircase, for one thing, and some nineteenth-century Chinese vases perched here and there.

Graciously though, he showed us around, proudly demonstrating, to my horror, in an upstairs hall, an oubliette. Enemies of the lord of the manor were simply thrown down to the bottom of this deep well-like closet, and if they did not die in the fall, they were allowed to starve to death. Then the gracious manor lord took us to his studio on the north side of the château. Here on an easel was a full-bosomed nude. This was no goddess or a Renaissance lady by any means. She had a decidedly twentieth-century figure and bore a close resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. All around the room were other Brigitte Bar-dots in various stages of undress, and there were also a few Gina Lollobrigidas and Sophia Lorens and other sex goddesses.

“Please,” M. Brenôt said to Linda, ushering her to a large canvas leaning against the wall. He swept off the dust cloth and uncovered another full nude. This one was slightly older and fuller. She looked vaguely familiar to me.

“Lovely,” Linda said.

They all expressed their appreciation. So did I.

But it was a horrible, garish painting, realistic in style, with fine brushwork, but ill lit and flat.

“Who is it?” I asked. They seemed to all know the model.

“My mother,” Linda said.

Following our gallery visit, the good M. Brenôt opened a bottle of white wine and gave us a glass for the road, even though it was still morning. Greedy pig that I am, I had been hoping for a full midday meal, with entertainment.

Following this short visit we wandered back to Azay le Rideau and found a likely looking restaurant where we had lunch together.

Linda ordered an omelette with asparagus and dug in.

“Aye lave thas,” she said, resorting to the odd tongue I had first heard them speaking.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No, but what language was that?”

“It’s nothing,” Mr. Linda said. “She just talks that way.”

“Yeah, but you understood,” I said.

“Aye knay,” said William the leader. “It’s just a way she has sometimes. We’ve cracked her code and now we all speak that way. It’s catching. It’s just English. Then you change all the vowels to flat ‘A’s. ‘Aye knay’ is ‘I know.’”

“Sorry,” Linda said. “We’ve been together too long. You should come with us to make us normal.”

Since they were headed for Chartres, where I happened to know there was, embedded in the stone floor, another solar emblem in the form of an elaborate eleven-course labyrinth, not to mention the best stained glass in Europe, I was sorely tempted. It was good to ride with some company for a while, although they were such a tight little group, I probably would have evolved into one of those annoying outsiders who couldn’t even speak their language and they would have regretted their invitation.

Near the town of Langeais they turned and took a small road inland toward Chartres. I bid them farewell and watched them pedal off, silently. They were like work horses, somehow, just doing their duty, pacing off the miles.

I began to feel lonely again.

From Langeais I rode on toward Le Mans, passing over rolling hills to Château-la-Vallière, where I got a cheap room and listened to cars wailing through the town all night. The next day I followed an unpaved road for a stretch to the town of Villiers-au-Bouin, crossed La Loire again, pedaled on to Vermeil, and then stopped at Laigne to get away from a horrid busy road and take a drink. An old man at the bar said he could tell I was an American right away.

“How is that?” I asked, knowing full well.

“Because you have a good clear look about you. Boys like you came here in 1944 and saved this town. Thank you,” he said, shaking my hand earnestly.

“Don’t thank me, Monsieur, I wasn’t even born. Thank my Uncle John. He fought in the war.”

“Well thanks to your Uncle John, and all the good soldiers,” he said, winking.

I did not tell him my Uncle John was a doctor who had spent the war in India.

“I tell you one bad thing though,” the old man said. “Americans fight too much each other. There was a black regiment here. Each night they come to town to look for girls. Then the white regiment comes in. Then they fight each other. And then …,” he waved his hand in dismissal and blew out his cheeks, “Police …”

This man told me, after he heard my plans to cross to England at Le Havre, that there was going to be a ferry strike and I wouldn’t make it. He said he knew many fishermen who would take me over, bicycle and all. But I only half believed him and didn’t take him up on the offer.

“Well good luck to you,” he said, shaking my hand again, and patting my back. “And my best to your mother.”

This last was a strange addition. I hadn’t said a word to him about my mother, although, oddly enough, she was leaving soon for Denmark and I had planned to call her there in a few weeks and had been thinking about her that day.

Things began to go downhill after Vermeil. I had to ride on a busy road to get into Le Mans and then I made the mistake of booking a room in a 1930s Bauhaus-style hotel. I salvaged what was left of the day by wandering around the old city and thinking of the last days of Eleanor’s son Richard, and the slow, sad end of the troubadours. Le Mans was about the northernmost point for the southern-based troubadours, and was the border with the tougher, French-dominated culture of the north.

The next day I learned that there really was a ferry strike and my chances of getting to England were pretty poor, at least for a day or two. I spent a nasty day wheeling up to Le Havre anyway, and learned even worse news. It would be three maybe four or even five days before the strike was resolved, rumor had it. And here I was stuck in the industrial port city squalor of the north under that gray English Channel sky, having so recently left the green pastures of the Loire and the Aquitaine. I went into a bad bar where sailors were drinking despondently, ordered a hot café crême, and tried to rethink my plans.

I couldn’t think of a single good reason to hang around this part of the world waiting for labor and management to work out their differences when I was no more than an hour or so by train from Paris. If I was going to wait in a depressing smoky bar for a strike to end, I might as well wait in my old smoky stomping grounds on the Left Bank.

This thought alone improved my mood and by that evening I was on the train for the City of Light.

Nine

The City of Light

For a while during my student years and afterward, I had lived in Paris, near the Place Monge, and had sporadically attended the Sorbonne and involved myself in the international world of sometime students, radicals, and artists who inhabited the underbelly of the Left Bank. Like many American students I had originally come to Europe to attend university, but I liked it so much I stayed on and managed, albeit illegally, to find work to support myself. I gave away all my American clothes and attempted, by acquiring a smattering of European languages, to obscure my decidedly American identity.

This was the first time I had been back in the city in ten years and, as soon as I arrived, I went out to look for my old friends. Most of the people I knew would gather every day at a place called the Café Saint Placide, and the morning after I got to Paris, I went there for coffee. Not surprisingly, except for a friendly waiter named Gilbert, everyone had departed for other adventures, and the café itself had declined sadly, I thought. It was bright and noisy and crowded with older, rough-looking types, none of whom I knew.

I had other, more established friends in the city, though, one of whom was a man named Chrétien Berger, whom I found in the phone book and called. Chrétien and I had worked together in a restaurant on Corsica and in the winter, back in Paris, almost every Sunday, he would invite me to his parents’ apartment for dinner. They must have had some money since they lived in an airy sunny place near the Champs-Elysées and always managed to put on a fine five-course meal, sometimes with champagne. Chrétien had a pretty cousin named Micheline and often, after our midday meal, the three of us would go over to the Jardin des Plantes and stroll arm in arm.

Chrétien was overjoyed to hear from me and later that first day we got together, rehashed the old times and made more plans to meet again for dinner with Micheline. I spent the rest of that day and the next wandering around my former haunts. I went out to the zoo, and the Bois de Boulogne, and I found a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes whom I had befriended and who remembered me and chatted with him about flowers and trees, and then I went back to the Saint Placide and chatted up the waiter Gilbert. After that, I went over to Notre Dame and looked at the famous stained glass window in the south transept.

The immense expanse of glass was glowing as usual, even in the half light of the cloudy afternoon beyond the cathedral walls. There were a few informed tourists there who knew exactly what they were looking for and had trained the binoculars on the details.

Stained glass windows were a crucial element in the spiritual foundation of the design of the interiors of Gothic cathedrals. They had the effect of bathing the interior architecture of these sacred buildings with a subdued, colored light that tended to dissolve the dark weight of the stone building material. The great wheels, or rose-patterned circular windows, were always set at the center of the main and transept façades as a climax to the long axial vistas down the forestlike aisles of the shaded interiors. This use, or reuse, or re-forming of light was an expression of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, which held that light was the most noble of all the natural phenomena, the closest physical approximation of pure spirit, an expression of spirit embodied. According to scholars, the idea originated with Plato and his correlation of goodness and wisdom with sunlight. The Neo-Platonists and later St. Augustine transformed this concept and saw light as a divine intellect that enlightens the mind. The idea is expressed repeatedly in the great work of the age, Dante’s Paradiso, which concerns itself with the theme of la luce divina or divine light.

In spite of the fact that Paris is supposed to be the City of Light, as it often does in northern France in spring, it began to rain the next day, and as I had in Madrid, I began killing time in some of the museums that I had overlooked or merely perused indifferently during my callow student years.

On my way over to the Louvre I walked through the Place de la Concorde, where there is an Egyptian obelisk that was lifted from the ruins of the temple of Luxor, and all that day and even into the next I kept running into little museum rooms stuffed with remnants of the first and in some ways the foremost civilization of the sun.

The obelisk at the Place de la Concorde once stood at the main pylon gateway to the great temple, constructed over 3,300 years ago by Ramses II, the king who helped establish the cult of the divine pharaoh by erecting statues of himself as a god throughout the country. Pharaohs were, of course, at the top of the social and political hierarchy, like kings and queens the world around, but in Egypt the pharaoh was an essential part of the cosmos, an integral part of what was known as ma’at, or the divine order of things. The pharaoh fulfilled the role of the god Osiris while on earth, the generative force of nature, but more importantly he was the living descendant of the sun god Ra, who was recognized as the preeminent god of all the many deities of the ancient Egyptians.

Everyday in ancient Egypt, Ra floated up out of the east in his celestial boat, sailed across the sky, and then descended into Duat, the dark region below the earth. Here he debarked, boarded a different vessel, his night boat, and began a voyage from west to east, sailing toward morning. As with the Maya, this night journey was known to be dangerous for the god of the sun. He was often threatened by a giant serpent as he made his way eastward, and demons and the souls of the damned would begin wailing and calling out as he passed. Undeterred, he sailed on through the dark seas. Toward midnight, he would come upon the body of the slain god Osiris, who supplied the power of life and rebirth to those living above. At this point, Ra and Osiris intermingled with one another. Osiris became the sun, and the sun became Osiris, and thereby gained his regenerative powers. Then Ra voyaged onward toward the gates of dawn and soon approached the horizon. Those on earth could now see his light, the light of predawn, but they could not see Ra himself until he changed to his day boat and sailed above the horizon, now visible as the solar disc.

This, for the Egyptians, was the great miracle of the solar transit, this reforming. It was a reaffirmation of the triumph of life over death and a critical aspect of their religion. Ra was the most powerful god in the Egyptian pantheon; he manifested himself in the form of many of the other gods and assumed many names. Prayers to him are inscribed on stelae throughout the land, often in the same hymnal language, “Hail to thee, Ra—Oh primeval one, coming into being of thyself, lord of what thou hast created—”

Even though there was a plethora of deities in the ancient world, the Egyptians knew that the sun, the singular celestial object that rose each day, throwing off heat and light, was the prime mover, the first force, and the source of all life on earth. But after the ascension of the pharaoh Akhenaton at the end of the eighteenth dynasty in the fourteenth century B.C., some 3,360 years ago, all the myriad gods of Egypt were diminished, the sun became the one true god, and the first monotheistic religion was born.

Akhenaton assumed the kingship in Thebes when he was still a young man, and immediately, in the first five years of his reign, began to reorder the cultural and religious landscape of all of Egypt. He began to question the role of the other gods and determined that they were failing. In their place, he established an all-powerful god, the living Ra, he “—who decrees life, the lord of sunbeams, maker of brightness,” in the words of one hymn. The great temple of Amon at Thebes languished. The temples to the other gods fell into disrepair, and the priests, who played such an important role in the Egyptian bureaucracy, had little to do. In the fifth year of his reign Akhenaton officially decreed, in so many words, that there was but one god, and Ra was his name. All other gods were deemed of little value and banished.

Akhenaton moved the royal city from Thebes to the new city of Amarna and reordered the courts. He laid out the city on a plain and oriented the streets toward double peaks in the east through which the rising sun would appear each dawn. Under the new religion, the sun god was no longer depicted as a falcon or a human form. He was abstracted and depicted as a disc emitting rays that formed the ankh symbol, the hieroglyph for life. Under the new religious philosophy, the artists and artisans focused on new themes. Formal ritualistic events in the underworld or the courts gave way to naturalistic representations of the family life of the pharaoh and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti.

Ever since the first discoveries at Amarna, and well into the 1960s, scholars and interpreters of this individualistic reformer have swept through the world of archeologists and spread into the fields of history and religion and even psychology. Freud, for example, interpreted the rise of Akhenaton as a way of explaining the later development of Mosaic monotheism. Akhenaton was seen by some religious scholars as a forerunner of Christ—not an illogical comparison, since Akhenaton was wont to describe himself as the son of god—he who made Ra’s will known on earth. Historians have also compared the sun cult of Ra as the forerunner of the pre-Christian solar cult known as the sol invictus deus, the Invincible or Unconquerable Sun, which was established as the state religion of Rome under Emperor Aurelian in the third century. By any standards Akhenaton’s new state religion appears to be the first example of monotheism, predating the Hebrew Jehovah.

But it was not to last. The thousand-year evolution of the order of Egyptian society and politics was weakened during Akhenaton’s reign. Unlike many of his predecessors, he appears to have been a considerate man, slow to strike down his enemies, of which, after a few years of rule, there were many. He allowed insults to mount. He relished the home and the hearth, his children, his famously beautiful wife. He reveled in arts and jubilees, gave traitors and rebels a second chance, refused to send out retaliatory expeditions, and in his last years never left his palace, poisoned, some historians speculate, by a slow-acting magic. He died in 1353 B.C. at the age of thirty-two.

In spite of the rain I went out toward the Bois de Boulogne for a walk, got caught in another downpour, and ended up at the Marmottan Museum, which had recently acquired a collection of Monet paintings, many of them from Monet’s garden home at Giverny. Also hanging here, at least at that time (later it was stolen), was a painting called “Impression—Sunrise.” It was this canvas, with daubs of broken color, which close up looked like a mottle of short multicolored brush strokes, but which at a distance merged into one smooth landscape, that gave the group that painted in this manner the name Impressionists.

I remember when I was younger wandering through gallery upon gallery of some museum that was organized chronologically. I passed through hall after hall of dark religious subjects and somber nobility and then entered into a room where the Impressionists were collected. Suddenly the gallery burst into natural light. The effect was dazzling, I literally felt as if I had stepped outdoors on a sunny morning.

No one knows exactly why this group of French painters should have chosen to go against the grain of the French Academy and begin, among other new styles, to break a scene up into a mass of short primary-colored brush strokes, but there were a number of scientific breakthroughs that were taking place in optics at the time that may have driven these artists to look at the world with a fresh eye. One of these was the invention of the camera and the development of photography. But it was during this same period that the chemical basis of light was revealed. In 1859 two German researchers had improved spectrum analysis dramatically and, for the first time, the complex chemical basis of colors came to be understood. As a result, the chemical makeup of the sun could be read through the analysis of the colors of the prism. The great surprise, to artists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers alike, was that the chemistry of the sun and the chemistry of the earth were similar. This suggested—as the ancient mystics appear to have known all along—that the sun was the parent of the earth.

On my way back from one of these rambles I passed one of the cafés at Montparnasse where Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and all the other American expatriates congregated in the 1920s. One member of this troupe was a talented but eccentric writer named Harry Crosby, who was a poet and a publisher who started a journal called Black Sun with his wife, Caresse. Crosby was raised in the bosom of tradition in Brahmin Boston; his father had been a well-known and successful banker and clubman, but early on Harry broke from Boston, or “The City of the Dreadful Night,” as he liked to call it, and executed a flight to Paris. Here, he converted to a new religion (actually a very old religion) of his own devising—worship of the sun. He tended to identify himself with the mythic young figures who died while attempting to overreach the bounds of tradition, such as Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who during the ingenious flight from the labyrinth of King Minos dared to fly near the sun and died in the process.

Having discovered his religion, Crosby threw himself into the solar orbit with fanatical devotion. He composed poems and paeans to the sun, collected together in Shadows of the Sun and Chariot of the Sun. He invented an elaborate admixture of Christian faith in the afterlife, pagan solar rituals, Egyptian sun cults, Aztec ceremonies, Roman mystery cult practices, and “sacred” writings from other solar-influenced writers such as Goethe and D. H. Lawrence. He closely identified himself with the principles of the sun-figures in the tarot pack, the astral monarch who dispenses heat and light, and the Chariot of Fire, which carries the hero, Phaeton. Apollo was among the favorites of his gods and he was especially attracted by the rash folly of Phaeton, who dared to take the reigns of the wild horses that drew Apollo’s Chariot of the Sun across the sky each day—with disastrous results for both the earth and Phaeton. No matter that the young hero died in the process, that was part of the attraction.

At the age of thirty-one, having first removed his precious golden sun-ring that he acquired at Al-Karnak in the Valley of the Kings and having stamped upon it, Harry Crosby, along with his lover, Josephine Bigelow, committed a spectacular double suicide during a visit to New York. The press was alive with stories after the event, but the flaming young sun acolyte was dead.

That evening I met Chrétien and Micheline for dinner at an odd restaurant on the Left Bank called the Garden of the Frog King. The two of them were handsome people, still in good shape, considering all the wine and food they consumed. Micheline was as pretty as I remembered, slightly fuller but with the same bright blue eyes and black hair, and that Gauloise warmth that had originally so attracted me.

We met again for a midday dinner on Sunday at the apartment of Chrétien’s parents. Madame Berger, a quiet person who favored long wool skirts and cardigan sweaters, was a little grayer, but M. Berger had not aged in ten years. He still had black hair and the same twinkling bright blue eyes inherited by his son. I happened to know from Chrétien that he was in the Resistance and had seen horrendous acts of inhumanity during the war, and yet I never knew anyone who enjoyed eating and drinking and the spirit of the moment as much as he. Everything was a great adventure for him, even his bad experiences. Chrétien himself had some of the same joie de vivre. Madame Berger was less celebratory, “c’etait affreux!”—it was horrible—was one of her favorite phrases, often affixed as a coda to one of the long adventure stories from M. Berger.

I related stories from my pilgrimage, and in contrast to many of the people I had met along the way, they all heartily approved of my plan to go to Scotland, a place that virtually all southern Europeans seemed to hold in horror, as if it were the repository of all the cold ills of all the frozen worlds. Chrétien and his family thought it a great lark.

“Instant death,” Chrétien shouted. “Wonderful. It’s a good place for you to die. You will freeze. It is said to be a painless death, freezing.”

“But before you die you will have to eat sheep belly stuffed with oatmeal,” M. Berger said, laying a finger aside his nose. “That will be worse than death.”

“That’s what will kill him,” Chrétien said.

“No, no, he will die of cold,” Madame Berger said. “He will have to wear a kilt.”

“But no underpants,” Micheline said.

They opened a bottle of champagne—and this before the midday meal—to celebrate my safe return to Paris. They always knew I would come back someday for a Sunday dinner, Madame Berger said. “We have missed you.”

After that we shared some tiny crab pǎté she had prepared, and then went to table.

Here was the usual fine setting. M. Berger brought out a bottle of Côte de Beaune, winked at me in a conspiratorial manner, and drew the cork. And then we set to: first a clear consommé and then a serving of mushrooms stuffed with a liver pǎté, followed by a poached trout, and then a plate of fresh-picked asparagus with a refined Hollandaise sauce, followed by a salad with chives, and then a board of cheeses, and then a flan, and along with all this, another bottle of Burgundy, and bottles of sparkling waters with the salad, and finally a café, followed by a tiny glass of calvados. By then it was three o’ clock and time for a stroll on the Champs-Elysées, with Madame and Micheline linked arm in arm, and Chrétien and I walking side by side, and leading the troop, glancing this way and that and nodding to his familiars, Monsieur Berger himself, his hands clasped behind his back—the contented bon vivant, who had experienced the worst that the world can throw at itself and, having survived that, the best that the world can offer, or at least the best that he could suck from the world in that unfortunate age.

“This sun pilgrimage of yours,” Chrétien asked as we strolled along. “What about the Sun King himself?”

“What about him?”

“The great solar palace of Versailles. You must go see it. You must.”

Three days later, having lost even more days from my theoretical schedule, Chrétien, Micheline, and I drove out through the fresh green tunnel of the beech forests to the great main gate of the palace, where, arranged around the Court d’Honneur, were the giant statues of the distinguished statesmen and marshals of the age, and looking over them on his horse the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, who occupied the throne of France for seventy-two years. At either side rose the impressive walls of the architectural masterpiece of what is generally held to be the most brilliant era of French history, a golden age of letters and arts, and the darkest age of the French peasantry. Here, in this singular place, are the creations of the architects Jules Mansart and Louis Le Vau, the murals and decorations of Charles Le Brun, portraits by Pierre Mignard, the sculptures of Antoine Coysevox, and, most impressive of all, the great stretching gardens of André le Nôtre. This court, in its glory days during the seventeenth century, was the seat of government and, until the coming of the Revolution, the haunt of some of the greatest sycophants, decadents, and courtesans, as well as writers and artists of the age—Molière, Racine, the famous courtesans Louise de La Vallière, Mesdames de Montespan, de Maintenon, de Pompadour, and du Barry, and Queen Marie Antoinette, and all the other members of one of the most hedonistic, pleasure-loving, and extravagant courts of one of Europe’s most dissolute and profligate and absolutist kings. It was, after all, Louis XIV who is credited with the motto l’état c’est moi.

Michéline and Chrétien, promoters of the new Europe and the then aborning Common Market, were indifferent, even dismissive. They had grown up with the myth of France and were unimpressed by glories of the past. After a few turns around the Hall of Mirrors and other extravagant splendors, since the day was lovely, we retired to the gardens to stroll and reminisce.

The sponsor of this garden, Louis XIV, ruled France from 1643 to 1715, having inherited the crown at the age of five upon the death of his father, Louis XIII. The regency, confided to his mother, Anne of Austria, the much despised “Austrienne,” was marked by a period of rebellion known as the Fronde, which was instigated by the nobility and later taken over by the urban commoners and eventually suppressed. The boy king, it was rumored, was both humiliated by the arrogant nobles and threatened by the people of Paris—and would someday have his revenge.

There are political kings and decadent kings, and power-mongering kings, and kings who are interested in the arts and culture and kings who are interested only in sex. Louis XIV was all of these and then some. Under his reign France experienced an extraordinary blossoming of music, writing, architecture, decorative painting, sculpture, and even the sciences—it was during his reign that the French royal academies were founded, including, in 1661, creation of the Académie Royale de Danse in a room of the Louvre, the world’s first ballet school.

Louis XIV was one of the few kings who had a genuine interest in dance and he was himself a skilled performer. The young king made his ballet debut as a boy, but in 1653 when he was still a teenager he appeared in his most celebrated performance.

Cardinal Mazarin, the king’s closest advisor, had promoted Italian influences in the French court spectacles that eventually gave birth to the ballet, and had imported the musician Giovanni Baptista Lulli from Italy, who was rechristened Jean Baptiste Lully for work in France. Lully was a skilled dancer as well as a composer and became one of the king’s favorites. Together they arranged a series of court dances called Le Ballet de la Nuit. For the final piece in the group, the young king attired himself in a golden mask, a golden, Roman-styled corselet, and a kilt of golden rays. Thus costumed he strutted onto the dance floor, bowing and dipping and performing his finely executed pas de chat and jetées, to play the part of Apollo the god of the sun.

It was a memorable performance. The sycophants and the courtiers applauded daintily, the ladies swooned, the grand dames fanned themselves, and the marshals and the ministers and the lords and the financiers schemed and bowed and glanced at one another sidelong. And then they gave the boy a new epithet. After that night, they referred to him as the roi soleil, the Sun King.

His majesty was well pleased.

Louis XIV adopted the name and soon chose the sun as his emblem and Apollo, the god of peace and the arts, the god who gave life to all things, as his personal god. Louis, one suspects, imagined himself to be very like Apollo. He brought peace to France, he was a patron of the arts, and, like the benevolent sun, he dispensed his bounty throughout the courts, if not throughout the land. Furthermore, Louis assumed a certain celestial regularity in his work habits. His ritual morning rising, his levée, was associated with certain set ceremonies and formulas. His retirement at night, the couchée, was equally ritualized, and in between the day proceeded with set times for various events, including the pleasure of the gardens, the boudoir, and the hunt. The metaphor of the solar transit was reflected and imitated as a theme through the palace, the decorations combining images and attributes of Apollo in the form of the laurel, the lyre, and the tripod. The sun king’s portraits and emblems, the royal crown, and the sceptre are fixed with solar symbols. The great Apollo Salon, the main room of the Grand Apartment, was originally the monarch’s state chamber, and the path of the sun was the organizing principle for the layout of le Nôtre’s famous gardens.

Versailles garden is without question the grandest, the largest, and the most ambitious garden in all of Europe, rivaled only by Caserta outside of Naples, which attempted, but failed, to outdo Versailles. The gardens were cut from an earlier royal garden. But the grounds here were hardly suited to the creation of a grand garden; they were without woods, marshy, and underlain by sandy soils. The earth was so low in the area that tons of soil had to be imported from afar and then graded and leveled and shaped according to the grand design of le Nôtre and his assistants. Aqueducts and a new road from Paris were laid out, and some 36,000 laborers and 6,000 horses were employed for construction. It was, according to the perhaps uncritical French historians, the condensed genius of the whole culture of France embodied in a garden, a formal and orderly landscape of flower beds, sparkling waters, and marble, and all of it arranged in a schematic and harmonious geometrical figure that used sunlight as the unifying concept.

Straight down the center of the garden from the Basin of Latona with its red marble fountain, depicting gilded tortoises, frogs, lizards, and the white marble image of Leto with her two children Artemis and Apollo and the long green carpet of the lawn, lies the Basin of Apollo and the Grand Canal, with fountains, more lawns, flower beds to the left and right, and walks leading off in every direction past statuary in marble and bronze.

The garden of Versailles actually preceded the construction of the palace and took over fifty years to fully complete. But when the work was done le Nôtre had succeeded in creating precisely what Louis himself imagined that he, the Sun King, symbolized. The land had been completely altered and subjugated to the taste of the seventeenth century with clipped and tonsured trees and water gardens and fountains laid out to reflect the sky and catch the sparking light of the sun. It was a perfect Apollonian world, a world of order and beauty, a reflection of the divine cosmos, with the sun as its center and the sun king as its ruler.

All this was to come to an end, of course. Less than seventy years later the French began crying for liberty, equality, and fraternity and took to the streets. For those who share a solar perspective on history, it is interesting to note that the revolutionaries who crowded the Place de la Concorde, the prophets of the light of reason who instigated the Revolution, adopted as their emblematic uniform the red Phrygian cap of the sun god Mithra.

In December of 1999, the sun, and its stepchild, the wind, wreaked further havoc at Versailles. A freakish windstorm with gusts up to 105 miles an hour blasted through Europe that month and destroyed some 741,000 acres of forest all across France and killed ninety people to boot. Ten thousand trees were uprooted at Versailles alone.

The following evening, my last night in Paris, the three of us met once more and retired to a small restaurant on the Right Bank, not far from the old Jewish Ghetto. Here, under the watchful eye of Chrétien, we ordered a full menu and two bottles of Bordeaux and stayed on late into the night talking. Micheline spotted a rare Vacherin cheese on the menu for the cheese course and shared it with us at the end of the meal. We had coffee and liqueurs and more coffee and had a long discussion—not about our pasts, but about Micheline’s cheese. It had a vague woody flavor of pine or spruce that I thought had something to do with the region it came from—the Jura Mountains—but that I was told in fact came from the strip of bark that was the traditional part of the packaging.

It was another one of those sad endings. I did not know when I would be back, and after dinner we walked for an hour, ending up once more at our old haunt on the Left Bank, where we kissed goodbye and vowed to write and I said I would come again to Paris soon, even though I knew I wouldn’t, and we would walk again in the Bois de Boulogne, and on and on, in the fashion of the Old World farewells. After we parted I wandered some more by myself and reflected on the unforgiving passage of time, and the fact that, really, those energetic student years when you thought you could bring down governments and stop all wars were mythic little café entertainments. In any case I was cut more in the style of a Santiago pilgrim or a troubadour. I was glad to be moving on. The green and sceptred isle of England loomed ahead.

The next morning, rather than struggle through northern France, I took a train to Le Havre and caught the night ferry to Southampton.

Ten

Ancient of Days

One of the things I had learned on my various pilgrimages was a knack for finding a good place to sleep in unfortunate conditions. The night ferry to Southampton was a case in point. Probably because of the strike the ferry was surprisingly crowded and there were no empty settees to stretch out upon. But poking around through the bowels of the vessel, I spotted a bulkhead lined with shelves of luggage racks and climbed to the uppermost with my panniers, stacked them up to prevent myself from rolling out, and fell into a deep sleep.

True to form, the English Channel was rough that night and we began pitching and rolling and diving into frothy valleys of water as soon as we cleared the shelter of land. At one point we took a dive that was steep enough to dislodge me from my nest and send me skidding forward on my rack, toward a steely gray bulkhead, my pannier barricade racing forward with me. I gave up on sleep and went out on deck to look at the sea.

There were sheets of rain and spray washing the decks, and the waters were black and Stygian and mixed with white toothy breakers that charged toward the vessel as if they were attempting to bite it. As I watched, suddenly in the terror of darkness, great horizontal bolts of lightning began flashing ahead of us.

Bravely, the little ferry chugged onward. Chairs and luggage came free and went scuttling to and fro along the decks. Below, in the companionways and in the main salons, tired, ill passengers clung to bars and doorways, while thunder growled around us and the great thud of waves pounded the topsides of the vessel. The lights flickered out at one point and the whole interior was illuminated by a bolt thrown down by one of the great sky gods. I was now midpoint between two worlds—the Mediterranean gods Jupiter, Jove, Zeus, and Apollo, and the hammer-bearing Norse and Celtic gods and goddesses of lightning, and the thunder god Odin.

Traditionally, in almost all cultures, lightning was a fostering agent that came down from the solar-associated sky gods, often in the form of a spear, and by extension the phallus, to fertilize the world. It was lightning that gave birth to the sun god Mithra, for example. In England in the early Middle Ages, lightning was absorbed into Christian mythologies; Lanceor, or the Golden Lance, was an archaic name for Lancelot in the Grail cycle of myths, and was also associated with Arthur’s sword Excalibur.

All this seemed to arise quite logically from the natural phenomenon of a powerful storm. I could see ahead of me great fingers of fire casting about here and there on the waters around us, as if attempting to find the proper range to sink us—or fertilize us—as the case may be.

At one point in the deluge it occurred to me that this storm was not a good omen for an entry into the green and flowery English spring and that I should perhaps have stayed in France. But after an hour or so, the storm abated somewhat and the gray line of dawn cracked the horizon to the east, under the cloud cover. Ahead, in the dim light, I saw the low-lying dark coast, blinking with kindly lights, and within the hour we landed.

Rather than spend the day fighting through a cold drizzling rain, I found a place in the student quarters of the town and went to sleep for the rest of the morning. The next day I set out for Lymington.

After a bad ride on a big, noisy road, I found a peaceful lane that led to Marl-wood and from there rode southward through the greening spaces of the New Forest, where I kept spotting seemingly wild ponies out in the brush. The tiny New Forest ponies run free here and the people fence the animals out, not in. This was the original style of fencing in England at the time of William the Conqueror, who landed at Hastings not far from this spot. The New Forest is in fact over a thousand years old, having been established as a “new” forest in these parts after the Conqueror instituted the dreaded Forest Laws, which forbade all but the Royal Hunt in this region.

As I pedaled along, I began seeing hedgehogs along the road. There seemed to be more of them here than in France or Spain. At one point, in the distance, I saw a lapwing executing a courting flight, and I could hear the whines and whispers and tweets of thousands of unseen warblers and sparrows and finches back in the brush. Bushtits and chaffinches, robins and thrushes appeared and disappeared, the sky cleared, the air was warm, the rainy fields were scented, the wind dropped, and the time of singing birds had come. It was, withal, springtime in old England.

At Beaulieu, a quaint little town at the upper end of a tidal river, I stopped for a cup of tea. Here for the first time I was surprised to realize that I was actually speaking English, my native tongue. I pushed on, singing little English ditties about springtime, the merry, merry ring time, and the like, and slipped through rolling farmland, passing en route the ruins of an abbey and the little towns of Bucklers Hard and St. Leonards, East End, and then finally the little yachting port of Lymington on the Solent, where all the happy sailors, men and women alike, were dressed in tricoleur sweaters and baggy blue trousers, and the pubs were full by twelve in the morning.

Everywhere in these little villages the lilacs were just opening and scenting the air. In fact the air had been scented with flowers throughout this splendid little sojourn, orange blossoms in southern Spain, horse chestnuts in el Retiro in Madrid, lilies of the valley, lilacs, and wisteria in France, and now again wisteria and lilacs and sweet violets.

On a back street in Lymington I found a tidy little whitewashed bed and breakfast and stopped in to secure a place. A fulsome, motherly woman with sea blue eyes and curly gray hair, dressed in a frilly flowered apron, came to the door and looked me up and down sympathetically.

“You poor lamb,” she said, glancing over at my loyal horse bicycle and deducing instantly, in that motherly way, the fact that I was a long-distance traveler. “How far have you come on that thing?”

I explained.

“You’ll be having tea first,” she said, and ushered me into a sparkling kitchen set with china geegaws and lacey curtains and flooded with white sunlight. “Sit,” she commanded and set the kettle boiling. “Drink,” she ordered when the tea was brewed. “Now, tell me where you’ve been, poor boy, and was it very hard, and were there many brigands in the mountains of Spain?”

I spent the next two days with Mrs. Saunders, resting and feeding up for the hard journey northward, an expedition that she, in her ancient wisdom, advised me against—strongly.

“Scotland is very, very hilly. Nothing but sheep and heathland, and a bitter chill in the air, and aren’t people a hard lot, they say, although I don’t know many, but they feed on hideous things like sheep belly and they are not, I’ve heard …,” and here she nodded vaguely, waiting for the polite term, “… they are not an intelligent race, it is said.”

“Nevertheless …,” I said.

“A poor small boy among so brushy a people, I durst not think on it.”

That night I had fresh green peas, a joint of lamb, and mashed potatoes, washed down with tea. For breakfast I had strong black tea, rashers, fried eggs, and hot buttered toast o’erspread with gobs of orange marmalade and scones with clotted cream and a bowl of fresh strawberries, and more tea and a glass of fresh milk. That afternoon I came back and was offered clotted cream and scones and fresh strawberries and more orange marmalade, and five cups of tea. And then I was sent on my way to a restaurant called The Diver, where I was assured I could get stewed elvers, a local dish I coveted. The next night I had roast beef, mashed potatoes, and more local green peas. And all the food was fresh, with no sauces, and no wine to speak of, and only a few hard cheeses—and that for lunch only—and soft white bread with the crusts sliced off, interspersed with minuscule thin cuts of ham. And then the following morning at Mrs. Saunders, fried eggs with crispy burnt bacon and her strong tea and stacks of hot buttered toast, and by now she was fretting even more about my journey to Scotland and had become especially distraught since I had made the grave error of informing her of my intention to push on to the Outer Hebrides.

“Good God boy you cannot go there,” she shouted. “You’ll die of exposure in the empty wind like a poor lamb. No one in their right mind ventures out to the Hebrides. It’s a brutish church-crazed lot they are and a hard people. I shall call constabulary and have you guarded. You’re not to go. You’re better off in the gaol in Lymington than the freedom of the Hebrides.”

“Palm trees grow there,” I said.

“Palm trees?” she shouted. “There’s not a single tree in all of Scotland, boy, save perhaps a larch or fir in the parks. If you want palm trees go back to Spain. Turn around and go down to Italy and ride your bicycle to Salerno. Mr. Saunders saw palm trees in Salerno in the war. Go down to Sicily if you must. But God almighty boy do not go to Scotland, I beg of you. You’ll be speared and eaten.”

I was tempted by the Italian alternative. I remembered the little lizards that bask on the sun-warmed fallen columns in the ruins at Ostia Antigua and Paestum, and the hillside groves of lemons around Sorrento and mozzarella, and olive trees and Chianti and the tall glasses of bubbly prosecco, and the sundrenched ruins of the great temples to the old solar gods of the Mediterranean and forest glens where Pan and his company of dryads and naiads might still lurk. All this was indeed the opposite of the wind-swept regions of the murderous Scottish Glens and the empty moors of the Hebrides.

“These were my people,” I said to Mrs. Saunders. “Long ago my ancestors emigrated from this region.”

“They were a wise lot, then,” she said.

As I poked around the streets of Lymington, I began to develop another grand unifying theory of the role of the sun in the religions of various cultures of the world in which those nations that almost daily experience the sun and its effects, such as Greece and Egypt, should develop a central solar deity, or at least some powerful sky god, such as Zeus, and those cultures of the dark cloud-covered north should adopt some dark religion based on war and storm clouds. But in fact worship of the sun seems to be universally spread over the world cultures. For those such as the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, where the sun at the end of summer leaves the green earth parched and brown, the sun god achieved his (usually his in these climates) greatest glory. And in the tropics, where the sun stands straight overhead and blasts down with a withering force, cultures seem only more acutely aware of its majesty and power. The sun-blasted West African peoples worship a sun chieftain, the Egyptians have Ra, the Aztecs worshipped Tonatiuh. And yet among those who dwell under mists and clouds and rains, sun worship still prevailed. The sun goddess Amaterasu was an important deity in the primordial Shinto faith of Japan, where it rains all the time, and among Celtic nations the tracking of the sun in its annual course through the heavens fostered the construction of elaborate rings of stone designed, as we now know, to function as solar calendars. The nearest of these, and the one that helped reveal the purpose of these curious rings of stone, was Stonehenge, where I was now headed.

The next day I summoned my courage and informed my surrogate mother that I was ready to leave for Scotland.

She quietly accepted my decision, prepared my bill, handed me a carefully wrapped package of ham and cheese sandwiches, and stood on the steps watching sadly while I packed my things away in my panniers.

I returned to the steps.

“Well goodbye to you, Mrs. Saunders, and thank you very much.”

“Goodbye, dear boy,” she said, taking my hands in hers and holding them to her ample breast. “You must promise to be careful on the roads.”

“I will,” I said.

“You will promise me.” She squeezed my hands tightly.

“I will.”

“And you will not go into London.”

“No, I’ll try to avoid London.”

“And do reconsider Scotland.”

“Well, I will think. But you know my plans, Mrs. Saunders.”

“O dear boy. Be off now. Don’t torture me with your wild escapades. And do write me a line and tell me you’re alive.”

“I will,” I said, and mounted up.

I pushed off, waving with one hand, and didn’t look back for fear she would be weeping.

And then I was on the road again, headed northward toward Boldre and on to Burley, through heathlands of gorse and forests where small herds of wild ponies scattered as I passed. By now the weather had improved dramatically, the May sun was in full force, and it was actually hot in the open stretches. In the countryside near Burley I ate lunch in a civilized little tea room, with a cool shaded interior and white tablecloths and clean white ladies in print dresses who eyed me in a curious, though not unfriendly manner when I clumped in to take a seat.

At Crow I skirted the town of Ringwood, taking a little country road that periodically dipped down into streams, and splashed through fords, wetting my legs with the cooling waters. And then it was on to South Fording and Damerham, to Sandleheath, through pleasant green villages to Rockbourne and Roman Villa, where I stopped to find a place to stay. There was nothing, so I began climbing, assaulting interminably long hills that taxed my legs, to Combe Bissette, where I finally found a pleasant little inn called the Fox and Goose.

I was now close enough to Salisbury to ride into town for dinner, so toward evening I pedaled off again and ate venison at a place called, appropriately, The Haunch of Venison Inn, which was built around 1320. I was served in an upstairs dark-paneled room with a setting of heavy silver and old seasoned waiters, who referred to me as “sir.” I had a pint of bitters and a glass of port after dinner, and then, feeling well stuffed, I rode home in the lingering dusk. There was still plenty of light even though it was nearly ten o’clock, and this was only May 12th. I still had almost six weeks to go before the twenty-first of June.

The following day at the beautifully sited cathedral on Salisbury Plain, workmen were mounting a new beam for the cathedral and were inviting people to inscribe a message on this great, heavy timber before it was hoisted and fixed in its place among the roof beams for the next six hundred years or so. I thought about what to say for a long time, and then inscribed a prayer: “May the Earth endure …”

As I was riding off I realized the prayer was ill-chosen, for the earth would endure as long as the sun maintained its present status. It wasn’t the earth I should have worried about, it was the earth’s human children.

After a ploughman’s lunch on a hill, in the bright hot sun and a dry wind, I cycled slowly along the Avon River to Amesbury, drifting past well-maintained country houses, sweet-smelling woods, and wide fields. This was the fresh green England of myth and legend, and in midafternoon, somewhat fatigued, I pulled off the road, hoisted my bicycle on my shoulder, hiked back into the greenwood a few hundred yards, and lay back in a bed of bluebells for a short nap. Birds were twittering and singing overhead, a green light was sparkling in the leaves, and as I drifted off, in that half state between waking and sleeping, I imagined that Bottom and Peter Quince would emerge from the greenwood and play the play within the play from Midsummer Night’s Dream. Better yet, as I slept, I imagined, some ethereal fairy queen would spot me and fall in love and carry me off from this boring temporal world to her fairy kingdom.

When I woke up a tawny owl was sitting on a branch above my head staring at me with its head tipped to one side.

I spent that night in a modest hotel in Amesbury, and very early the next morning rode out to one of my primary destinations, the great stone circle of Stonehenge.

This was in the time before Stonehenge was fenced and you could wander at will through the fields and under and between the great standing stones. I arrived, however, long after sunrise. The sun had come up at something like five in the morning. Long before I got there I could see the lonely cluster of upright trilithons standing together on the distant plain and rising above the grasses and wildflowers like the cast-off coronet of some giant king.

It was midweek and not a particularly special day in the Druidic calendar, when white-robed ovates and priests come here to pay homage to the sun. All about me in the watery light I could see, for the first time, the precisely placed stone markers that the ancients had arranged here on this otherwise unremarkable plain in order to track the wheeling sun, moon, and stars.

Of all the ancient monuments of the world, of all the temples and cathedrals, carved cliff faces, castles, lost cities, jungle-clad ruins, megaliths, and lonely menhirs, Stonehenge ranks as one of the best recognized sites. The great stone rows of the solar temple of Carnac across the Channel in Brittany are far grander. Avebury, just twenty miles to the north, was also a larger complex, and there are stone rows, menhirs, monoliths, megaliths, and stone circles strewn from the Hebrides and the Orkneys, throughout the British Isles, and south to Tunisia and into West Africa and even into India. Although they have not all been analyzed, almost all of these monuments appear to have solar or sometimes lunar alignments. In fact there was a theory, since generally disputed, that they were all constructed by a so-called Heliolithic culture that emanated out of Africa and the region of the Nile and spread across Europe during the early Neolithic period, when most of these monuments were constructed. As evidenced by the Siberian mammoth tusk carvings, however, the human mind came under the spell of the sun and moon some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, long before the appearance of these solar temples.

The importance of Stonehenge is due in part to the fact that it happens to be located in what emerged as one of the most literate nations on earth, and has been written about, discussed, debated, and scientifically analyzed for over five hundred years. Stonehenge was already a thousand years old when the Romans occupied England in 55 B.C. It was recognized as an ancient relic as early as the sixth century; it was cited in literature in the seventh century, and had acquired a rich baggage of legend and myth by the twelfth century. It officially entered into the history of England in the thirteenth in a work by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the first official account of the building of the site. According to his story, a race of sea giants from Africa once constructed a temple made of bluestone in Ireland, known as the Giant’s Ring. In time these sea giants died out, and no one could lift the stones to carry them to the sacred site on Salisbury Plain in England, until Merlin came along. He was able to dismantle the Ring and had it transported and rebuilt in Britain.

Theories of the purpose of the temple at Stonehenge have varied over the ages. For centuries it was believed to be a Druidical sacrificial altar, or a temple to the sun, or a Danish victory arch, or a burial site for the dawn people who inhabited England in a mythic prehistory. Theories on how it was constructed are equally diverse. There are two kinds of stone in the temple complex, the sarsen stones, which are huge local sandstone monoliths, and the famous blue-stones, the closest of which are found a hundred miles to the west. Given the complexity of the engineering required in transporting these enormous boulders over hills and valleys to the Plains of Salisbury, raising them in specific positions on the plain to align with celestial events, and even setting them in such a way that the tops of certain stones line up with the eastern horizon, not to mention the effort involved in capping the uprights with massive lintels, it seems that perhaps the first explanation is the best. Merlin the Magus built the temple all by himself.

What is now known is that Stonehenge was not built by any one group. It was constructed over a period of some five hundred years and utilized by a number of different cultures, ending with the Druids, who were latecomers to the site, and were contemporary with the Romans. In spite of the fact that they more often worshipped in sacred oak groves and at sacred springs, the Druids are the group most commonly associated with Stonehenge in the popular mind. Neo-Druids still worship there today, or did when I was there. The British government has since prohibited them from gathering at the site at the summer solstice.

Stonehenge is one of the most heavily visited tourist sites in rural England, but what most of these visitors notice is the central ring of great stone trilithons and megaliths that stand out on the Salisbury Plain so dramatically. In fact, however, this central circle of massive upright stones is a later addition to the site and is surrounded by three rings of holes, known as the Aubrey holes, two of which lie close to the center, and one, an outer ring, lying well beyond the stone circle. The whole of it, holes and ring of stone, is encircled by a mound and ditch. Furthermore, on the north and south sides, there are two earth mounds, and on the northeast side, two more ditches running off perpendicularly from the circle. Not far from the modern road, and more or less in the middle of the perpendicular ditches, is an upright megalith, called the heel stone. There appears to be some order to all this, but that order is not entirely clear, even after a hundred years of analysis.

As early as the eighteenth century the British antiquarian William Stukeley had noticed that the inner circle of trilithons opened up to the northeast, the direction of the midsummer sunrise, and he surmised that the monument must have been deliberately oriented so that on midsummer morning the sun rose directly over the heel stone and the first rays would shine directly into the center of the ring. This alignment implied a ritualistic connection with sun worship and it was generally concluded that Stonehenge was a temple to the sun, constructed by the ancient Druids.

In the first few years of the twentieth century, the astrophysicist Sir Norman Lockyer, who had established the solar and stellar alignments of the Pyramids and Greek temples, made accurate observations at Stonehenge and concurred, based on his measurements, that the temple had more to do with astronomy and the sky than with ritualistic sacrifices, as the popular theory held. These studies were followed in the 1950s by the work of an engineer named Alexander Thom, who took up the cause of astroarcheology and began examining other megalithic sites in the British Isles, some six hundred sites all told. Thorn argued that these so-called barbarians of the late Stone Age in fact had precise working knowledge of the complexities of the solar passage and astronomy, including Pythagorean geometry, and even the complex variations of the lunar cycle. Thom was laughed out of the halls of academia by established archeologists.

Then in 1961, another outsider, this time an astronomer, entered the debate. Gerald Hawkins took precise measurements of the sunrises and sunsets during the solstices and equinoxes and employed a then newly developed machine, the computer, to calculate the solar alignments accurately. What he determined, as others had surmised earlier, was that whoever originally built Stonehenge had a deep and precise comprehension of the workings of the solar system.

Hawkins spent a season at Stonehenge investigating the peculiar arrangements of the stones and the holes. He stood at each position and measured alignments for moonrise, sunrise, and the rise of various stars, and like a good Druid priest he went out at the midsummer sunrise and filmed the rise of the summer sun over the heel stone at dawn on the summer solstice. He even went so far as to take the weather into account (how often, after all, can one expect a sunny dawn in England!) and determined that in fact at dawn the sun is more likely to be free of clouds than not. Once he had collected all the measurements and astronomical data, he fed the material into a contemporary computer, a device that now, a mere forty years since he did his work, seems as primitive as the stone circles of the ancient world. What Hawkins discovered was that Stonehenge not only precisely marked the moments of sunrise and sunset on the solstices and the equinoxes, it also marked the range of moon-rises and moonsets on important seasonal points. He put forth the argument that the great heavy circle of stones was in some ways a computer itself, a massive device that served as a brilliantly conceived astronomical calculator that could predict, precisely, future solar and lunar eclipses.

For Hawkins and the archeoastronomers who followed after him, the Aubrey holes were the key. They served as fixed reference points along a circle, and their number was essential to astronomical calculations. The cycle of the moon, for example, which takes 27.3 days, could be tracked by moving a marker by two holes each day to complete a circuit in 28 days. A much longer calculation could be accomplished by moving the marker by three holes per year to complete a full circuit in 18.67 years. In this way, it would be possible to keep track of the “nodes,” or those points at which the paths of the sun and moon will intersect to produce an eclipse.

As with the theories of earlier archeoastronomers, the argument met with criticism as soon as it was published. Whether this was in fact the intended use of the Aubrey holes is a matter of debate in the scientific community, and in more recent years other astronomical interpretations have been taken up in support of more fanciful notions about the cosmic significance of Stonehenge.

The main argument against Hawkins’s theory is that Stonehenge was constructed by several different cultures over a period of centuries, which throws into question his idea that the whole complex, with its ditches and Aubrey holes and megaliths, was originally set up to function as a device to track celestial events other than sunrise and sunset.

The earliest Neolithic culture in Britain is believed to have been a group called the Windmill Hill Culture, which lived in the area around Stonehenge and Avebury about 4,500 years ago. They constructed large, often concentric, circular enclosures of earthworks and long barrows where they buried their dead. Around 2000 B.C. these people were replaced or assimilated into another group, the Megalithic builders, who probably came out of the eastern Mediterranean and moved up through France to Brittany and across the Channel to the British Isles. This group tended to build henge monuments, or large circular, banked enclosures, also concentric. About this time, 1900 B.C., Stonehenge was first constructed by a group generally referred to as the Battle-ax People, who were followed shortly by or even contemporary with the Beaker People, who probably worked on the second stage of construction of the monument. Then around 1500 B.C., the Wessex culture built Stonehenge III, the great sarsen stone circle, consisting of thirty huge stones with an average weight of some twenty-six tons and massive lintels running around the top and, on the inside of the circle, a horseshoe of five trilithons that opened to the summer solstice.

The one feature of the monument that no one questions is the first, and that is the fact that the sun on midsummer morning rises directly above the heel stone and throws its light down the avenue of ditches to align with the center. This is the same alignment of most of the stone circles that were built during the Megalithic period, as Alexander Thorn had discovered. Furthermore, by the time of the construction of the second phase of Stonehenge, it is clear that the culture was honoring the sun. In the graves of certain chieftains, the dead were buried with solar-based jewelry, a spoked disk of beaten gold, and during the third phase of construction, when the temple we see now was finally completed, archeologists have found in the graves of women concentric ringed ornaments based on the sun. Archeologists believe that both men and women wore these objects as they passed within the ringed bank marking the sacred precincts during the seasonal festivals.

Many of the small ornaments in the grave sites, and even some of the constructions and stone carvings, bear a resemblance to artifacts found at Knossos, which suggests that there was trade between the two cultures. Scholars read into these artifacts the larger story of the expansion of the Indo-European cultures from north to south during the second millennium B.C. The Indo-Europeans were a pastoral people who drew their wealth from flocks of sheep and goats and herds of horses. Solar worship was paramount among these people; all their gods were heaven-based, rather than earthbound, and everywhere they went they appear to have introduced their celestial gods to local populations. As they moved south the Indo-Europeans encountered people whose religious beliefs were based on the chthonic powers of the earth, the worshippers of a Mother Goddess, or Great Mother, whose sanctuaries were located in caves and whose cults had spread northward along the Mediterranean and on into Western Europe and Britain. The two cultures met most dramatically and most famously in Greece, giving the West some of the best-known and best-loved gods of both heaven and the underworld. Some scholars read into the tale of Odysseus, especially in the Polyphemus story, a symbolic retelling of the conflict of these two religious orientations: The wily sky-child Odysseus blinds and outwits the cave-dwelling giant Polyphemus. In the modern era, these differing religious orientations reappear in the Judeo-Christian culture: the snake, which traditionally lives in holes in the ground, symbolizing the old earth-based chthonic cults, and a brilliant, single, heavenly God, reflecting the sky-based deity, with the cross and the halo enduring as the remnant symbol of the old solar cults.

I spent the whole morning sitting amidst the ruins of this mysterious circle of stones and then rode up to the lesser-known archeological site known as Woodhenge, which may have served as a temple or meeting hall for the people engaged in the construction of Stonehenge. Here I lounged in the sun and ate lunch, watching the skylarks rise and flutter in the spring sky and thinking of Shelley and Keats, and romantic English springtime, rather than the ancient days of the Druids. The day was still clear and fresh, and all the fields had a deep, rain-washed English green cast, and although the air was cooler, the sun was warm on my face.

There are some three hundred and fifty stone circles, earthen mounds, and long barrows located along the River Avon and the Kennet River, and after my lunch and a short doze, I set off for the largest of all these, the great complex of earth mounds, banks and ditches, burial sites, and sarsen stones at the village of Avebury.

You cannot escape English history and literature in this region. Merlin came through here when he laid out the megaliths of Stonehenge, and long before there was a real England there were giants in the land. Most of them had died out before England was settled by normal human beings, but when Brutus, the first king of Britain, landed at Totnes with his Trojan followers, so the legend goes, there were still a few left. The Roman town of Bath is just to the north, the famous mystic hill of Glastonbury, where Arthur and his knights held sway, is close at hand, and Thomas Hardy’s unfortunate heroine Tess d’Urberville fled through the night here in her last days and ended up on a supposed sacrificial stone in the middle of the heathen temple, Stonehenge. Mysterious power spots known as ley lines crisscross this part of England and there are supposed to be subterranean geodetic phenomena known as blind springs, or spots of negative and positive energies that react to the phases of the moon in this region. The green-clad hills in this quarter were scraped clear of turf during the Neolithic period to create images, such as the famous White Horse of Uffington, or the vast club-bearing Cerne Giant in nearby Dorset.

As I followed the rural roads from Hilcott to Alton Priors and on through the Vale of Pewsey, I kept coming across these reminders of the ancient days of old England, and I found myself stopping periodically to admire the white horses and strewn sarsen stones, and the wide land of the mystic hills in the distance. In time I came to a pleasant little nature reserve, and once again wandered into the forest to rest amidst the bluebells and the heavy boles of the oaks, and then pushed on toward Avebury and found a quiet little inn for the night.

The array of ditches, mounds, stone circles, and lines of menhirs at Avebury is the largest and most striking collection in England and entirely envelops the small town. This prehistoric Bronze Age center, which dates from 3250 to about 2600 B.C, is much older than the smaller, though more famous temple at Stonehenge. The complex consists of a sanctuary, now just a series of post holes, as well as a long since lost stone circle, a grassy ditched and banked henge connected by an avenue between a double row of giant stones, and the 340-foot West Kennet Long Barrow. Just south of the town is the great mound of Sillbury Hill, a vast pudding-shaped burial mound that is said to be the largest in all of Europe. Some of the sarsen stones in the visible sections of Avebury are huge, weighing as much as ninety tons, so vast that they too could only have been set in place by the likes of Merlin, or perhaps the race of giants who used to roam the nearby hills.

I went out to the site after dinner to poke around some of the avenues and the standing stones. As I was walking, at the far end of one of the avenues, staring out to the westering skies and the long summery light, I saw a little man dressed in flannel slacks and a hound’s-tooth jacket. He had his hands clasped behind his back and he was rocking slightly on his heels as he contemplated the serried clouds.

He heard me pass behind him and turned.

“Pleasant evening,” he said. And then hearing my accent after I returned his greeting: “Not from these parts, I gather?”

“No,” I said. “America.”

“Right, North America. Mystery Hill, the Serpent Mound and all that,” he said.

“Mystery Hill?” I said, surprised. “You’ve heard of Mystery Hill?”

He was referring to a strange jumble of grottoes, standing stones, and slabs in a southern New Hampshire town not far from where I live, a site known in the tourist literature as the American Stonehenge. The complex is much debated by traditional archeologists and is hardly known overseas, and in fact is nothing compared to the great temple complexes of Europe, whose authenticity is undebated. I was amazed that this man knew of this obscure site and said as much.

“Well, you know, you hear of these things,” he said.

“Very few even in America have heard of this particular thing though. Are you an archeologist?” I asked.

“More or less,” he said, obscurely.

There are, it should be said, many “more or less” archeologists and New Age Druids and the like who inhabit the ancient sacred sites around Stonehenge and Avebury, especially during the solstices, some of them of dubious religious persuasions. This little man, with his brush-cut moustache and bushy eyebrows and debonair attire did not at all fit the New Age stereotype. But it was clear that he was well versed in the background of Avebury and other prehistoric complexes. He corroborated my theories—which I proposed to him modestly—on the mixing of cultures that had occurred at Stonehenge, only he claimed that it was here, at Avebury, that the best evidence of the transition could be found.

This was not a man who dabbled in the usual small talk about the differences between England and America. He jumped right in.

“You’ve got here your split between the matriarchal and the patriarchal,” he said. “This sarsen stone here,” he said, lifting his head toward a wide-based, diamond-shaped menhir. “That’s your female figure. This one over here,” and he nodded toward a thinner flat-topped stone, “… that’s your male. All these ditches and mounds … that’s the old order. That’s the old earth goddess worship with its phallic fertility rites, blood sacrifices, and dark Paleolithic rituals. Then here and down at Stonehenge, with your stone circles and the like, you’ve got your shift. They all look upward, away from that dark earth towards the sun and the sky. Of course you get your human sacrifices among both groups.”

He began guiding me along the avenue, pointing out stones and mounds and ditches, and we walked on together chatting about the ancients until we could see in the distance the vast mound of Sillbury Hill.

“Now there’s a dark place if ever there was one,” he said. “Burial mound, of course, but there’s some that think it was a charnel house up on top. You’ve got some nasty business going on there back then, defleshing corpses in the sun, and then carrying the bones out during the equinox and solstice and ritual processions through these avenues led by your antler-decorated shaman types, dancing at the solstice festivals, ritual sex, and all that, in order to bring back the warming sun. Your Red Indians did the same thing back then, around the same period too, built these great effigy mounds and the like. The Serpent Mound and such like.”

I began to form a fantasy that this man was a famous archeologist who merely wanted to keep a low profile. Save for archeologists and a few local tourists, very few in America know about the Serpent Mound, which, unlike Mystery Hill, is an authentic site. The great twisting earth mound winds above the Miami River in southern Ohio with its head facing the river. If you stand at the serpent’s tail on the summer solstice, the sun sets directly beyond the open mouth of the twisting snake—the serpent swallows the sun, in other words.

“You must have studied all this though? Have you been to the Serpent Mound?” I asked.

“Right, some years ago back, I’m afraid.”

“And Mystery Hill, you’ve been there?”

“Well, yes. Not much to look at is it.”

He was being polite.

“Now over on your Connecticut River,” he said, “you’ve got some interesting petroglyphs which I believe have some solar symbols. Or are they sexual. Can’t remember. But these are really Scottish in origin.”

This begat, at my prompting, a very long and very bizarre account of the Scottish influences on the tribal cultures of North America, one of the most elaborate of the various popular theories and legends designed to account for the many improbable stone temples, menhirs, grottoes, and the like that are scattered across the northern sections of the United States from New England to Wisconsin.

According to the gentleman’s theory, which I could barely follow, sometime in the ancient past a Scottish seafaring laird had established a colony in New England. This group brought with it the customs of the country and had taught the natives to construct menhirs and grottoes and stone effigies to the sun god. Much of this had been recently suggested in a book published by a Harvard professor named Barry Fells called America B.C. But by some convoluted genealogy, my man connected famous Indian warriors of the nineteenth century to Scotland, mainly Red Cloud, whom he claimed was directly descended from a Scottish laird of the Mackenzie clan.

I considered running all my solar theories by my self-appointed guide to the archeological sites of the pagan temples of Britain, but the light was fading and somehow, with all his talk of human sacrifice and ritual sex and the like, I did not fancy finding myself alone with him after dark at some remote tomb. Mainly I was hungry and thirsty, so I suggested we lift a glass back in town to continue the conversation.

He was an obscure sort. I didn’t want to press him any further, but it occurred to me that he was perhaps some defrocked archeologist, a renegade academic, dismissed from Oxford for reading solar sexual symbols into too many standing stones and earth pits. But he was a likable fellow and a ready talker about the subjects I was interested in, and in any case, you never know who you’re talking with among strangers. As the ancient Greeks believed, any passing stranger might possibly be a god in disguise.

Years earlier I used to worship the sun at a beach on Siesta Key in western Florida. Every night I would go down to watch the sun drop into the Gulf of Mexico, and every night I would see there a well-bronzed little man, sitting on a terrace, eyeing the sun, with obvious appreciation. This was a crowded beach during the day, but at sunset most of the beachgoers retreated indoors to drink or watch television. Over the few weeks that I was there I fell into conversation with this man about light, and the sun, and the role of the sun and light in the history of art. It was he who had explained to me the relationship between the scientific breakthroughs with photography and the spectroscope and Impressionism. Only later did I learn from someone else that the old man was the famous art critic Meyer Shapiro.

Perhaps my English archeologist was Alexander Thom, the mathematician who decoded so many solstice sites. Perhaps he was Gerald Hawkins, or Christopher Hawkes, or any one of the myriad archeologists, engineers, astronomers, and talented amateurs who have concerned themselves with the great mysteries of these ill-understood sites.

What remains is that Stonehenge, like the great Temple at Cheops and the Sun Pyramid at Tenochtitlán, holds a place as one of the greatest archeological sites on earth.

On my way back to the hotel after sharing a glass with my guide I noticed that there was a decided chill in the air and the next morning, for the first time since I had landed, I felt the presence of a true English spring, as opposed to the English spring of song and verse—that is, a low gray sky, the smell of damp air, cloddy earth, and wet grass. I set out for the Saverndale Forest nonetheless and rode slowly through the rolling country, to Shelbourne and Ham. Just before the town of Newbury the sky opened and the dank cold rain that had been threatening all day finally released.

I had by this time on the trip developed an elaborate theory on the physical relationship between atmospheric conditions and the tensile quality of modern rubber. This theory, in its simplest form, holds that if it rains heavily, the likelihood of experiencing a flat tire increases one hundred fold. For this reason, I was not surprised when I experienced the familiar swerving lack of control and felt my rear tire go flat. I pulled off, carried the bicycle up into a field, unhitched my panniers, turned the bicycle upside down, and began rummaging through my tool kit for the proper equipment. By the time I was finished I was soaked.

Alternate theories on the relationship between the proximity to cities and rain, or the proximity to cities and flat tires, might also be proposed. Looking at the map, I realized I was only forty-five minutes or so by train from Londontown.

Throughout this trip, I had been tempted by London, partly because I had friends there and partly because I felt that somehow, since I was thinking about the sun, and thoughts on the sun beget thoughts on time and the measurement of time, and the center of Western Time is Greenwich Observatory, that I should perhaps undertake a profane sort of pilgrimage to this important scientific site.

I pedaled on into Newbury, thinking over my plans, found a tea shop, changed my clothes in the clean, well-lit, heated bathroom, and drank a pot of hot tea and savored scones with strawberry jam, served by two nice ladies in frilly aprons who wrung their hands when they heard my story.

“Oh my, Dottie,” one of them called out, “come all the way from Cádiz, he did, riding that bicycle all the way. You must come and meet the man.”

Whereupon Dottie trotted out from the back room and wrung her hands. “… All the way from Cádiz is it? You must be tired, poor boy. Give ‘im another scone, Mildred.” And Mildred, bless her English heart, brought out another scone, which I dutifully consumed. And then, having topped up, I pushed back my chair, crossed my legs, took a sip of my tea, and began to expound: “A hard coming I had of it,” I told them, “and the mountains cold, and the natives unfriendly.…” And all the while, as I told my tale, I kept my eyes on the mullioned window to watch the progress of the rain outside.

It only got worse.

“Would either of you know, perhaps,” I asked, “where the train station might be located. I’ve a mind to go to London to further my adventures.”

“Oh my Dottie, now he’s going up to London,” Mildred said.

“Don’t do it boy. It’s a dangerous unhealthful city. And there’s crime.”

“And Pakis.”

“Filled with Pakis, now. You mustn’t go.”

“But, actually, I want to see my friend, the vicar.”

“You know a vicar in London?”

“I do.”

I didn’t, of course.

“Well the train is just two blocks on, off to the right.”

“Regular schedule, now, I’m afraid. We’re getting a new type out here now. Bankers and such like.”

By 3:48 that afternoon, I was on the commuter train to Paddington Station.

Eleven

The Last of the Sun Gods

One of my friends in London was an aspiring American actress named Billy, who had tried to make her way in New York, had failed, and then fled to London to try her luck. She and I and a woman named Nancy used to spend a lot of time together in New York, mostly up in Central Park, where we would all head to come up for air. This Billy had a fine mop of black hair, cut in a bowl style, with long thick bangs that fell below her eyebrows, giving her the look of a blue-eyed sheep dog. She and Nancy sometimes would lock arms on Fifth Avenue and go sashaying down the sidewalk singing—shouting really—a little ditty set to the tune of the Old Grey Mare:

The bells of Hell go ding a ling a ling a ling.

Oh death where is thy sting a ling a ling a ling?

I considered staying with Billy in London, but knowing her financial status, I decided to call some other London friends, an older and decidedly better appointed couple whom I had befriended in Corsica. They had stayed at the auberge where I worked, and had insisted I visit them in London the following autumn, which I had. They owned an airy apartment near Regency Park with many interesting artifacts and they had energetic, lively minded intellectual friends. So I called them and secured an invitation.

Peter and Magda were in their forties and had led adventurous, exploratory lives. He was a painter, who had been a wanderer before he took up the brush. He had motorcycled through India, traveled in the South Pacific and in sub-Saharan Africa, snuck into Tibet, and lived for a while on a houseboat in Srinagar in Kashmir. The only place he had never been was the United States.

“I saw it once from Mexico,” he told me. “But I was afraid to cross the border, too dangerous.”

Magda taught English at the London School of Economics and was a quieter, more stay at home sort, as well she might be. She had grown up in Poland during the war and had seen things that still gave her nightmares. Some nights in Corsica I would hear her cry out from her room. She filled her days with beautiful objects by way of forgetting, flowers, Chinese vases, old books of verse, the poetry of John Keats—which she adored—and a little lapdog named Poufty, a Brussels griffon, one of the most bizarre creatures I had ever seen.

I was given my old guest room, a book-lined study with tall French windows that gave onto a green court. And here I stayed, waiting out the rain.

One day Magda took me up to Keats’s house near Hampstead Heath, a small, formerly rural cottage where the possessions of the poet were preserved in the manner of sacred icons, which Magda surreptitiously laid her hands upon lightly, as if touching the relics of the saints.

“He was so good a man,” she said reverently. “So feeling and tragic.”

“Was he not also a worshipper of the sun?” I asked.

“No, you are thinking of William Blake, who used to bask naked in his garden—to the horror of his neighbors.”

I asked this because Magda herself was a confirmed nudist. I used to come upon her sprawled flat out on the red rocks of the Corsican coast on my afternoon ramblings. It was as if she was attempting to bake out all memory of the Polish winters and the war. Peter had something of the sun worshiper in his soul as well. He was an obsessive spear fisherman but would sometimes crawl out of the water like some primordial sea lizard and join Magda on the rocks. She was small and blond, he was a lanky Englishman, but browned like an Arab. In fact he had been born in Tunisia to English parents and was trilingual. He told me once that he had befriended a white-eyed sanyatsi in Gujarat who had gone blind from staring directly at the sun.

Magda and I poked through the quiet rooms of the John Keats house, and then went out into the rainy garden, where the lilacs were blooming. Sparrows were fluttering about in the lower limbs, the leaves were dripping, and the stone benches were cold and damp.

“Not much change here since the 1800s,” I suggested.

She looked over at me sadly.

“Many changes, I’m afraid.”

John Keats died at the age of twenty-six. The rainy, indoor English climate, or, as some say, the stresses of critical reviews and an off-again on-again relationship with Fanny Brawn, got the better of him and he suffered periodic bouts of tuberculosis. Finally, his doctors recommended the ultimate and only known cure—a sunny climate—so he fled south to Rome, where he lived in an upstairs apartment just off the Spanish Steps. He died there in 1821.

One of the longer poems in his substantial body of work was a blank-verse epic called Hyperion. The story dealt with the Titan Hyperion (“Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire”)—who was an early god of the sun, overthrown by Apollo, one of the new generation of Hellenic gods whose chief figure was the sky god Zeus. Hyperion, like Apollo after him, lived in a high palace “Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold” and wore flaming robes that streamed out behind his heels.

Keats was not the first Romantic poet to flee southward to the supposedly sunny climate of Italy. Lord Byron and Shelley were already spending time around Leghorn (as the English called Ligorno) before Keats went to Rome. In fact they encouraged him to join them. The idea of the south, of warm air, light, and a vibrant, colorful peasantry, began attracting northern Europeans around the turn of the nineteenth century, and still attracts them today, as anyone who has spent any time on Capri or Positano or for that matter Majorca will attest.

Some fifty years after his death, Keats’s apartment on the Spanish Steps was taken over by another northern sun follower, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who made a name for himself among the rich and famous expatriate community, and eventually fled even farther south to Anacapri, where he restored—more or less—the former villa of the emperor Tiberius. By this time, half of the well-heeled patronage of northern Europe were spending at least part of the winter season in Italy it seems, and Munthe managed to make himself a favored physician for them all.

Italy was so popular with the British that there were English churches and English newspapers and journals in Rome and especially in Florence—which in my experience is not much warmer than London in winter. Be that as it may, the northerners flocked there, and as late as the Second World War still formed a permanent community. In the postwar years they were still coming, although for shorter stays, and by the 1970s they were beginning to crowd onto some of the then unspoiled coasts of Europe, the isles of Greece where Byron sang, the Moor-haunted coast of southern Spain—the newly named “Costa del Sol”—and, most densely populated of all, the Côte d’Azur. The quieter, more contemplative sun lovers were forced to seek ever more obscure coves, islands, and undiscovered crescent beaches. It was here, in a little auberge on the northeastern coast of Corsica, that I had first met Magda and Peter.

One night in London, Magda and Peter held a dinner party to which they graciously invited my friend Billy. She came dressed in black with a Spanish lace shawl knotted around her hips and wore silver hooped earrings and many spangles and baubles and black eye shadow. I caught Peter eyeing her favorably at one point.

There was another couple there who had recently returned from Peru. As do most tourists, Peruvian and foreign alike, they had made the ascent to Machu Picchu, a site Peter had visited years earlier. This led quite naturally to a discussion of the Inca and the brutal Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his hometown of Trujillo in Estremadura, where a statue of the brave man is displayed on the town square aloft on his heroic horse. Ultimately, at my prodding, we even managed a little analysis of the role of the sun in Inca society, about which Peter knew a thing or two.

Peter, in fact, knew a thing or two about almost any subject, especially exotic distant cultures. He was in the habit of collecting images such as mandalas and the round, wheel-like solar symbol of Ashoka that you see all over India and would work these into his obscure paintings. He knew all about Moche pottery and Nazca lines and soon we were launched into a seemingly interminable and heated discussion of the relationship between culture and altitude.

Billy had remained uncharacteristically silent during most of this dinner, but at one point during all this Peru talk, during a rare pause in the stories, she spoke.

“I’ve been to Peru,” she said quietly, “to a place called Chavín something.”

All eyes turned to her, waiting for more. But she held her silence.

“That’s very interesting,” one of the guests said, a degenerate sort of fellow named Robert who had just come back from Peru.

“Rather,” said his wife, Patricia. “Did you get terribly sick?”

“No. Why would I get sick?”

“Doesn’t everyone who goes to Peru?”

“I don’t know, perhaps.”

People waited for more. I had heard a little about this trip earlier; she had been traveling with an American ethnobotanist.

“Is that when you were traveling with what’s his name?” I asked, trying to draw her out.

“Right.”

“Wasn’t it a lovely trip?” Magda asked. They all wanted to hear more from this exotic-looking figure.

“Well, actually, it was quite a trip.”

I alone knew what she meant. The man she was traveling with was researching hallucinogenic plants.

“Rather,” said Patricia. “For us too. We got sick as dogs in Machu Picchu. Partly the altitude though.”

“This Chavín,” Peter asked. “Do you mean Chavín de Huántar? There’s a pyramid there, isn’t there?”

“Actually it’s not only a pyramid,” Billy said finally. “It’s a whole series of passages and stone columns. There is a monolith or whatever you call it and I think there are images of birds and a rare plant there or something. Shamans used to eat this plant, a cactus I think, and travel to the sun and on into outer space.”

Within a few minutes, the old theatrical Billy emerged, throwing her arms akimbo and relating histrionic tales of her travels with this Charlie, from the Amazonian lowland tropical forests to the heights of the Andes in search of hallucinogenic plants, any and all of which Charlie would consume, sometimes after enduring daylong rituals with crazed shamans who would pierce his skin with thorns and sharp stems of grasses.

“Were you not afraid there?” Magda asked. “It sounds dangerous.”

“I was,” said Billy. “I was terrified all the time, but excited. We met a man named Valencio in the upper reaches of the Orinoco, I think it was, in Venezuela anyway. Valencio knew some Indians who promised to give Charlie a sacred powder that would cause the world to fall apart, disintegrate totally. Charlie of course, being Charlie, had to have some, and so we spent a week motoring up to some village in a narrow canoe, and all the people, naked people, came rushing out when we got there and they rubbed my skin and felt my body, and the old women squeezed my breasts and said approving words.” And here she grabbed her breasts like fruits (to the approval of Peter, I noticed). “But Charlie, all he could do was make Valencio translate and ask for some of this powder that takes the world apart. And do you know what the translation was for the name of this stuff, do you know what it’s called?”

She looked over at me, smiling wickedly.

“What’s it called?”

“Semen of the sun.”

“By God,” said Peter. “That’s what the Egyptians used to say about some column they maintained somewhere, it was the solidified semen of Atum, the sun, left over from the time when he created the world, I believe. That’s an interesting image.”

“I say, did this Charlie fellow eat some of this semen?” Patricia asked, sufficiently horrified.

“He did.”

“What happened?”

“Who knows,” Billy said. “He sat in a dark hut for three days, looking terrified. Then he got sick and the Indians gave him some black stuff, a drink, and he recovered in a few hours, and then he and the shaman and Valencio had a long talk. I was getting bored. The women took me to the stream to wash. They liked me. A white queen. They thought I was the queen of the north. When I asked Charlie what had happened he said he knew what it was like to be dead.”

Magda shook her head, as if to perish the thought. “This is most unpleasant. Tell us about your sun pilgrimage to lighten us up,” she said to me.

There was nothing to tell to this eclectic group. What could I say except that every day I would pedal along the rural roads of Europe, eating local dishes and drinking wine and contemplating the sun.

“I shall walk on air and contemplate the sun,” Robert repeated drunkenly.

“Who said that?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

“One of your Cynics, I daresay,” said Peter. “Who was it who told Alcibiades to step aside so as not to stand between him and the light of the sun?”

“That would be Diogenes,” Magda said. “And it was Alexander he told to step aside, I think. But how about some music, Peter? Let’s listen to some music. We’re getting too glum here.”

“Let’s listen to Bach and get lost in the fugue,” Patricia said.

“And travel into space …,” Billy said airily, throwing out her arms.

Peter and Magda glanced over at her quickly, unsure of her drift, and then Peter rose from the table and went over to the stereo, and began rummaging through records.

“Put on the Goldberg Variations,” Magda said.

Billy rolled her eyes at me and I winked. We were used to younger music.

Peter agreed and rummaged some more.

“Ready?” he asked. He carefully placed the needle on the record.

What sounded out was not Bach but the chanting of pygmies from the Ituri Forest, accompanied by the drumming of their bark hammers. Everyone feigned outrage, and Robert began laughing approvingly. Then his laughter grew, and soon he was coughing and sputtering and pounding his chest.

“He’s had enough, I think,” said Patricia. “We must put him to bed.”

“My Charlie knows of a plant concoction that will sober up a drunk man in ten minutes,” Billy said.

“Get some for Robert,” said Patricia.

“Don’t need,” said Robert. “… can walk on air.” He began laughing apoplectically again.

All this talk about Peru left me wondering about the last of the great solar kingdoms.

In 1513, when the Spanish arrived in Peru, the Inca had established a vast solar kingdom stretching from Ecuador south to northern Chile. Ruling over this kingdom was the Son of the Sun, the supreme ruler, Intip Cori. According to their legends, the father sun sent the first Inca out with his sister and wife to establish a city wherever a golden wand that the Inca carried should sink into the earth. This place happened to be Cuzco, a strategically located city at the head of a gently sloping valley, 11,000 feet above the sea. Here the sun king, the Sapa Inca, built a vast stone complex of palaces and temples, shrines, and museums of power, all interspersed with wide plazas and buildings devoted to learning and science. The whole was dominated by a great fortress, but the main building was the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun. It was the chief temple of the Sapa Inca and the royal seat of the Son of the Sun. Surrounding it, as in the heavens, were lesser structures dedicated to the moon, to Venus, to stars and rainbows and lightning. The doors of the main temple were sheathed in gold, and on the western wall there was a rayed sun disk with a jewel-studded plaque arranged so that the rays of the sunrise would strike it and flood the interior of the temple with a bright reflected light.

In the tightly controlled Inca hierarchy, the solar king was a direct descendant of the sun itself. In order to maintain his pure blood line he took his full sister as his chief wife, Qoya. He also maintained a vast harem of Chosen Women, selected at intervals by officials who were sent throughout the kingdom to find the most beautiful girl children. These were sent to live in an enclosed, luxurious harem where they were favored and pampered, but doomed. A few of them would be sacrificed to the sun god on special occasions, such as a victory, or a coronation of a new Sapa Inca. In exchange, they were assured a blissful afterlife. And, indeed, archeologists excavating the cemeteries near the city of Pachacamac found the mummies of several girls who had been richly attired before burial but had been ritually strangled.

The other women lived either as concubines to the Sapa Inca or were given as prizes and awards to favorite nobles or successful soldiers. A few were selected to serve as the equivalent of Vestal Virgins, or Virgins of the Sun as they were known. These, like the Vestal Virgins, tended a sacred fire, the sun’s holy fire, attended to religious ceremonies, and wove the splendid vicuña robes for his majesty. Others in the harem provided the great lord with many children. These “Children of the Sun” wore distinctive headdresses and large ear lobe plugs.

Every morning in Cuzco, carved aromatic woods were set on fire by priests, and everyday, as Inti, the sun, began his descent into the underworld, a chestnut-colored llama was sacrificed to him. Just before the summer solstice the people fasted for three days and no fires were lit, then, on the longest day, crowds gathered in the central plaza dressed in finery made of feathers and gold and silver. The Sapa Inca appeared before them and poured a libation to the sun from a golden vase and led a procession of the Children of the Sun to the Coricancha temple, where they made public sacrifices of flowers, grains, and llamas, and occasionally a Virgin of the Sun. At the height of the festival, a burnished concave mirror of bronze was held in such a way as to catch the god’s rays, and the light was sent to kindle a ball of bunched cotton. This fire was turned over to the Virgins of the Sun and was used throughout the year to make burnt offerings.

If, on one of the solstice festivals, clouds covered the god’s face, the sacred fire had to be ignited by friction, and there would be much anxiety and concern among the priests and nobles for the coming year. The same held true if the Virgins of the Sun allowed the fire to go out at any time during the year.

The weather on the day of the summer solstice in Cuzco, in the Julian calendar year of 1531, is not recorded. Nor is it known if the sacred fire of the sun, so carefully tended by the Virgins, was accidentally extinguished in that year. But if the Sapa Inca and his priests and nobles and their deep, legendary history has any merit, the day of the solstice in 1531 was cloudy.

In that same year, on the coast north of Cuzco, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed with his contingent of horses and men and began moving towards Cuzco.

On November 16th, hearing that the current Sapa Inca, Atahualpa, was decamped near the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca, Pizarro moved a force of 168 soldiers, cannons, and horses toward the city. As they approached, the Spanish could see the encampment of the Indians, and one wonders if they did not think at this time that they had undertaken a deadly folly. There, spread over the surrounding hills, was a vast tent city of some 80,000 Indian warriors and nobles. Undaunted, Pizarro ordered the men into the main square of Cajamarca and prepared for battle. He split the cavalry and sent the horses to either side of the plaza and then hid his men around the walls.

That night they could see the campfires of the Indian soldiers shining like a clustered galaxy across the hills. The next morning a messenger came from Atahualpa and Pizarro sent him back, inviting Atahualpa to come into the city. He would be received as a friend, Pizarro indicated, and no insult or harm would come to him.

Around noon the Indians began moving toward the city. All afternoon they marched forward and finally the Spanish could see Atahualpa himself. Thousands of Indians in multicolored robes came ahead of him sweeping the ground clean of every stick and leaf. Behind them came squadrons of dancers and singers, and behind them, warriors armed with shining metal plates that caught the afternoon sun. Then, finally, in their midst appeared the Sapa Inca himself. He was borne on a high litter of many colored parrot feathers, held aloft by ornate timbers sheathed with silver, and carried by eighty lords in blue livery. He wore a golden crown and a huge necklace of emeralds and sat upon a saddle cushion fixed on the litter. Behind him was the company of warriors, an immense horde filing into the square.

So great were the numbers of warriors, and so vast the approach, that some of the brave conquistadors wetted themselves in fear. Pizarro held firm, and when Atahualpa was set down in the center of the plaza he sent out a priest to deliver the word of God and demand that the Sapa Inca subject himself to the law of Jesus Christ. The priest proclaimed that his power rose from a book, the Bible, and Atahualpa asked to hold it, but he did not know how to open it. So the priest stretched his hand to show him and the Sapa Inca struck his arm. Then he opened the book, looked at it, and threw it down in disgust. This enraged the Christian man of God, who called for revenge.

At that moment the signal trumpets of the Spanish sounded. Horses fitted out with noisy rattles rushed into the square, cannons began firing on the Indians, and Spanish soldiers emerged from hiding and began slashing their way toward the litter of Atahualpa, killing the unarmed Indians as they approached. For an hour they attempted to get near the great leader, but whenever the litter bearers were killed, others would rush in to take their place. Finally, horsemen charged through the crowd, tipped up the litter, and dumped Atahualpa on the ground. Pizarro took him prisoner and held him for eight months, demanding what amounted to the largest ransom in history. The ransom was delivered—a cube of gold twenty-two feet long, seventeen feet wide, and eight feet high. Once he had the gold, Pizarro reneged on his promise and ordered Atahualpa killed.

So ended the kingdom of the sun.

The next day was Sunday and Billy and I went down to Hyde Park to hear the atheists and neo-Nazis give their speeches. She had the bad habit of heckling people and misbehaving in public, but in Hyde Park on Sunday, almost anything is permissible and, as in New York, hardly anyone noticed her eccentricities. We walked around arm in arm, listening to people’s speeches and remembering Sunday afternoons in Central Park and the spring sun and the little crowds of celebrants who would collect there to show themselves off and walk their children and dogs. It was a sunny day (or at least a rare sunny afternoon) in Hyde Park and the speakers and the crowds were all out and about. The sun and a spate of fine weather have a universal and seemingly timeless effect on the human psyche, especially in northern climates. In fact it appears to have an effect on all species. Turtles and snakes and alligators must bask to stay alive, lemurs gather at dawn to warm themselves, and my two cats have an uncanny ability to find the best spot in the sun anywhere on the property at any time of year.

On one corner at Hyde Park we came upon an old man playing a violin, which he held between his knees and to which he had attached a sort of megaphone to amplify the sound. Then we passed a man explaining that Hitler wasn’t so bad, and then another preaching anarchism, and another preaching baptism, and a fourth communism, and then we saw a little Irishman doing acrobatic tricks for no one in particular, and then finally we came to an angular, apparently rational gentleman wearing a green sport coat, who was a member of the Flat Earth Society.

“Where does the sun go at night?” Billy wanted to know.

“Into the sea, of course.”

“But how does it get over to the other side?” Billy asked.

“It’s sea under the earth. The earth is an island.”

“The sun can swim?” Billy asked. “Like a fish?”

“You might say that. But it floats over in point of fact.”

“Fishy story,” she said.

Then he launched into it.

“I can see you’re one of those ones who’s been duped by the great lie of 1613. You no doubt buy the myth that the planet must be orbiting its own sun and therefore must be moving at least with a critical orbital velocity, but as I will explain, if you would be so polite as to refrain from your decidedly insulting fish comments, the earth, you see, is flat. This, we know, is the minority opinion, the followers of lies of Galileo being the majority, and we gladly accept our burden if, in the end, that acceptance means ridding the world of the foul half-truths spread by Galileo.…”

“Who?” someone asked from the small crowd that had gathered.

“Galileo, the impostor. As you may remember, he proposed the odd theory that the earth is moving through outer space and not fixed at the center of the universe, as it of course is. According to the Galileo lie, the planet earth is supposed to be a large, spherical shaped ball of rock flying through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. But how could the Earth continue to move at the same speed for as long a time as Galileo and his brood of vipers claim.”

“Brood of vipers?” Billy shouted. “I beg you, sir, I am no viper.”

“Right. To carry on. If outer space were a vacuum, then there would be no problem. But space is not a vacuum, is it? Space is instead filled with ether. The earth would have to have been pushing its way through the ether for all those billions of years. Shouldn’t it have slowed somewhere along the line?”

“Sir, thou shoulds’t not refer to people as vipers,” said Billy with Shakespearean flare.

Somebody in the back crowd agreed.

“You got no right to call a pretty young lady a viper.”

“Now, to come to the point,” our man continued, ignoring the hecklers, “the earth is not the center of the solar system. You of the misguided generation believe that earth is orbiting the sun at a radius of around five-hundred million kilometers. Were this the case …”

“I’m no viper, I’ll tell you that much,” someone shouted.

“Were this the case, the earth would be an accelerated object in circular motion around its sun. And thereby are the problems introduced.”

“Eh. Who you calling a viper?”

“Never mind vipers,” the Flat Earth speaker said. “The point is, the earth, accelerating in circular motion, would behave no differently than would a car taking a corner, if you take my point. We’d spill off into space, just like loose change or a cup of tea on the dashboard of a car taking a fast turn. We would slide around, or be thrown off completely. There would be an apparent centrifugal force on everything.”

“Wha’ about gravity, mate?” someone shouted.

“Would them vipers spin off too?” asked another. “We’d be better off without no vipers such as yourself.”

“Indeed we would be,” a little man in the back of the group called out.

“Tell it to Galileo,” said another.

“Tell it to the Catholic Church, why don’t you?”

The crowd was warming up.

“Conventional thinking would suggest that the water would just run down the sides of the earth if it were round, wouldn’t it? If that is the case why don’t the seas fall off the earth? I shall tell you why. Now, taking into account the so-called gravitational charge theory, and assuming that for some reason the atmosphere was able to align itself with the new direction of the theoretical ‘gravitational field,’ we are faced with a new problem involving another branch of physics known as thermodynamics.…”

“Are you a Roman Catholic?” a little man in a derby hat asked.

This halted the speaker for a second.

“No, but why do you ask so foolish a question?”

“Church don’t recognize Galileo either. You and the church. Now ladies and gentlemen if I could interrupt this man for a moment and have your attention, I should like to say a few more words about vipers. By which I mean your priests of the Roman Catholic Church.…”

“Sunday in the park,” Billy said to me. “Let’s go drink a pint.”

I tried to get Billy to come with me down to the Royal Observatory the next day but she claimed she had a rehearsal, so instead, since it was raining again, I went over to the Tate like a good tourist and saw an exhibition of the works of J. M. W. Turner. Here, hanging among huge canvases of swirling lights and clouds, sunsets, and slave ships, I saw a small, quiet painting I had heard about all my adult life but had never seen, not even as a print: “The Golden Bough.”

I knew of the existence of this painting from the opening lines of James Frazer’s epic collection of the same name—“Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?”

Well I didn’t, and I daresay most of Frazer’s modern-day readers don’t, and now I had happened upon it.

It was a surprisingly small painting, and it was not half as dramatic nor bold as Frazer’s description of the scene. It depicts the moment in which Aeneas and the Sybil present the golden bough cut from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of the Elysian fields, thereby gaining entry to the Underworld. The painting does not match at all Frazer’s dark, brooding description of the doomed king who stalks the wood at Lake Nemi in the Alban hills, guarding the sacred grove where the golden bough is found. According to the myth, the king priest gains his power by overcoming the former king of the wood. Sooner or later another contender will arrive and kill the current king. The thirteen volumes of Frazer’s tome go on to document the details of rituals and beliefs of cultures around the world, focusing on the myths and religious practices associated with the idea of the Hung God, the king who offers himself up for the benefit of the tribe, or, in some cases, for humankind. Completed in the early 1900s after nearly twenty-five years of work, the work attempts to discern archetypal or universal elements in the religions and magical practices of world cultures. Quite naturally, among the many rituals and rites analyzed are those associated with worship of the sun.

In typical Turneresque style, the dark scene at the sacred wood at Lake Nemi is bathed in a diffused glowing light. Of all painters of the Romantic English tradition, Turner is the one who was most associated with this question of the fall of light on a scene, in fact he was known popularly as “the painter of light.” He had an odd career for an artist, inasmuch as, unlike many painters, he was successful from the start and his popularity continued throughout his life. His first work was exhibited when he was still a teenager and he was only fifteen when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was eighteen he had his own studio, and soon after he began traveling widely in Europe.

Wherever he went he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather, but instead of recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into light-filled canvases that expressed his own attitudes toward the sun; there is hardly a painting—even those of snowstorms—in which the sun does not appear. As he grew older he became more eccentric and more obsessed with this question of the sun and its effects on a scene. Except for his father, with whom he lived for thirty years, he had no close friends, and he wouldn’t allow anyone to watch him while he painted; he gave up attending the meetings of the academy, and he would go months without seeing any of his acquaintances. Eventually, he disappeared altogether. Only months later was he found, hiding in a house in Chelsea on the verge of death. The story goes that as he lay dying, a ray of morning sun beamed in through the half-opened shutter and illuminated his face. He opened his eyes.

“The sun is God,” he muttered. Then he died.

Turner was one of the major painters of the English Romantics, a movement that was popular throughout Europe from about 1800 to 1850. Artists in this school strove to express feelings too intense for ordinary mundane expression, thoughts that lie too deep for tears as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth phrased it. They favored scenes of wild nature, especially its untamed and mysterious aspects, as well as exotic, melancholy, or melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion or even fear. Subject matter and style varied from country to country in Europe and America, and each nation seemed to produce one outstanding painter in the field. In England it was Turner, the “painter of light”; in Germany it was Caspar David Friedrich, who had a theory of a “Father Sun,” which he believed to be the creator of all things.

In America, there developed a school of romantic landscape painters known as the Luminists, whose canvases were always infused with a glowing diffused light. They favored radiant, atmospheric sunlight, explosive storm scenes, and incandescent, twilit vistas. The term luminism was traditionally associated with the French Impressionist painters to describe the manner in which light was depicted, but in American art criticism it was applied to painters of seascapes and landscapes such as Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade.

The following day I finally persuaded Billy to come with me down to Greenwich, and we boarded the little ferry and motored down the river in a misty light rain to the Royal Observatory. We stood on the meridian line that serves as the zero reference line for astronomical observations. The line in Greenwich represents the Prime Meridian of the World—longitude o°. Every place on earth is measured in terms of its distance east or west from this line. The line itself divides the eastern and western hemispheres of the earth—just as the equator divides the northern and southern hemispheres.

Billy was totally indifferent to this highly interesting fact, and I was no one to convince her of the importance of the site, inasmuch as I barely understood it myself. In fact the whole mystery of astronomy—of ellipsis and eclipses, and waxings and wanings of the circling moons, and the procession of the equinoxes, and the ecliptic, and the four seasons—baffles me, interested though I am in this great machine of the solar system. For this reason I am all the more in awe of the ancients, those of Stonehenge and Callanish and the astrologers and wizards of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt who had so thorough an understanding of the complexities of these workings and laid the foundation for the understanding of modern astronomy.

One of the stages in this progression toward human understanding of the universe was the construction of the Royal Observatory here in Greenwich. It was founded in 1675 by Charles II to improve the art of navigation, and it played an important role in determining the longitude of a given vessel at sea, which, as it turned out, required a better means of accurately measuring time. Since the late nineteenth century, the Prime Meridian at Greenwich has served as the reference line for Greenwich Mean Time. Before this, almost every town in the world kept its own local time. There were no national or international conventions that determined exactly how time should be measured, or when the day would begin or end, or what length an hour might be. The expansion of the railway and communications networks during the 1850s and 1860s created a worldwide need for an international time standard and in 1884 the Greenwich Meridian was chosen as the Prime Meridian of the World.

After dragging Billy through the tourist areas of the ROG, as it is called locally, we went over to Blackheath and took a little walk under the trees on the wet green grass. At one point we heard an ominous growling and croaking in the trees and a large black raven sailed forth and crossed low over our heads and soared out over the heath.

I saw Billy watching it. “Death,” she cackled, pointing a bony finger at me. “Beware.”

Exactly where the raven had crossed the open ground of the heath, in the misty, riding skies, a blue rift appeared and slowly shifted westward. I knew what was coming.

“Regard,” I said.

Slowly the rift brightened, the blue began to shine with a warm summery intensity, and within a minute a full blast of late spring sun fell upon us.

I raised my arms toward the light and placed my hands together in praise of the sun.

“Sometimes I actually believe you are crazier than I am,” Billy said seriously.

Twelve

A Certain Slant of Light

To be complete, any true solar pilgrimage really should include a visit to Whitby Abbey, since it was here in A.D. 664 that a synod of bishops met and set the date for Easter, an act that unintentionally involved the Roman Catholic Church in the advancement of Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy.

With this in mind, I headed northeast and spent the next several days alternately pedaling through the flat farmlands of East Anglia and taking trains whenever boredom or the wind or rain got the better of me, and since I was off course anyway I decided to ride over to the fens and marshes of the Norfolk Broads to look for birds. It was easy riding. The land was flat and watery, with ditched farm fields, and there were huge skyscapes of welling cloud banks in the west that reminded me of a Constable painting, which, I later learned, made a great deal of sense. John Constable lived not far from this district, at Flatford Mill in Suffolk.

I spent one day at Hornsea, and passed a few hours at Hornsea Mere, watching the swans and the white-fronted geese and pochards, and then the following day rode on to the high cliffs at Flamborough Head to look for seabirds. Here I found a pleasant if somewhat formal hotel near the lighthouse and wandered out to the high chalk cliffs.

A thousand feet below were sharp formations of spiky stone towers, arches, and thundering sea caves, with white clouds of thousands of kittiwakes circling and mewing around their nesting sites on the cliffs. Below, rafted on the great green sea wash, scuttling across the waters in black lines, and spearing like white arrows from great heights down into the blue green depths, were gannets and guillemots, razorbilled auks, puffins, fulmars, herring gulls, and shags. The noise of these seabirds, the wind, the lack of human presence, the sheer energy of this scene held me in thrall and it wasn’t until I realized that I was starving that I could bring myself to leave.

Back at the hotel I was told that if I wished to eat, I would have to join a private party that was even then in progress in the bar. Here, in a well-appointed room with a gray rug and silver bowls set on the white-painted window ledges, was a crowd of ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, all of them well-attired in sensible tweeds and blazers, all of them drinking whiskey or sherry, smoking cigarettes or pipes, chatting happily and eating while standing up. I was ill-dressed for the occasion, tousled and browned from the sun and wind, but they seemed a friendly lot and went on talking without looking up when I entered. One older gent caught my eye and winked as I came in, as if to say “not to worry,” and I went to the bar and ordered the only dish available, a thick, bloody steak and chips, which I attempted to consume standing up.

The man who had caught my eye came over to me while I was eating.

“You the chap on the bicycle?” he asked.

I told him I was and at his prodding told him a little of my journeys.

“I did the same thing in reverse once, back before the war,” he said. “Rode from York to Rome by way of France and Germany, and I’ll tell you, Europe was a different place back then. You had your Frenchies partying all night long, dressed up for their art balls in feathers and white robes and the like, and Berlin the same, only worse, men dressed up like girls with lipstick and all that, and dancing till dawn. But then, you know, out in the countryside, in the little villages, at dawn or late in the night, I’d hear tramping and marching in the streets, and troops of Brown Shirts would pass by in the dark, singing their bloody patriotic songs. We didn’t see it coming, did we?”

He had made the trip on a heavy, three-geared bicycle, and had to walk uphill in many places in the Alps, and then again in the Dolomites. But from the Italian lakes all the way down to Rome he was able to stay in the valleys, he said.

“It was the finest country, Italy, save, of course, for Mussolini and his band of gypsies. Friendly people. They would always put me up in the little hill towns, took pity on me, don’t you know, fed me, sent me on with directions to some cousin one day’s ride away, and all the way down to Rome like that. And it was better coming back four years later.”

He meant the war. He had landed at Salerno and fought his way northward, hill by hill, town by town, all the way to France.

“We were fagged by the time we got up into Umbria. March into the little villages and the old men weeping, the women smiling through their tears and shouting viva l’inglesi and so on, and the flags and the pretty girls. But we didn’t care. We’d been liberating villages since Sorrento.”

It was hard to believe that this frail old fellow, with his papery skin and thin fingers, had undertaken such a journey, and following this had spent four years fighting against boys his age, who not three years earlier stood him to rounds of lager in the beer gardens of Germany. But such, I suppose, are the ravages of time.

I told him my own traveling plans, and he began giving me very good advice about routes through the highlands, and suggested that rather than slog up to Fort William in the west of Scotland, I take a train on the last leg. And then he told me that since I was in the general area, I should take a ride along the Swaledale, which was, he said, one of the most beautiful valleys of the region. I stood him to another whiskey and soon he was reminiscing on the beauties of the past, and that eloquent, somehow ominous calm before the storm of the war years when everyone was poor, and life was, as he phrased it, “topped up” and there was nothing that could stop you.

“It’s why I made that bicycle trip. I wanted to see the fountains of Rome and I could not for the world of me think of any reason why I should not go. I had not a shilling to my name, but I kissed me mum goodbye, rolled me old bike out the garden gate, and rode off without a fare-thee-well. Oh, those were fine times we had before the storm,” he said, “and all the girls knew what was coming”—he winked at me knowingly—“and I do believe the sun shone more brightly and more often back then and it was none of this gray you see nowadays.” He glanced out the back window toward the North Sea, where a lowering sky had covered the gray brown chop of the waters.

I think this joie de vivre must have been more a question of his chronological age than the spirit of the times. I had heard other stories from the thirties in England when there was no coal, and the only time people would heat a parlor was when someone in the household was about to die. But I knew what he meant. I felt the same way as he once had. What’s to lose? You’ve got the strength, you make the time, and so you ride on.

The next day I pedaled over to Bempton Cliffs, which are even higher than the rocky heights of Flamborough Head. I watched more seabirds circling and then skirted the curve of the coast, with kittiwakes never out of sight or sound, and a cold North Sea wind biting at me. At Filey there was a great expanse of smooth sandy beach stretching off to the sea, and, having found a room for the night, I took a walk along the strand, trying to fight the wind as well as the sense that it was about to rain. This was a small, dreary spot, not a place where one would want to wait out the rain for a few days.

My premonitions proved true. That night on the roof I could hear the drumming of a serious northern downpour.

In London I had purchased some better foul weather gear for just such an occasion, and so I set out in the teeth of the rain, riding, fortuitously, with the wind. All along the coast under the whipping downpours there were wild tides and huge gray breakers roaring in, growling and smashing up on the rocky shores or wailing at the base of the sea cliffs where the kittiwakes and the gannets circled and cried. In the afternoon the weather began to clear, and I came into a country of sharp hills, with pastures and planted pine forests and sweeping, high moorland. Then the grades smoothed out, the sun appeared, and I stripped off the rain gear and began flying over long easy grades like a kittiwake over seas of brown heather, with islanded shades of green and banks of yellow gorse.

This was desolate, empty country, and as I tripped along, I heard for the first time a sound that would be with me for the next week or so, the high descending whinny of the curlew. In late afternoon, beaten up and tired, I turned off the main road, such as it was, and descended again to the coast, down a precipitous, narrow track to the little town of Robin Hood’s Bay. The road was so long and steep and curving and wet that I actually had to get off my bicycle and walk it down. By the time I got to the town I was chilled again and stopped in at a little well-lit tea room and had poached eggs with toast and a pot of tea. They were so good I had another plate.

As often seemed the case in the precious village tea rooms of the British Isles, there were two sympathetic waitresses serving.

“Any little bed and breakfasts in this town?” I asked one of them.

“Well, not really,” she said.

“You do have Harry’s place, though,” said the second one, a plump woman named Betty.

“Right,” said the first. “You’ve got Harry’s. I suppose.”

“And this Harry’s …?” I asked, tipping my head.

“Oh it’s nice, all right,” Betty said.

“Right,” said the other.

“But …?” I asked.

“But then you got Harry.”

“We’ve got the key if you like.”

“Any place else?” I had a sense that Harry’s might not be the best place in town.

“No. I’ll fetch the key,” Betty said. “Harry might not be home tonight. You’ll have the run of the place, if he doesn’t come home.”

Harry’s turned out to be a snug, narrow little house, set, like a beached ship, right out on the very rocks of the coast. The seas were beating against the east walls. In fact the whole of Robin Hood’s Bay was very much like being on shipboard. Narrow companionways that served for streets led down to a shingle beach, and huge breakers swept in at high tide and smashed up against the sea walls that protected the town, spraying the windows of the coast-facing houses, only to retreat a quarter of a mile back across the seaweed-strewn flats at low tide.

By six that night the town closed up, and I was left with the run of Harry’s house.

Nice Betty had set me up in a shiplike little cabin in an upstairs room, paneled in blond wood, with a heavy white comforter and a good clean smell. She showed me the kitchen and a study with a big television in it, and then brought out a shepherds pie and showed me how to warm it.

“Now you just make yourself at home here. Harry won’t mind. And if he comes home, it’ll be all right. He’ll understand he’s got a house guest tonight.”

“I hope Harry won’t become enraged when he finds me here,” I said.

I was beginning to imagine an ogre who stomps in and then eats his house guests, like Polyphemus.

“Don’t you worry. Harry won’t eat you for dinner,” Betty said.

I tried to make myself at home, cooked up my shepherds pie as instructed, made a pot of tea, and was sorely tempted by Harry’s whiskey cupboard, but felt I would be overstepping my bounds if I took a nip. I cleaned up after my dinner and then began perusing Harry’s books: Glories of Scotland. A Pictorial History of the Second World War. Great Battles of History. The Holy Bible. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Great Medical Mysteries, and finally The Royal Family.

I was tempted to poke around some more but instead went out for another walk. By now it was low tide and I crossed the slippery green flats looking for sandworms and “winkies” as the locals called the myriad species of periwinkles that forage on the flats.

The tides were huge here. When I had come into town the waters of the North Sea were breaking on the shore, and now the surf line was barely visible, set way out across the tidal flats. This is, of course, as we learned in sixth grade science class, the work of the moon, the theory being that the gravity of the moon exerts a pull on the waters of the globe. The side of the earth nearest the moon experiences a slightly greater pull as a whole, while the far side experiences a lesser pull. The effect of this is most evident in large bodies of water, such as the oceans.

The length of time that it takes the earth to rotate completely in relation to the moon causes two high tides and two low tides each day, and the size of these tides can vary tremendously from season to season and month to month because of the changes in the positions of the sun and moon over the course of a year. All this celestial-driven ebb and flow, this changing half-land half-sea environment, has created here on the planet earth a whole range of species such as the periwinkles and limpets that are able to survive in both environments. But the sun has an influence even on those species that live in the deep oceans.

The same cycles of growth, death, and decay that are at work on land also function in the seas and are regulated, as on land, by the solar cycles. In spring, as the life-giving rays penetrate deeper beneath the surface and the temperatures warm, there is a sudden and rapid growth of phytoplankton, which, especially in shallow areas, is stirred and mixed by spring storms and currents. The warming waters and the increase in plant food supplies beget blooms of planteating plankton, which in turn encourages plankton-eating species, everything from tiny newborn fish fry to immense creatures such as the baleen whales. The whole cycle reverses in winter. The weaker sun and the subsequent colder temperature slow the process and the oceanic year of growth and decay comes to an end.

In spite of the fact that the summer season on the sea was approaching, it was cold out on the flats, with an east wind whipping in, so I went back into town to look for a warm pub with one of those little gas fireplaces where I could take the chill off. All the streets in the town were steep and wet and glistening with salt spray and there was no green save for a few flowerpots, and no trees or shrubs to speak of anywhere. And no pubs. After a few explorations I went back and sat down in front of the blank TV and turned on the space heater to try to warm myself.

Around ten o’clock, just as I was about to head up for bed, I heard keys in the lock and a burly man with a graying beard and a heavy white cable sweater came in.

“I heard you were here,” he said, gruffly. “I’m Harry. And you would be the chap on the bicycle, wouldn’t you?”

“I am he, I believe,” I said.

“And it was you down at The North Light Inn, drinking whiskey with Old John Dawkins and talking of the war in Italy.”

“I was.”

“And I take it you believed that drivel he spilled about Italian girls and liberating the villages.”

“Well he did tell me some stories, but wasn’t any of it true?”

“Some. Maybe. But it wasn’t like that, and I’m here to tell you.”

This begat a history of his own wartime adventures, stories of imprisonment in Lithuania, long discursive rants against communism, the righteousness of the American position in Vietnam, Stalingrad, the Battle of the Bulge, attempts on Hitler’s life, the despicable nature of Poles, the dangers of the Chinese, the future of the Labor Party, why Royalty should be restored, and, finally, a long discourse on the history of the Standard Bearers of Her Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, an elite band of pensioners of which, he said, his father, god bless his dear departed soul, was a long-standing member. This went on and on until one in the morning, when, on the excuse of an early start, I managed to extricate myself and get up to bed.

At least I was able to have a glass or two of the whiskey I had been coveting.

Sometime in the night I heard his heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and woke up, fearing he would break in, roust me out, and make me stand at attention and listen to more stories of Lithuanian prison camps.

After a fitful sleep I woke up the next morning to find a note instructing me to pay Betty and have my breakfast at the tea room.

“Get a little history lesson, last night?” Betty asked, when I came in.

After a filling breakfast of fried eggs and rashers, a stack of hot buttered toast, and coffee I rode up to Whitby along the coast.

The town itself is an ancient fishing port at the mouth of the River Esk and consists of a maze of alleyways and narrow streets that run down to the busy quayside. The village is dominated by the looming skeleton of Whitby Abbey, which sits high on a cliff and ranks as one of the most haunting ruins in all of England. The wall of arches and crumbled stone seem to hover above the landscape and the ruin is visible both from sea and land for miles around.

The sky had cleared by the time I got there and the green carpet of grass that had overgrown the flags of the old abbey floor was wet and sweet smelling, and here, in the sheltered corners of the ruins, I discovered a warm place out of the wind and put my face up to the sun to bask.

Whitby Abbey was founded about 657 by Oswy, one of the powerful kings of Northumberland, and was made famous by its first abbess, St. Hilda, who enlarged the community of monks and nuns and constructed new buildings on the site. The monastery flourished until about 687, when it was reduced to ruins by the raiding Danes. The community of monks dispersed, and the abbot fled to Glastonbury, taking the relics of St. Hilda with him.

The abbey’s finest hour occurred in 664 when a synod of bishops met there to settle a long-standing dispute concerning the actual date of Easter, which had divided the Christians of northern England, who had been converted by the Celts, from Christians in southern England, whom the Romans had converted. Such small matters, and even so small a matter as the correct tonsure of Christian monks, mattered greatly to these early Christians and, of course, would matter even more after the Reformation. But in the seventh century the issue had become especially pressing to King Oswy, who followed the Celtic rule, whereas his wife, Queen Eanfleda, followed the Roman. After a month-long debate the king decided in favor of Rome, and the date of Easter was set as the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. All that remained was to predict exactly when the vernal equinox would occur.

This was easy enough in theory: You simply note when the day and night are equal length and then wait for the next full moon. The trouble came with the elaborate celebrations that would take place in the Christian church at Easter. Given the communication systems of the period, under the old method, there was hardly time to announce the holiday and prepare for the events. Furthermore, both the equinox and the full moon occur at different times at different places on the earth, which meant that there still was no general day of celebration—something that did not serve an institution such as the Roman Catholic Church, which was attempting to make claims to universal truths. As a result, in the twelfth century the popes, some of whom were greatly interested in astronomy themselves, encouraged a closer examination of the apparent motions of the sun and moon in the heavens and a means to enable them to predict far in advance when the vernal equinox would occur.

During this period, Europe was operating under the Great Compilation of Ptolemy, which had been introduced in Córdoba by Maimonides and Averroës in the tenth century and had spread through France and Italy. Under the Ptolemaic system, the earth sat at the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars circled around in perfect symmetry. In order to calculate the time of the return of the sun each spring, astronomers determined that they would have to lay out a meridian line, north to south, in some dark building with a hole in its roof. They had but to mark the spot on the line where light from the sun crossed at noon on the day of the vernal equinox, and observe how long the sun’s noon image took to return to the same spot on the line a year later.

Buildings of the right sort already existed it turned out—the great Gothic cathedrals of Italy and France. And so astronomers laid out meridians in stone on the church floors, pierced holes in the cathedral roofs or high walls, and began studying the heavens inside the churches. In effect, the churches became solar observatories. The irony was that in the very house of the Christian God, at the center of church power, and no more than a few feet from the sacred altars of Christianity, astronomers uncovered the great flaws in the dominant Ptolemaic earth-centered system that had dominated Europe and church doctrine for four hundred years, and ended up proposing a solar-based system. This development eventually shook apart the rock foundation upon which the church was based.

In 1543, by studying ancient astronomical records, Nicolaus Copernicus determined mathematically that the sun must be at the center of the solar system, but he still accepted the Ptolemaic model that held that the planets move in perfect circles. Fifty years later, by studying the skies with a newly invented device, the telescope, Galileo determined that the Copernican heliocentric model was correct. But even though he privately taught the system to his students, he did not openly declare the doctrine, since it was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. In 1616, the system of Copernicus had been officially denounced as dangerous to faith. Word got out of Galileo’s teachings and he was summoned to Rome and instructed to stop teaching the system. In spite of this pressure, in 1632 he published a work that supported the heliocentric theory. That brought down upon him the infamous courts of the Inquisition. He was recalled to Rome and tried, found guilty, and forced to recant, which he did. More or less. Legend holds that as he rose from his knees in front of the judges he mumbled “Epur si muove” (“Nevertheless it moves”).

Some four hundred years later, in 1992, the Church officially accepted the theory and apologized for its error.

One sultry August afternoon at Whitby, back in the late 1800s, a strange and sudden cloud enveloped the seas just outside the harbor and a violent storm swept in. By nightfall immense rollers were hurtling against the shore and watchers on the coast spotted a storm-tossed schooner, her sails tattered, rolling in toward the rocky coast. Those who knew the waters were certain she would ground out on the reef beyond the harbor and a searchlight was played upon the vessel. To their horror, observers saw that the ship was empty, save for a corpse lashed to the mast, its head lolling in the wash. Miraculously the schooner slipped through the harbor entrance, and with a mighty, jarring crash, struck the shore. At that moment, in the searchlight, watchers saw a huge dog leap from the bow and bound up the heights to a churchyard at the top of the cliffs. The schooner, the Demeter, turned out to be of Russian registry, and in the hold searchers found several oblong boxes marked “clay.”

Later in that same week, a local woman affected with sleep-walking wandered away from her bedroom at night and was found near the churchyard with two minor puncture wounds on her throat. She had been overwhelmed by a strange sleep. During this same period in Whitby, a certain tall, dark, and handsome nobleman from Transylvania appeared in the town.

Dracula was the invention of the nineteenth-century novelist Bram Stoker, but he has many of the qualities of the Zoroastrian god of darkness and evil, Ahriman, who heads a company of evil spirits and is the carrier of death and destruction. He is the opposite of Ahura Mazda, the all-wise, all-good, god of the sun and light, truth and goodness. Dracula is nothing if not a depressed character, a figure of melancholy—if depression and melancholy had a god, it would be he. He is, like depression, surrounded by darkness, clouds, graveyards, night doings, and a living death. All the words traditionally associated with depression are somehow related to this lack of light—a cloud hangs over one’s head, the dark night of the soul, and the like. The same, of course, is true of the other Prince of Darkness, the Devil, and all of these figures, Dracula, Ahriman, and the Devil, have the same archenemy—the sun.

Innumerable movies have been made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula story, but the one I like the best is the old 1940s version with Lon Chaney as Dracula. In this movie, there is a scene in the tombs of Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in which the hero, Jonathan Harker, enters the underground chamber where the vampires rest by day in their coffins. Dracula rises up to attack and kill this invader, but as the evil lord of the castle approaches, our hero raises the crucifix. This drives Dracula into paroxysms of rage, but does not kill him. What defeats him ultimately is the sun. While Dracula is raging, Harker bounds to a tall window and tears off the darkening curtains; great dusty beams of light stream in, striking the vampire and forcing him, hissing and snarling, back into his coffin. Once Dracula is rendered powerless by light, Harker delivers the coup de grâce, the wooden stake through the heart.

I spent one more night in Whitby and then the next day began a hard slog across the high moors of Yorkshire, headed for the Swaledale, at the old bicycle man’s suggestion. Immediately outside of Whitby the hills grew steep and precipitous, in some places so steep I was forced to dismount and push my bicycle up to the summit. High at the top of the moors the views across the countryside opened to the wide sky, with sharp, quiltwork, fairy tale hills, sheep meadows, banks of clouds in the western skies, and everywhere now the eerie descending cry of the curlews. I thought to stop early that day since it was such fine country, but had trouble finding a spot. There was no place in the little town of Grosmont so I pushed on to Egton, straight uphill for two miles through a lonely country, with very few cars, and once or twice a passing shepherd with his flock, one of whom I greeted. He stared at me somewhat aghast as if no one on earth had ever spoken to him before and then opened his mouth and pointed to it, indicating, I believe, that he was unable to speak. He had a good whistle though. I could hear him for miles, directing his dogs to work the flocks by means of his whistling.

Eventually I happened upon a quiet country inn beside a small river, with a stone courtyard, a dark wood-paneled pub, and a first-rate, civilized parlor. I had a late lunch and took a little walk along the riverbank to stretch my legs. Here, I was joined immediately and enthusiastically by two house dogs, a smooth-haired energetic Jack Russell terrier and a slow-moving shaggy black Scotty. We set out along the little path working our way upriver through grassy glades and groves of poplar, sloe, and larch. As I walked, the Jack Russell would dart off into the brush, shake something, and then trot on, hardly breaking stride. I went over to see what he was catching and found that he was killing water rats as we walked. Business as usual for him, I supposed.

The trail seemed to go on and on, and the light of the sun fell through the twisting tree leaves, and soon the glades ended and the trail began to climb into the hills. The Scotty turned back at this point, but the Jack Russell carried on with me, still scurrying off left and right, hunting vigorously. It was warmer now, I could hear the rippling river below me and the curlews above me in the hills, and the distant bells of the sheep and the air was filled with the sharp scents of the moors, and it was all fresh and sweet and charged with the glories of the high country of Yorkshire and its deep structure of legend and literature. This was, among other things, the country of the Brontës.

At one point I came to a sheltered spot among ferns and brake where the warming spring sun was beating down with full force. I lay back and folded my arms behind my head and felt the power of my deity on my face. Relaxing there in the benevolent warmth, I could understand why, here in the northern climates, the summer solstice celebrations were so festive, and why the early peoples would become so concerned about the sun’s possible disappearance at the winter solstice.

That night at the inn I had one of the best meals I had had in England, a roast duckling and a good bottle of Chablis, and roast potatoes sprinkled with thyme, along with fresh green peas, wild leeks, and a basket of hot rolls with butter, followed by a salad and a little apple tart for dessert. I was offered coffee and brandy in the parlor and was prepared to accept the offer until I saw there another group of country gentlemen dressed in tweeds and smoking and milling around back and forth between the pub and the parlor. My immediate thought was to duck out—I feared more war stories abrewing—but one of them spotted me.

“You the chap with the old Peugeot?” he said.

Peugeot, I thought. He noticed my Peugeot. Maybe he’s another bicycle man.

“Come and have a drink on us, lad. Any man that braves these bloody hills on an old machine like that deserves a dram.”

I couldn’t hide, and this begat another night of heavy drinking that ended with full-bodied northern males slapping me back heartily and calling me laddy, and trying to get me to go trout fishing with them the next day in the fast-running rivers of the Yorkshire dales.

There was one shy fellow there nodding in agreement to nearly everything the big boys shouted out, and toward the end of the evening he came over and asked quietly where I had come from.

“Cádiz,” I said.

“Oh, Cádiz,” he said. “I would like to go to Cádiz. Someday I want to go back to see my people.”

“Your people are from Cádiz?” I asked. He was a sandy-haired fellow with sky blue eyes.

“Well long ago, yes.”

“And they immigrated to Yorkshire?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“But you have people there still?”

“Well a long time ago, you see. I lived there.”

It turned out he had lived in Cádiz in the tenth century, and had served as a musician in one of the early courts. He told me in a flat, matter-of-fact manner that he had fallen in with one of the caliph’s favorite concubines, and they plotted their escape together. Their plan, he said, was to sneak her out of the harem on a dark night, leap over the city walls, and head to northwest Portugal, to those regions recently reconquered by the Christians.

“I had it in mind to convert, you see, and then marry under the Christian law. But our plot was uncovered.”

The poor innocent lamb, standing here before me, with his narrow face, somewhat bucked teeth, and tousled sandy hair, had been ignominiously dragged to the dungeons of the alcázar and beheaded with a huge curving scimitar.

What became of his beloved Jezebel, he did not know.

“But I shall meet her again someday,” he said. “She and I are free, you see, from the restraints of time. I knew her before Cádiz.”

And where was that, I wanted to know. I had a sense of what was coming.

“Egypt.”

“Eleventh Dynasty?” I asked. “Thebes?”

“Right. How did you know that? You weren’t there too were you? Do I look familiar? You must have been there too.”

“Just a sense,” I said.

It was indeed only a good guess, but I had met people with past lives before, and somehow they never seem to have had to live in boring times. They’re always in the courts of the Medici in Florence or in Rome under Augustus Caesar, or Thebes in the period of the worship of the sun god Amon.

“Did you take part in any of those grand processions along the Nile at the solar festivals, when you were there?” I asked.

“I don’t remember. This was three maybe four lives back for me. I did have a little scarab though, the dung beetle. A little image of what’s his name.”

“Khepri?”

“Right. Khepri, the beetle. He rolls the dung across the sky.”

“The sun image.”

“Right. He rolls the sun up everyday. How d’you know all this, though? You lived back then too, I think. Otherwise you wouldn’t know about Khepri and Thebes. Now, maybe you saw her, when you were there. They called her Harakhte, after the falcon, and she was one of the most beautiful courtesans of the palace, with almond eyes, and a lithe brown body, high cheek bones and full red lips, and we used to meet down by the River Nile with the red sun behind us and the white ibis stalking in the bulrushes. I remember her so well. I can see her now. That was the first life in which I met her. The second life she was a slave girl to the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. She was unaged, still a great beauty, even after a thousand years.”

I ventured a line I knew from Anthony and Cleopatra—a favorite of Magda’s.

“‘Age cannot wither her.’”

“Wot’s that?”

“It’s just a line from Anthony and Cleopatra.”

“Right, I remember that.”

I told him I knew about Egypt because I was interested in sun mythologies and that ancient Egypt, as he of course knew, having lived back then, was a solar-based culture. Then I asked him if he remembered anything about all this solar worship, and did his people really believe that the sun god Ra was as powerful as the scholars believe he was, and was it true that even baboons worshipped the sun?”

“Oh yes, definitely. I seen ’em myself. Harakhte and me used to steal away to the cliffs west of the river. You know, to be alone. We’d see baboons out there on the rocks, facing the sun, they were. Their arms raised. Oh yes,” he said, “baboons worshipped the sun. I remember that much. Harakhte, she was right fond of baboons. She had a pet one for a while. And a dog. A white dog.”

“What was its name?”

“Mu,” he said without the slightest hesitation. “Nice little chap. Used to lick my hand. Lived in the house. Not like those other dogs you’d see around in the streets at night.”

Try as I might, I could not keep him on the subject of the sun, not because he didn’t know much, but he was far more interested in his memories of Harakhte. He did tell me about the golden-winged bird of the sun, the phoenix, and the falcon sun, Horus, and he described the little models he used to see of Ra’s boat and contemporary stories of Amenhotep II that he had heard about. But he was mainly obsessed with this beautiful courtesan who had the ability to transcend the ages.

“I am looking forward to seeing her again,” he said.

I asked him if he had lived long in the town and he said he was born and raised and would die here.

“Ever been to London?” I asked.

“Once, when I was twelve. Didn’t stay long.”

I was fishing to see if he had spent any time in the British Museum, reading the labels on the mummies and the statuary there, but he hadn’t been there.

I asked if, by any chance, he knew Herodotus.

“I think not. No, I don’t remember him. He might have been that Greek chap lived down the way from Harakhte’s servants. I’ve heard of him.”

Who am I to judge? There was a famous reincarnated Londoner whom I had learned about from Magda who had some sort of fever when she was young and woke up from a coma feeling disjointed for the rest of her life, until she got to Egypt, where she felt suddenly at home. She had strong memories of the sites of ancient palaces and developed an uncanny ability to locate buried ruins for archeologists.

After an hour or two, the pub started closing up, and I said good night to my Egyptian informant and made my way to my room down a long hall. One of the drinkers emerged from the men’s room as I was walking by, and tipped his head at me.

“Get an earful did you?” he said.

The next morning, after yet another hearty breakfast, I went out into the stone courtyard. The barman was there with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up above his elbows and his tie tucked into his shirtfront. He was throwing a tennis ball at the corner of the courtyard wall so that it would arc back in a high curve. The Jack Russell was there catching it in midair with balletic leaps.

“Getting his exercise?” I said.

“His and mine, too,” he said.

We chatted for a while before I left, and I asked him about the sandy-haired man and if he knew him. He did indeed, the barman said. He lived with his mother in a small croft in the moors high above the town.

“He’s a quiet sort. Comes in Tuesday nights for a drink. Keeps to himself. Got some strange ideas, I believe.”

Maybe the loneliness of the high moors unchains temporal restraints among such people. The winters are said to be long here; and the sun sets at three in the afternoon in winter and does not rise until ten in the morning, and then in thick fogs.

The clouds had returned that morning and I forged on through a less dramatic country toward Glaisdale to Lealholm Bridge, where the hills began to steepen once more. I had lunch at a small empty hotel, crossed the Esk River for the last time, and then began climbing higher and higher over Killdale Moor, all treeless and patched with shades of gray and green and brown. For the next two or three days I pedaled on in this manner across the wild landscape of the Yorkshire Moors, climbing through long, sloping sheep meadows and then winging down to little river valleys with towns at the bridge crossings. Every day it rained, and every day it cleared again, with huge walls of clouds, and then sun and then rain, and a cool wind, which was refreshing on the uphill slogs and chilling on the way down.

On the third day, I began another seemingly interminable uphill climb, the longest yet. At the summit I paused to rest. There below me lay the Edenic valley of the Swaledale, with the river winding through it, banded by woods, and the vast brownish green moors sweeping above the floodplains to hills dotted with flocks of white sheep and, above them, the cloud-banked, blue-rifted sky.

I tightened the straps of my panniers, shifted the gears upward, and flew down the west side of the long slope into the town of Keld, where I found a bed and breakfast on a working farm just beyond the town.

Here there lived a little family of hard-working country people, milking the cow herd, tending sheep flocks, and taking in boarders to make do. We all ate together at breakfast and then again at evening, and it was so pleasant there, and so quiet, save for the lowing of the cattle at dawn and dusk and the cry of the curlews and the sheep bells, that I decided to stay on. It was Whitsuntide, a bank holiday in England, and I feared it would be difficult to find another spot anyway.

On the third day there I took a long walk down the valley of the river Swale over to the town of Meeker, alternately climbing into the moors and descending to the river. The sky was mixed with ranks of fast-moving clouds, some of them dark and rainfull, others light and airy and building to vast spires and castles in the air. There were dappled groves on the river valley floor, and wide fields with abandoned houses. At one point there was a hard downpour and I ran for an abandoned barn and sheltered there in the old musty hay while the shower passed. Other hikers and farmers back to 1900 had marked inscriptions on the walls, relating weather and progress of the haying, and I sat there in the hay, crossed-legged in front of the open barn door, watching the sheets of rain stream down. It occurred to me that this must be the actual day of Whitsunday, or Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, the day Christ rose from the dead. Pentecost is based on the ancient Hebrew feast that marks the closing of the spring grain harvest. According to James Frazer, in earlier traditions a king would be selected, would serve for a given period of time, and then would be killed and buried around this time of year. Three days later he would be reborn in the form of grain.

The family that ran the farm, Laurie and Marjorie Rukin, had one son still living at home, and had gathered under their wings a collection of local people who helped out around the place. One of these was a straight-back, blue-eyed woman with a direct stare named Faith Cloverdale. Another was a little postman who always wore black wool trousers tucked into his boots and a baggy red shirt with black pinstripes. He would come up each day to help with the milking, hang around the farm and play with Meg, an excitable little border collie who would crouch on the ground and “swim” on command. “Swim then, Meg,” people were always saying to her, whereupon she would start her dogpaddling.

One day out in the moors I came upon the little postman, sitting on a rock staring into space with his arms folded over his knees.

“Lovely view,” I said as I approached.

He nodded vigorously and looked away.

“That it is, that it is,” he said.

“Beautiful day today,” I said.

The sun was shining clear of clouds for the first time since I had arrived.

“Right. That it is.”

“Nice spot you’ve chosen.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Nice spot. Very nice. Lovely views. Yes. Right.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Well I’ll be off now.”

He leaped to his feet and started down the trail toward the farm.

Why he felt it necessary to rush off I couldn’t figure.

I saw him the next day and asked if he was going up to the moors today.

“No. Not me. I’ll be staying here. Got me chores.”

Try as I might I couldn’t figure out why he was avoiding me. Everyone else at the farm was outgoing and friendly. Finally I asked Faith Cloverdale about his behavior.

“Well, you’re an American, are you not?”

“I am,” I said.

“He’s afraid of you. He thinks you’re armed. He’s heard about Americans on the telly. Don’t believe he’s seen many though.”

This little valley had a strange hold over me. I was actually reluctant to leave. The family that ran the place had been on the same farm for nearly four hundred years, and they had acquired a seasonal rhythm driven by weather, crops, and animals. There were many animals around, Meg, the dog, a clutch of puppies, two or three pregnant cats, a herd of thirty-eight cows, each of whom had a name and known character, a less well defined flock of sheep, with many “lambykins” as Faith called the lambs, chickens and chicks, doves in the dovecote, a goat, two pigs, and a community of valley people including the postman who would come to the kitchen part of each day or evening to chat. I grew very lazy there, sometimes sleeping through the rains, and I began wondering if I could live like this in this spot.

There was some ineffable, almost mythic quality to the place. It was this very attraction, the hold it was beginning to wield on me, that made me think I had better leave. Pilgrims on the way to their various shrines often get waylaid or tempted by earthly attachments. The strange power the valley was exerting was somehow increased by the fact that almost every day it rained at least a little. This no doubt accounted for the deep greens of the hills and valleys, the freshness of the brooks and the river that ran behind the house, and the wealth of bird life—the thickets and high moors were alive with thrushes and warblers, the cry of the curlews filled the air all day, and there were continuous bursts of red and speckled grouse in the thickets of heather on the heights. The weather was part of the attraction, however. In Andalusia I came to take the sun for granted in spite of the fact that I hit some patches of rain. In southwestern France the presence of sun was a regular part of the journey. I would ride on under the warm skies, day after day. But here in the Swaledale, the appearance of the fulsome, silvery yellow sun in a cobalt blue break in the clouds was a near religious experience. The slanted, raking light that filled the valley at dawn and dusk was infused with a radiance I hadn’t ever noticed before, anywhere.

When I announced that I must pedal on, I sensed a vague, unexpressed sadness at the dinner table that evening. These Yorkshire people did not have the effusive, overbearing, almost smothering qualities of some of the bed and breakfast “mothers” that I had encountered, but they had a warm, country directness, the famous north country kindness that made me feel at home. I wasn’t really a guest there, I was just there, a part of the place.

On a clear, warm morning, I packed my things, helped feed the lambs, wandered around the farm, seeking people out to say goodbye, and then, while the family stood by the kitchen door, not saying much, I bid them all farewell and unhappily mounted up and began the long climb out of the valley. About halfway up the eastern slope on the road to Kirby I came upon the postman walking down the hill. I stopped to say goodbye.

“Leaving us are you then?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “On to Kirby, then Sedbergh, then the Lake District.”

“All the way there? The Lake District is it? It’s a long way off.”

“I’ll make it,” I said.

“Right.” He looked away.

“Cheerio,” I said, and held out my hand.

He shook my hand, tipping his head downward and to the side as he did so and nodding without looking me in the eye.

“Goodbye, then.” He let go of my hand quickly.

Poor little man, I thought.

“I’ve got to do the mail now.”

“Yes.”

“Must be going.”

“Well I’m off, too.”

“I wish you luck in your adventures,” he mumbled and clipped off at a fast, nervous pace without looking back.

I crossed a bridge over the headwaters of the Swale at the crest of the hill. It struck me that at the rate the postman was moving, he would reach the farm at about the same time as the waters now running under the bridge.

Thirteen

Apparell’d in Celestial Light

At Sedbergh, at the edge of a field, I found a pleasant bed and breakfast with a sunny dining room and white tablecloths, each table set with a little bowl of local wildflowers. Warm-hearted though the Keld household had been, it was a rough and unpretentious existence there, with few amenities and ample, but by no means elaborate or well-presented, dishes. Here, at tea, I had fresh scones and strawberry jams on little plates set on doilies with china cups and silver table settings, a Scottish maid named Mary, who set out more plates of sweeties, and was there again in the morning, dishing up oatmeal and toast points, pots of real coffee—as opposed to the dreaded instant coffee—and dishes of fresh fried eggs. I took very long hot baths in their old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub and left the next morning, pedaling on easy country lanes, amid birdsong and the scent of fresh-mown hay.

Knowing the difficulty of the climbs ahead of me, I rested by a wide, rippling brook practicing Irish jigs on a penny whistle given to me by John Rukin, the son of the farm family in Keld. I went through my old favorites, “Soldiers Joy,” “Roaring Jelly,” “The Muckin’ of Geordie’s Byre,” then took off my shoes, bathed my feet, and lay back in the spring sun to think about my schedule.

I had not been keeping careful track of time or dates in the past week. In fact time had almost seemed suspended in the Swaledale. I couldn’t be sure how long I had actually stayed, and I started working back with dates trying to calculate what day it might be. In this manner I came to the date of June first, which meant that there were only twenty more days to the solstice. In the Swaledale, the sun would leave the valley floor an hour or two after the evening meal, and the light would slowly creep up the west-facing slopes of the eastern ridges. But when the sun actually set was hard to say. Great ribbons of fire would sally across the sky for hours after the valley floor was a well of darkness. At Sedbergh after dinner, I went for a walk and didn’t come back to the bed and breakfast until ten or so, and the sun was still up. So we were getting close.

I sat up, inspired to undertake a great hill that lay just ahead. I wanted to get to Kendal to find out the actual date.

Once I got on the other side of the hill, I heard a strange roaring in the air, and in due time crossed over the hideous M6 motorway that strikes up through Lancaster and Cumbria from Manchester and Liverpool. From this point over to Kendal was a slow and arduous climb, followed by a long descent into the busy streets of the town. I went immediately to the post office and learned that it was June second, not the first, and that because of the fine weather, the locals were preparing for another onset of tourists. I pushed on toward Bowness-on-Windermere, riding up and coasting down, riding up and coasting down, all the way on back roads to Trout Beck and on to Windermere and finally Amble-side, where the only place to stay was a three-star hotel, where the hostess set me up in a pleasant single room with a bath and then ruined the atmosphere by making bad jokes about Pakistanis.

The next day I rode out to Dove Cottage to pay homage to the other great poet of the sun, William Wordsworth, who had lived for eight years in the cottage with his sister, Dorothy, and his wife, Mary.

In 1799, Wordsworth and Coleridge made a walking tour of the Lake District from Temple Sowerby and passed Dove Cottage along their way. The house was then an empty inn called the Dove and Olive Branch, and later in the same year William and his devoted sister Dorothy moved into the cottage. Coleridge by that time had already moved to Keswick, but no sooner had Dorothy and William moved in than Coleridge began regular and prolonged visits. Wordsworth had married his childhood companion, Mary, and she brought her sisters to the cottage, ostensibly to help take care of the children. By this time, Thomas De Quincey, who shared Coleridge’s taste for opium, was an almost permanent guest, and by 1808, with children, and continuous house guests, and the presence of Coleridge all the time, the cottage began to feel overcrowded, and the whole troop moved to Grasmere to find more spacious living quarters.

I am not one for guided tours of house interiors, but I am interested in the setting of places in which artists and writers worked, and Dove Cottage is set in one of the most beautiful locations of any of the literary retreats that I have seen. From the garden the vista takes in three-quarters of the Grasmere valley, the lake, Loughrigg, Silver Howe, Easedale, all the way to Helm Crag with its sweeping fells, and the gray lake below the billowing Lake District sky.

While I was poking around outside the cottage I fell into conversation with an old gardener deadheading flowers with a pair of shears. He was dressed for the occasion in flannel trousers and vest, a blue shirt, and a red necktie.

“Are you interested in the poet, then?” he asked.

I told him I had been trying to remember a line about the sun, which I then quoted to him—“All things that love the sun are out of doors …”

“That’d be ‘The Leech Gatherer,’ I believe,” he said. “But there’s others you must know,” and hereupon began quoting the poet: “‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light.…’ Do you know that one?”

“Sounds familiar,” I said

“And how about this: ‘… The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth.…’ I can do more if you like.”

“He was a fine poet,” I said.

“That ’e was, that ’e was—roamed all over these parts and ’e spent a lot of time right here in the garden, watching the light. Was him and Dorothy first put up the roses here, and the honeysuckle. Dorothy used to bring in flowers from the hills, wild thyme, and columbine from the fellside, and wild orchids from the lake banks. ‘In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm’… as the poet said.”

“You know a lot about the poet,” I said.

“Was a great, kind man, the poet.”

I asked him if he thought William Wordsworth made especial use of sun images in his poetry. “Did he enjoy the sun?” I asked.

“Well not in the way that Blake fellow did. You wouldn’t see the poet basking naked in his garden. And anyway he loved all weathers, storm clouds and rain, you know, ‘not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come.…’ That sort of thing.”

“‘Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower …,’” I quoted, summoning a line from freshman English.

“‘We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind,’” he continued.

If this keeps up, I thought, I’ll have to spend the rest of the afternoon here, listening to the full body of the 4,000 however many lines of the prolific Mr. William Wordsworth.

I began to make my excuses, but made the mistake of admitting that I had not yet been inside the cottage.

“You must though. You must. Go up and ask Mrs. Daley to show you Dorothy’s journal. She’ll have the entry for today. And furthermore, she’ll show you the study where the poet worked. It’s a fine prospect from there.”

I assured him I would, but I was actually planning to secretly escape. Then I changed my mind and went inside and asked for Mrs. Daley, who without offering the full tour gladly showed the entry for June 3rd.

Even without Wordsworth, the Lake District would be one of the most literary regions of this intensely literary nation. William Gilpen wrote a well-known guidebook to the region in 1772, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century sightseers were regularly visiting the area. Thomas Gray of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” fame spent time in the region in the eighteenth century. John Keats, who also made a tramp through here, complained in 1818 that all of London had invaded the district. Thomas De Quincey, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ended up living in Ambleside after the Dove Cottage group broke up. Shelley and the poet Robert Southey spent time in the Lakes. Walter Scott was a regular visitor, one of the inhabitants of Dove Cottage; Tennyson stayed at Bassenthwaite, which is thought to be the setting for the closing scenes in “Idylls of the King,” and the art critic and author John Ruskin moved to Coniston Waters in the 1870s. Beatrix Potter spent almost every summer in the Lakes, as did the children’s writer Arthur Ransome.

Long before the lakes were discovered by England’s writers and poets, long before there was an England in fact, Cumbria and the lakes region appear to have been an important part of the world. There are more than 1,000 Neolithic archeological sites in the area, one of the oldest of which is the stone circle known as Castlerigg. After my visit to Dove Cottage, I decided to pedal over for a look.

Very few places are as evocative as a four-thousand-year-old temple, but in order to really grasp the meaning of the depth of time, you have to arrive at the right moment, as I had at Stonehenge. The sun was in the west by the time I got to Castlerigg, and the few tourists who had gathered were lounging around the stones, posing for pictures, and slowly meandering back to their parked cars. I was too early for sunset, but it was about time for high tea, and as the visitors departed I was able to find some isolated spots to meditate on the siting of this important Neolithic site.

The stone circle consists of thirty-eight boulders, flanked by tall stones set due north, and an even taller pillar set in the southeast. An arrangement of stones juts into the circle from the east and aligns perfectly with an earthen circle at the summit of the Great Mell Fell, which is about six miles off. A line from the southeast pillar fixes the point at which the midsummer sun would have set some five thousand years ago, when the stone ring was laid out.

The Lakeland fells surround the ring, and the site overlooks a fertile woodland, and this whole arrangement of circles and pillars on a flat, open plain is one of the most evocative settings of any of the myriad stone circles of Europe. Theories on the siting of the temple hold that specific stones in the circle line up with specific mountaintops in the ring of surrounding hills and mark the rising or setting sun as well as the rise of certain stars to determine the dates of seasonal festivals. But as is so often the case with prehistoric monuments, nothing is proven. One of the more interesting theories holds that the stones, known locally as the Carles, are in fact petrified Danish warriors, frozen into rock by the gods for some heinous deed.

On my way over to Keswick, after my visit, near what appeared to be a conference center, I spotted a circle of people in a meadow above the lake, going through the ritual exercises of a yoga class. For traditional yogis, the sun was a recognized, driving force of the universe, and I waited for a while, to see if the group would execute the well-known series of postures known as the salute to the sun. In the Hindu cosmology the simplest form of the sun god was Surya, the solar disc that one sees everyday. But Surya, like Apollo, who drove a fiery chariot across the sky each day, was known in sacred texts by as many as twelve different names. He was known to be the force behind all the great gods of the Hindu pantheon and is still worshipped today by devout Brahmans. At dawn each day his name is evoked in lines from the Gayatri, one of the sacred texts of the Vedas, as “the divine Vivifier.”

Back in Keswick, after some searching I found a bed and breakfast outside the town where I was offered the last room in the place, a tiny upstairs den with a green hill just outside the bedroom window. The other rooms had either views of the lake or the mountains and were decidedly more expensive. In the morning there I met a pleasant couple named Rolph and Judy who were undertaking a hiking tour in the old style of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

“We’ll set out on a fine morning such as this,” Rolph said. “Pick a route and a subject and then try to get to the end of both.”

I didn’t quite understand. “Get to the end of the trail, you mean?”

“Yes, and the idea.”

“What he means is that we discuss something as we hike,” Judy said.

“Yesterday it was the poetry of William Wordsworth,” Rolph said.

Judy snickered. “That’s not true, actually. Rolph’s not fond of poetry. We talk about ideas, any idea.”

“No Wordsworth, not even here?” I asked.

“Rolph has no time for Wordsworth, I’m afraid,” Judy said.

I was curious to know what kind of ideas and even had a topic in mind for them, such as “Is the sun God?” but it turned out they were more interested in politics and political philosophies than larger questions, such as the driving force of all nature and culture.

Rolph was a witty fellow, but it appeared that protecting nature and the environment was not high on his agenda.

“Gone too far if you ask me,” he said, at one point. “Man’s role on earth is to remake it. Subdue and multiply, saith the Lord.”

“You see what I have to deal with,” Judy said.

“So you don’t think much of the Ramblers Association, I take it?” I was referring to a recently formed organization of walkers who made a point of maintaining the ancient public ways in Britain, some of which were being closed off by local farmers and landholders to keep people off their fields, and up in Scotland, away from the grouse moors.

“Bunch of crazies,” Rolph said.

“See what I mean?” Judy said.

“So what’s your topic today?” I asked.

“Wordsworth,” Rolph said.

“We don’t have one. We don’t plan one, they just come up. Rolph here imagines he wants to be in Parliament. But he’s the last man on earth you want representing you.”

All this banter and snookering was merely superficial. This was a couple who enjoyed each other immensely. They asked me about my bicycle journey and became interested in my “topic” for the trip but could not for the world understand why I would go north to the Hebrides to see the sun when it was a known fact that Scotland had some of the most unpredictable weather in all of Europe.

“Scotland is no place for a sun worshipper,” Rolph said.

I explained that I was not a sun worshipper in the traditional sense of beaches and suntans.

“I’m headed for the stone ring at Callanish,” I said. “I’ve been stopping at megaliths all the way north. I was just over at Castlerigg yesterday.”

“Did you sacrifice a maiden there?” Rolph asked.

“No, but I was forced to rescue one from the Druid priests who showed up at sundown,” I said, rising to his challenge.

“That’s another thing,” Rolph said, “these Scots, they’re a pagan lot. Professed Christianity back in the seventh century, but haven’t really been converted yet.”

“That’s why I’m going there,” I said.

All this time in the Lakes the weather had been warm and summery, with day after day of full sun. Wherever I went I had dawdled along, stopping by pleasant stone bridges, hiding my bicycle and wandering up the slopes to sit on a rock and play old sad melodies on my pennywhistle. But on my way back from my last outing, a cloud rack hove into view and by the time I got to town there was a decided chill in the air. I went into a local pub to warm up.

Here there was a happy crowd of hikers and ramblers, drinking and playing darts. There was an upright fellow with a full sandy beard and a great sweep of hair, a typical Scot. He caught my accent and offered to buy me a whiskey.

“Why not,” I said. “What’s a good brand?”

“Och mon. Any whiskey’s good whiskey,” he said.

I feared another night of drinking, but he was a stolid sort, also a walker who, like me, was on a long trek. He was walking home to Dumfries, he said.

“It’s a long walk from here, isn’t it?”

“No, not really, I calculate three or four days. Save for this weather coming in. I might lie low, for while.”

Unlike me he was a careful weather watcher and told me that a huge front had come in and very heavy rains were predicted off and on over the next few days. This information caused me to reconsider—yet again—my itinerary. If I went directly northwest, to Mallaig, as I was planning, he said I would run into the teeth of the storm and have to stay in the warrens of Glasgow. The weather was drier—as it often is—up in the northeast, he said.

“Aberdeen is dry?” I asked.

“For the time being,” he said. “If you’re a free man, and so you seem to be if I might say as much, go up there and then ride across the Highlands to Mallaig. Don’t be going through Glasgow.”

There is a story in my family about two cousins, one of whom had been the third son of a laird in the town of Kintore, west of Aberdeen. The official version was that, as the third son, he would, under the Scottish system of primogeniture, inherit nothing, and so he and his cousin came to America in 1722 and set up a tobacco trade in Virginia. My theory, the unofficial but perhaps more accurate one, was that this third son, one Hugh Forbes-Mitchell, was either a bastard, or in essence a remittance man who was banished to the Americas for his transgressions. I had always been curious about the town and the manor house where Hugh Forbes-Mitchell had lived, and decided to change my plans drastically, forego my western route, and follow the suggestion of my walking friend.

The next morning, in a heavy downpour, I rode my bicycle to the station at Keswick and boarded a train for Edinburgh.

Fourteen

Chariots of Fire

In Edinburgh in a warm hotel not far from Princes Street I found a friendly clerk who also appeared to be fond of whiskey and was an energetic tour guide. He joined me for a dram as I tried to reconstitute my plans yet again. Unlike so many others I had met on my trip, this man understood completely why I would come to Scotland to better appreciate the sun. He was an excited talker and the more he talked, the more intoxicated he became, not with the whiskey but with the sound of his own words.

“The sun is our god here, lad,” he said in his churly Edinburgh burr. “The sun is god and that you must know. And now, let me ask you this. How often does a man see the face of God? And when you do, when you see his glorious radiance above the castle and St. Margaret’s Chapel, when, as he so rarely does here in this dark city, he deigns to show his face, you must stop and pay obeisance. Now don’t be going over to the Western Isles, I tell you. Go north to the Orkneys. There’s a great ring to the sun there, and the people are Danish in their worship. If you want to understand what it means to love the sun, go there, where it never shines.”

I didn’t ask for this speech, but of course I quite agreed with everything he said. His idea was tempting, but since I would have to go north in either case, I left by train the next day after buying a heavy wool sweater. I sat on the left side of the train watching the Scottish landscape pass through rain-streaked windows. Soon I could see beneath the heavy blanket of clouds the gray green sweep of the lower slopes of the Eastern Highlands, the choppy gray mist-shrouded expanses of moors, waterfalls, and rippling salmon runs, with the ruins of deserted crofts, and periodically, through rifts in the clouds, the indications of true wildness. I longed to be outside in the open air, rainswept or no, forging my way through the great glens, fighting hills and headwinds, and by night coming into quaint, well-lit pubs.

I debarked at Aberdeen, switched trains, and eventually made my way to the small, generally unremarkable town of Kintore. After questioning a few people I was told that a certain woman named Mary would take in boarders from time to time. Mary, it turned out, was the town nurse, and I was soon ensconced in her daughter’s room among teddy bears and shelves of dolls and little framed pictures of fairies dancing in sunlit glades that did not look at all Scottish. In fact nothing in that room looked Scottish. I wondered how long Mary’s daughter would stay in this little corner of the world.

If she left, she would be in keeping with tradition. Scotland has been losing population for over three hundred years and there are fewer people in the Highlands now than there were in the mid-eighteenth century.

In the evening the sky cleared and I went for a long walk in the fields beyond the town. This was lower, rolling country, not the rough-hewn Highlands I had passed on the way here, and all above me in the warming evening clouds the skylarks were singing madly and hovering high over the fields. As I walked along I heard the skirl of pipes, a sound—when heard at a distance, at least—that has always stirred some atavistic charge in my soul. My progenitors had come from this village and by rights I was supposed to be at home in the Highlands and the heather. In fact I had always felt more at ease in sunny Italy, under the blue Mediterranean skies, with hot town squares, the peal of campaniles, and tangy red wine. But then that too is terribly English. No one really likes it in the British Isles in my view, either they stay out of habit, or like my people get up and leave. And those who stay take vacations in the south whenever they can afford to.

The next day I explored the town of Kintore, visited the old manor house that was said to have been in my family until the 1930s, and then, in the churchyard, found some weathered gravestones with my family name inscribed on them. As I was leaving I happened to meet the kindly vicar, a lank, gray-haired man who walked with a cane. He began pointing out the ancient stonework on the church wall bearing, along with the early Christian angels and saints, pagan symbols of the Picts.

In the time of the Romans, all of what is now northern Scotland was under the control of loosely connected tribes of people that the Italians (that is, the Romans) called the “Picti” or painted ones. They were a violent, warlike herd of people who wore tattoos and painted themselves before going into battle and were so vicious that even the warlike Romans gave up on invasion and, in Hadrian’s time, simply built a wall all the way across the island from Solway Firth to the Tyne to keep them out of Britain.

The Picts organized themselves into individual tribes and were influenced, at least in the latter period of their obscure history, by people of Celtic origin. The actual origin of the Picts is not known, and not much is known about their culture either, but there is some thought that they may be of Gaulish descent, since there was a group known as the Pictones who lived on the Bay of Biscay south of the Loire.

Contemporary with the Picts, or perhaps even their common ancestors, who lived across the North Sea in Denmark, was an active and better-documented Bronze Age culture that shared many of the characteristics of the Picts. These Danish tribes had evolved, as had the Picts, no doubt, from stone age cultures that hunted in these northern regions 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, after the retreat of the last glacier. During the Neolithic period, agriculture and cattle herding became part of their livelihood in both Denmark and Scotland, and around 1000 B.C. the Danes began building large mound-graves, which have been the source of rich archeological troves. One of these artifacts was a bronze chariot found at Trundholm Bog in northwest Zealand, dated about 1400 B.C.

The artifact resembles a child’s pull toy. It is a wheeled horse that drags behind it a golden sun chariot upon which is mounted a bronzed disk, sheeted with engraved gold. The object is large enough to have been drawn along by priests or acolytes in sacred processions during some long lost solar ritual.

Sun symbols in the form of spirals and circles and even starlike rays surrounding the horse’s eyes are engraved on the flat surface of the chariot, and similar images and symbols appear on the lids of circular bronze boxes carried by women from the same time period. Bronze knives and razors, with horse heads bearing solar symbols, also occur among the artifacts found in grave sites, and horse images and horse heads with solar symbols are a common decorative motif in objects of the region. They are found throughout Norway and Sweden, engraved on flat rock surfaces, sometimes in the horse and sun chariot form, sometimes as simple solar emblems.

The archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, who wrote a book about the relationship of human beings and the sun in prehistory, has theorized that horses were honored among Indo-European peoples not only because of their obvious usefulness, but also because they were viewed as solar beasts, the animal that pulls the sun across the sky each day. In the later engravings and artifacts of the Picts, and also among the early Scottish Christians, the solar emblem evolved, as it did elsewhere, into the wheel and halo symbol that is so often associated with Christ and Christian saints. Even here, in the rain-swept cloudy Highlands and all across cloudy northern Europe, the sun in prehistory maintained as much symbolic power as it did in more southerly climes.

From Kintore, having supplied myself with bread and cheese, a local marmalade and butter, I began the long trek across the Highlands. The journey started as an easy ride through low hills of green fields with the larks and clearing skies, alternating with misty showers, and continued in this way for ten miles or so. Then, slowly, the land began to rise and continued rising, with increasing wildness, all the way to Inverness. By late afternoon I was heaving along narrow roads that wound through some of the highest country I had been in since the Pyrénées. Although no steeper than the hills of the Yorkshire Dales, the ascents here were longer and the land was far wilder with very few crofts, only a few little greystone villages, isolated plantations of conifers, and above them the sweeping, treeless grouse moors, rising up to craggy peaks, some of which were still snow capped.

Periodically, along the shores of some of the smaller lochs, I would come to groves of birks, as the Scots call birch trees, and here I would stop to rest and feed on crackers and cheese. The land was wonderfully ominous, a huge lonely elemental block of space, with one-track roads and little traffic. It’s no more than seventy miles or so from Kintore to Inverness, a distance that for a normal rider, with today’s high-tech mountain climbing gears, could be covered in a day or two, but it took me four days all told to get to Inverness and the trek was made all the longer because, at Carrbridge, I turned north in a great loop through the mountains to avoid the dread A9, a main trunk road that drives up through the Highlands from Perth. I spent the night in the tiny town of Nethybridge, in a hotel packed with anglers and mounted fish on the walls by way of decoration.

One of the advantages (or perhaps one of the problems) with making a cross-country trek in this part of Scotland is that the region is best known for its whiskey makers, and on my way west I passed a few distilleries offering public tours, which, I am happy to report, I found the strength to pass up. But in the pub at Nethybridge the talk was all of single malts and fish. I was forced by the happy throng of fishermen who gathered there to sample both fish talk and whiskey late into the night. The qualities of the different whiskeys were lost on me. More comprehensible was the talk of midges and flies, and the rippling waters and the pools of the River Spey.

From Nethybridge I worked my way up and down through the mountains of this echoing, lonely country. At one point, on a bend over a steep valley, I dismounted and began shouting out to the gods of nature, daring them to call back. Which they did, in the form of my own empty voice, ringing through the hills again and again. I hadn’t been in such lonely country since the deserts of the American West. In fact it was lonelier than the deserts, sad in some ways, partly no doubt because of the change of weathers, the sudden showers, the shredded mists of the peaks, alternating with a wet, clear brilliance that I hadn’t experienced anywhere on this journey.

Here too, as in the American West, the native peoples had been cleared from the countryside. After the battle of Culloden in 1746, a system of Clearances effectively removed (sometimes by force) the small, independent farming crofters of the Highlands and once and for all emptied these mountains to make way for the sheep grazing of the rich lowlanders, both British and Scottish alike.

At one point riding through the interior, I went for as much as an hour without so much as a passing car, and there were no villages or crofts in sight, only the gray green heather lands, the occasional roll of a black flock of hooded crows, stands of fir and larch, birks and beeches and rowan trees in the hollows, ribbony waterfalls, misty green peaks that revealed themselves briefly through the torn fabric of clouds, and racing, foaming streams tumbling everywhere, with wet mossy rocks o’erspread with liverworts, fern mosses, and clinging lichens. Somehow the great emptiness gave me a strength I didn’t know I had and I began assaulting the hills with frenetic energy, stripping off clothes and sweating as I rose higher and higher into the peaks, shouting into the lonely face of the wind at the passes, and then flying ever downward with the catapulting streams, only to begin again the long slog up against the currents of the falling waters.

In spite of the fact that I was now conditioned for this—I was finally in shape—the Highlands were a challenge. I still had to dismount from time to time and heave my old Peugeot forward, leaning over the handlebars as I pushed, resting my upper body and sometimes even leaning my head on the bars and letting my legs do the work. I came to look on the crossing of the Highlands as a meditation. I lost track of where I was. There were only the great green hills, the lochs below the roads, and the rare gray town, where I put in by night to eat and sleep and then, through rain and sun and showers and clouds and fogs, ride on.

In time I drifted down into the lower country around Cawdor and the castle on the blasted heath where Duncan was murdered by the terrible eleventh-century king named Mac Be’ath, also known as Macbeth. From here it was an easy ride down the coast of the Firth of Moray, through the green forests and heaths to Culloden itself. Here, in a misty rain, I visited the infamous battlefield of Culloden Moor, the battle that forever ended the hopes of the Stuarts to regain the throne.

Scotland is a bloody, battle-strewn piece of the world, with the Mackenzies and the MacDonalds and the Campbells forever sallying forth on one vengeance raid after another and leaving behind a landscape of legend and memory, with place names like Well of the Dead, and Well of the Heads, and the Glen of Weeping, and unfortunate sites like Glencarry and Glen Coe, with bonnets and spears and bended bows and plaided warriors, armed for strife.

But of all these raids and counterraids and battles, perhaps the most analyzed and the best remembered is the short fight that took place here on this cold moor outside of Inverness, when the dragoons of the Duke of Cumberland ruthlessly massacred the Scottish forces under Prince Charles and then celebrated their victory by hunting down the wounded in the forests and crofts and killing them too. It is said that the soldiers of the Butcher Cumberland, as he is called locally, even set upon civilians who came out from Inverness to watch the battle. Now the site is a tourist attraction and draws many nationalistic Scots from both Scotland and abroad—some 100,000 people a year visit the place.

As I was leaving, I again heard the skirl of pipes, and the muscular rattle of drums, and a company in full eighteenth-century regalia came straight stepping out from a parking area. It was Saturday and a celebration of the culture of the Highlands was forming up, so I stuck around to watch. It turned out to be a smaller version of the usual Highland Games, organized by some local club, and there were caber throws, and marching pipe bands, and a demonstration of the Highland Fling and other traditional dances, performed by troupes of high-stepping young people clad in traditional plaid skirts and kilts. These Scottish dances, like most folk dances, have ancient origins. In this case, according to scholars, the dance patterns evolved from ritual dances in celebration of the sun. The Romans who fought so diligently against the Highlanders reported that the Caledonian tribes used to execute wild, high-leaping frenzied dances and form weaving chains and circles around swords stuck in the ground.

Not far from the battlefield was a group of three chambered cairns, known as the Stones of Clava, each of which is surrounded by a stone circle. The cairns, which were originally burial chambers, all have an inner room built of large stones that can be entered along a passage. The two entrance passages align with two of the stones outside the central area and align with the position of the midwinter sundown.

That evening I wheeled into the quiet city of Inverness and found a quiet hotel on a quiet street above the River Ness. I was in the mood, after the bad food and hard climbs of the Eastern Highlands, for a little softness and spent a long time in a hot bath, soaking the aches out of my muscles. In the subdued hotel pub I nursed a single malt whiskey and then repaired to the high-ceilinged dining room and ordered a broiled local salmon, boiled potatoes with parsley butter, and green peas cooked with lettuce leaves and butter. It was still light after dinner, with a calm, pearl gray sky hanging over the cityscape, so I walked through a park along the river laid out with a winding path and ancient firs and larches interspersed with emerald green sheered lawns and beds of flowering annuals. Then I sat on a park bench and admired the gray rippling waters of the Ness, and then I strolled some more, and then I sat down again and watched some old men fishing from the banks.

The crossing of the Eastern Highlands had been completely unlike the leisurely ride through the lowlands of western Andalusia, or the gentle roll of the Loire Valley or the Downs and plains of Salisbury, where, as I slowly pedaled along, I always had time to think. But here on a park bench under the dark firs I finally was able to let my mind wander, and quite naturally, since I was in the heart of the Highlands, I began thinking of the old Scottish ballads I used to know—Thomas the Rhymer, who was kidnapped by a fairy queen on a milk white steed, never to be seen on earth again, and the king in Dunfermline town, drinking his blood-red wine, The Twa Corbies, and Lord Randall pleading with his mother to make his bed smooth. And then I thought of my own dear mother across the seas, and then it struck me that actually she was not that far away. She was visiting close at hand, more or less, just across the waters in Denmark. So I went back to the hotel and called her up.

Where have you been and what have you done, she wanted to know.

“I’ve been to Kintore, and have seen the graves of the family,” I said with balladic cadences. “And before that the Lakes. And before that London. And I’ve just crossed the Eastern Highlands and lived to tell the tale.”

A good Ma in the old style would have wept bitter tears and bade me come home, but she laughed and wished me a safe journey through the Western Isles, where I told her I was headed. She must have been having a good time herself; normally she would worry. I asked her about her own journey.

“Interesting,” she said, “but we’ve had to witness the most horrid Bog Men and grave goods and the like.”

She was traveling with two friends, one of whom was interested in antiquities.

I woke up tired the next morning and decided to rest up here in the city for the next onslaught of mountains, the higher, rainier Western Highlands. I had not, however, calculated that this was Sunday in northern Scotland.

The Scots, it has been said, have inherited a great deal from their landscape. The burr of their accent is derived from the whirr sound of the red grouse as it bursts from the moors. The great glens and mountains isolated the crofts and communities and encouraged the formation of clans. The deep valleys and wide moorlands called for a musical instrument, such as the bagpipe, whose sound could travel for miles. And the bitter, intemperate, and unpredictable weather—“God’s country and the Devil’s weather” as it is said—engendered a taste for a warming dram of whiskey. And all of this, mountains, valleys, granite rocks, deep, cold lochs, chill streams, and cold weathers, begat a cold, pure, unforgiving religion—the United Presbyterian Church. By decree of this church, when Sunday rolls around the world closes down.

I realized that I had made a good decision by staying on. Had I left and, as I had done over this entire trip, taken my chances with finding a place to stay rather than booking something in advance, I might have encountered closed doors. No one works on Sunday.

Since everything was closed in Inverness, I took a ride down the scenic road above Loch Ness, hoping to catch sight of the curvéd neck of the beguiling monster that is known to live there. Traffic was light and the banked forests above the steep shores smelled rain washed and sweet and I stopped often to peer down into the mystery of the gray, choppy waters, where I hoped I would see the infamous looped neck and small head. I saw nothing. But at one rest stop and overlook I met up with a young couple who were part of a Loch Ness monster watch team who said that once—they thought—in the gloaming, they saw a long V-shaped ripple in the still waters.

“Was some kind of a head. And it was not a duck. That much we can say.”

The grouse moors about Inverness stand at the head of one of the ancient folds that splits the landscape of this part of Scotland in a vast northeast-southwest chasm known as the Great Glen. The deep rifts in the earth in this place are an extension of the folds of Norway and were shaped during the vast upheavals that marked the second of the two mountain-building ages of Britain. The shifting tectonic plates in this area subjected the earth to great interior tensions and created a long chasm that eventually became the rift valley of the Great Glen. Running toward this glen from all across the hills of the Highlands are smaller, wilder glens, which pour in waters from the eternal rains and fill the rift with deep lochs that run down the length of the break—Glen Urquhart, Glen Roy, Loch Lochy, Loch Leven, and Glen Coe.

All this occurred over the five-billion-year life of the unquiet earth, and is due in part to the hydrologic cycle in which the heat of the sun draws up moisture from the seas and lakes of the world, thus forming clouds, which subsequently condense and fall to earth again as rain.

After gorging on what is known as a “full breakfast” the next morning—a pot of tea, scones, strawberries, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, toast, jams, bacon, and brown bread—I set out northward toward the town of Achnasheen on the west side of the Western Highlands. The meal made me logy and at Beauly I had to stop for coffee to fire myself up for the hard ride, but was forced to settle for more tea. As I rode westward from the Beauly Firth the land began to rise and soon I was falling into the rhythm of pumping or pushing the bicycle up long, sloping hills, resting at the top, and then sailing back down, passing all the while the high shores of lochs, with beech forests and firs and larch, and, farther north, the treeless barrens and windy stretches of moors. Once again, out here on the small roads, under the vast geologic upheavals of earth and the wild stretches of moors, I was alone.

At one point, pedaling along a valley floor, staring up at the immensity of the hills ahead of me, it struck me that my bicycle was too small for this vast country. I had counted on high hills. I had not counted on wilderness.

All across the Western Highlands I encountered mists and fogs, hard showers and drizzle, and then, like a calming sleep, a burst of clear clean rain-washed light. It took me days to cross, partly because whenever I found a sheltered place and a period of bright sun, I would pull over, settle myself on some warming rock, and bask out all the cold and dank, stripping off my sweaters and anorak as the sun blasted down. I watched the sky continuously and learned the meaning of different types of clouds and wind direction in this quarter of the world. I got so I could predict the onset of a blue break, and three or four times I actually deserted my bicycle altogether to hike down shaded mountains, through narrow valleys, and up the other side, so that I could get to a sunny spot to bask for a while.

It was here, during these short excursions away from my excursion, that I came to better appreciate the landscape I was moving through.

Once in a flat valley, a herd of red deer scattered like phantoms across the moors. At stream banks where I stopped to rest I saw wagtails and a ring ouzel, and I surprised leks of red grouse out on the moors. I saw a blackcock, or perhaps the capercaillie, and once I thought I saw a dotterel, a rare nesting bird in these parts, standing on a rock at the edge of a heather-covered hill. Periodically, as I lay on some flat rock in the sun, I would hear an odd cackling and cuckooing, the call or song, I believe, of the blackcock. Back on the road, flights of corbies and hoodies, as the ravens and hooded crows are called here, often sailed down the slopes with me, and once or twice I think I saw golden eagles over the peaks.

All of these birds and mammals are well adapted to the unique harsh habitat of the heather-dominated moorlands. The red grouse feeds on the green shoots that grow on the underside of the heather, even in winter. Their eggs can endure a frost, and in deep snows the grouse treads down the snows under the heather, packing it so that the bird rises with the deepening snows. Red deer browse on the heather in summer, and in winter help maintain the treeless stretches by nipping off the stems of young trees that have made a start in this hard land. Heather is all brown and gray and dull most of the year, but in early summer it goes into bloom and transforms the Highlands into a rich carpet of reddish purple, the source of much song and verse of the balladeers: “The heather was ablooming, the meadows were mawn, our lads gaed a-hunting ae day at the dawn,” as Robbie Burns would have it.

Scottish verse and song seem melded with nature and landscape. Beeches and birches and thistles and harebells and red deer and grouse, ravens, and the blooming of the heather figure as background to all the storm and strife and dying knights and fairy queens that weave in and out of Scottish stories and songs. For all its wildness and emptiness this is actually a very human, if not humane, territory. All the Highlands, with the famous grouse moors and heather, are in fact the product of human activity. This land was once covered with forests of birch and pine and its decline to a treeless state may have begun as early as two or three thousand years ago as Neolithic farming peoples moved northward, clearing trees for crops and sheep. Even now, the forest would return slowly if the moors were not grazed or burned periodically to keep the trees out.

Heather—and of course sunlight—is the principal player in this ecosystem. It shades the ground so that it is difficult for even so much as a harebell or buttercup to grow, much less a tree—although they do try. But if the heather were not pruned by fire or sheep it would lose its compact, dense form and grow toward the sun, spreading itself higher and becoming leggier, putting out three-foot-tall feathery fronds. The sun would then be able to reach the ground between the heather plants, and in these sunny open patches the bird-and wind-spread seeds of sun-loving trees such as rowan and birch would take hold. These would grow taller, offering a dappled, filtered shade where pine seedlings could grow, and in the shade of the pines the heather would disappear, the sun-loving birches would wither, oaks would move in and begin to dominate the lower slopes, and forests of beech and alder and oak would cover the lower valleys. Only at the higher elevations would the heather and the birch trees endure.

From Achnasheen west the land grew higher and rougher before dropping down to Loch Maree, which I had heard is one of the prettiest of the Scottish lochs, with many places to stay. I was planning to ride out to the town of Gairloch, where there was said to be a garden with palm trees, the farthest northern range of these decidedly subtropical plants. From here, I could get a good view of my final destination—the connected isles of Skye and Lewis and Harris.

I began to descend once more, and came into the little village of Kinlochwe, where I had a heavy lunch of cheese and bread with a glass of bitters, and then began riding out along the south shores of the loch. On the way, under a canopy of lush, deciduous trees, I spotted a long green drive and found a little white hotel on the banks of the loch with a lawn and birch trees and an un-Scottish feel, more like the Lake District, or Vermont. Here I stopped and rested and tucked into another dinner of salmon and peas. Around nine-thirty, the sun had not yet dropped over the mountain ridges to the northwest, so I wandered out along the loch.

Coming down a narrow path along the shore, dressed in a Black Watch plaid skirt, sensible shoes, and a frilled white shirt, I met a woman who could have emerged from the pages of Robbie Burns. She had all the Scot features, the wide cheekbones, fair blue eyes, a peaches and cream complexion, and curling strawberry blond hair.

“Staying at the hotel, are you,” she said with a thick Highland burr.

I explained that I was. And she asked if I was having a good stay and where had I come from and where was I bound. She worked at the hotel as a clerk in the day and was a chatty friendly sort who, for all her Scottish Highland affect, had family in the United States, not far from Boston in a town that I knew. She had been there a few times.

“It’s a dreadful place, if you don’t mind my saying so. I could’na’ get a cup a decent tea in all of America.” Her husband was a musician, she said, who worked the tourist pubs along the western coast, and she herself could sing and sometimes accompanied him, and knew many of the old Scottish ballads, having learned them from her grandmother.

“He’s here now, my husband. Stopped for a pee.”

No sooner said than her husband appeared. Out of the gloomy forest emerged a dark tall man with a Mohawk haircut and doubled silver earrings, dressed in tight dark jeans, heavy kicking boots, and a black leather jacket with silver studs on it. Had I not the protection of gentle Mary I would have turned and run.

“Come John,” she said. “Here’s a man come all the way from America on his bicycle to meet you.”

In contrast to his appearance John extended his hand and smiled with crinkling blue eyes.

“Pleased to meet’cha, then. All the way from America, is it?” he said.

“Yes, just a little touring.”

“I heard about you,” he said. “Bloke at a pub I met today said he had passed a Sassenach”—he meant an Englishman—“on a bicycle in the middle of nowhere, back in the hills. Must have been you.”

“Could have been,” I said. “But I’m from the States.”

“Right, I’ve been there. Played Boston. Springfield. Hartford. I like America. I like your blacks. We don’t get your blacks here in Scotland. That’s why the music is so bloody boring.”

He loved blues music, as do many rock musicians in the British Isles, and according to Mary he played a “mean” guitar.

“But he can do your ballads too,” she said. “We knew Sandy Dennis before she died. We used to do that kind of traditional number, ‘Little Matty Groves,’ ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ that kind of thing. John even backed her up for a couple of gigs. But John here, he goes for blues now, and so does the pub crowd.”

“No more sad ballads then?” I asked.

“Na,” said John. “The crowd don’t like it.”

“We do though,” said Mary.

“You do,” said John. “I don’t.”

Mary kept her silence.

“Well I’m off,” I said, and made motion to take a walk.

“What’re you doing up here anyway?” John asked. “Just having a look around?”

I explained my solar pilgrimage.

John made a grimace. “I hate the bloody sun,” he said.

Out along the lake, the light slowly began to alter. A golden yellow atmosphere crept into the sky and by ten-thirty or so the sun had dropped silently behind a saddle between two hills across the loch. I noticed that it was far up into the northwest by the time it set. The light remained above the hills though, and the whole landscape began to shift color, from bright yellow to a paler yellow, to red, and then slowly to a dark sort of haunted blue, with a shaded blue black up in the valleys of the hills. I walked on for a while and then finally turned around lest I be caught out here in the dark, where I would perhaps meet the likes of John, alone, without nice Mary to temper him.

The next morning I rode out to Gairloch, found a place to stay, and then carried on out the peninsula, toward Poolewe and the gardens of Inverewe, where the palm trees grew, a site that I had been thinking about ever since my visit to the green subtropical palm islands of the Everglades in south Florida. The road climbed and then wound down into a little valley, where there were larches and firs and deciduous trees, with a stream bubbling through. It was a pleasant little glade, so I hid my bicycle, a more or less unnecessary precaution since there was no one around and this part of Scotland was not exactly famous for thieves. I dawdled here, pointlessly putting off, I suppose, my arrival. And then I rode on and within a few miles came to the gardens.

I was almost as far north here as I would get on this journey. The latitude of the garden is the same as Labrador in North America, and Siberia in the east, and in fact not that far from the Arctic Circle itself. And yet here, in luxuriant splendor, all flourishing and green and sweet-smelling, was a wealth of subtropical plants from all over the world. There were plants from the east, from Australia and Tasmania, New Zealand, China, and Japan. There were rhododendrons from the Himalayas, and many species from temperate zones of South America and North America, including the palm trees. Because of the long light, the plants in this garden achieve a luxuriance that seemed to me more lush and larger and seemingly greener than plants of the same species that I had seen in Central America and Florida.

Inverewe Gardens was started in 1862 by Osgood Mackenzie, who was the son of Sir Francis Mackenzie, the laird of Gairloch. The garden is located on a barren and rocky promontory on Loch Ewe, which is about the same latitude as Hudson Bay in Canada. The subtropical plants are able to flourish here because of the warm Atlantic currents of the Gulf Stream that sweeps up from the Caribbean and swings near the coast at this point. The site is far warmer in winter than any of the surrounding areas and, because of its latitude, rarely very hot in summer; the highest temperature ever recorded was 84° Fahrenheit, the lowest 14°.

The problem Mackenzie had to face was wind. The west coast of Scotland is famous for wintry blasts, out of the southwest especially, and this carries with it salt spray from the loch. Osgood solved the problem by planting a sheltering belt of native pines and constructing walled gardens that he improved upon by importing rich topsoil—a great rarity in this part of the world. He set about creating woodland walks among which he planted a variety of species collected from around the world. By the end of the century he had established one of the finest plant collections in the Northern Hemisphere.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the little garden paths, smelling the tropics, sheltering myself from a little downpour, and then venturing out again to smell plants. Sitting on a bench, under the spell of this mythic subtropical site, I was suddenly seized with a desire to eat an orange. Andalusia came flooding back, the rich blossom-scented air of the streets of Seville, the smell of the grove-strewn roads on the way to Córdoba, the hot light, and the bull-haunted, Catholic landscape. How good it would be, I thought, to eat an orange.

On my way back to Gairloch I stopped at a turnout above the Loch Gairloch and the Sound of Raasay, found a place in the evening sun, and sat there for awhile, watching the wheeling flocks of seabirds and the illuminated cloud-scape. It was seven o’clock and the sun was riding above billowing rows of white and gray clouds with black rims and yellow blue streaks above the bank. In front of the clouds, over the waters of North Minch, I could see the jagged, misty peaks of the Isle of Skye, and west, far beyond the Minch, the mountains of Harris.

These were the storied Western Isles, my final destination.

Fifteen

The Longest Day

I was still hungering for an orange when I got back to the bed and breakfast but Mrs. McLeod, the blue-eyed hostess, could not think where, in all of Gairloch, I could find such a thing. If ever I was to find an orange in western Scotland, I would think it would be here. Gairloch, because of its location, is one of the more visited towns on this barren coast. There are fine views out to Skye and the Torridon Mountains; there is angling and sea-angling, and golf, and there are even sandy beaches. The best of these is a great dune-backed sweep of beach called, not with a great deal of imagination, Big Sand. In a pub after dinner, I met an older gent with a white moustache and a plaid waistcoat who told me, in horror, about the Germans who come to the beach at Big Sand.

“And d’you know what they do?” the gentleman said.

“I do not,” I said.

“D’you know that on summer days, when it’s sunny, they ha’ been known ta strip aff their clothes and go stark naked upon the strand.”

“Oh my,” I said.

“But that’s na’ the worst of it,” he said, taking hold of my sweater with a shaky hand. “And I ha’ seen this myself.”

“What?”

“They SWIM.”

In the middle of June in Gairloch, as the summer solstice approaches, the light begins to show across the east around three-thirty in the morning. At noon the sun stands directly above your head, and then as the earth rolls slowly eastward it begins a long raking descent and sets in the evening at about eleven-thirty. Just north of here, above the Arctic Circle, after the twenty-first of June, it never dips below the western horizon, but rolls across the sea and slowly rises again.

All this is most excellent for creatures who love light. But it is not good for sleeping. Birds begin to sing at three in the morning, and by midsummer night in circumpolar regions the world around, parties can go on all night long. There’s plenty of time to sleep. You can say good night in November and sleep in near darkness until February 2nd, when the sun reappears and the days begin to lengthen.

The darkest of the various solar-based holidays, and yet in some ways the most hopeful, is the ominous winter solstice, the longest night of the year. All year long in ancient cultures the magicians, wizards, and astrologers would have watched the slow decline of the light that begins on the day of the summer solstice. In their world, living as they did within the bounds of their own culture and understanding, there was no absolute guarantee that on the day after the winter solstice, the sun would not continue in its disappearance, never to return. It was only by the hard work of propitiation, of sacrifice and appeasement that the sun’s return could be assured. The end of autumn was a dangerous time of year.

After the winter solstice, there followed a series of pagan holidays that are, somewhat ironically, best preserved in the celebrations of the Christian church, which subsumed so many local festivals as it spread around the globe. Twelve days after the winter solstice, there was a festival known as twelfth night, which involved, among other rituals, a “blessing” of fruit trees. In the north this was carried out by songs and music and the spilling of strong drink around the trees. Following this, on February 2nd, was the old Roman festival of Floralia, when the birds traditionally returned from migration, and then, at the end of February, the ancient festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated on the Christian calendar as Mardis Gras and carnival. Next to arrive was the beginning of Lent and the progress toward the spring equinox, which is marked by Easter in the Christian calendar and Passover in the Jewish year. This was traditionally followed by Lady Day in Britain, when the sun enters Aries, and in pre-Islamic Afghanistan by a festival known as Nauroz, in which celebratory kites were flown and livestock was auctioned. Then Pentecost, in the Christian calendar, then Rogation Days, which marked the traditional blessing of the fields in ancient Rome, and then May Day, when the maypoles were once set up all across Europe and strewn with flowers, and on and on, one festival after another at each of the sun’s stations, until finally, at the opposite end of the year from winter, the happiest, universally brightest, and best celebration of all, midsummer night, the summer solstice.

In parts of Italy, no one would go to bed on this night. In Sweden, maypoles were set up, no one would sleep; there was dancing and singing and coupling. In France, and in fact all over Europe, bonfires were lit, the so-called fires of Saint John; in Spain these fires were allowed to burn low and people celebrated by firewalking. Midsummer night is, as we know from Shakespeare, a night of mixed identities, song, and sex, and mystery, when fairies walk abroad and the two kingdoms, the seen and the unseen, can intermix. But by dawn it is over; the masque ends, normalcy returns, and day by day, as the earth sweeps around the sun, night gains ground.

It was now June 7th, I had two weeks to get over to the western coast of Lewis where the stones of Callanish stood guard, so I bid farewell to nice Mrs. McLeod and rode down the Loch Torridon coast. I had been assured that the road was passable, and it perhaps would have been in a car, but after a few miles it broke down into a gravel road that was hard going, and halfway down the coast I suffered my requisite flat tire. It was about time, I hadn’t had one in three weeks. I wheeled the poor, limping Peugeot to an overlook and showed her the island of Skye, which we could see off beyond the loch. Not far now, I soothed her as I fixed the tire, hoping that this would be the last time.

That done I pedaled onward and southward, weaving in and along lochs and cutting over high hills, with splendid views out to Skye. By late afternoon I came to the Kyle of Lochalsh and caught the ferry for the short ride across the straights.

On the ferry ride I spotted a man in full regalia. He wore a Prince Charles jacket, a kilt of some greenish colored clan, a Glengarry cap with his clan badge affixed to the side, clan kilt hose, garters, and a squian dubh, the black knife sheath, fixed to his leg, and he had a dark otter or muskrat pelt sporran. He was first in line to debark as we approached the pier and was the first off the boat as we touched. I watched from my perch on an upper deck and saw him go striding up the hill without a break. About twenty minutes later as I rode along the high shores of the Kyle of Lochalsh and the Inner Sound, I passed him. He was mounting a hill at a vigorous pace, his kilt swinging from side to side as he strode along. He carried a small pack on his back, and wore the light shoes known as ghillie brogues, more suited for formal wear than hiking. But he was making good time, all told.

I whistled as I approached from behind to warn him, and greeted him as I pumped by, and once I crested the hill I left him far behind. I stopped at the next hill and looked back. Here he came, striding onward in an unceasing, determined march.

I hadn’t eaten all day and at Broadford I put in to a place called the Claymore, and had a lobster stew with boiled potatoes and green peas. As I was ordering, I looked out the window and saw the kilted man go by, still advancing in his unbroken pace. He was making better time than I was.

I was told that there were not many places to stay along the coast road past Scalpay, and was directed to the house of a woman who would take in boarders. It turned out to be another one of those lovely little spots that one tends to find accidentally, a white-washed croft with thick stone walls and upstairs bedrooms overlooking the tidal flats on the Bay South shore, run by a pleasant woman named Mrs. MacBrayne, who fussed over my bicycle and of course gave me hot tea.

After tea I went for a walk out on the flats to watch the oystercatchers and dunlins feed. When I got back there was a man in the house named Martin, possibly the husband of Mrs. MacBrayne, although he wasn’t introduced as such. Martin was familiar with the house though and offered me a snort of whiskey and sat me down at the dining room table to give me a lecture on the Common Market, the current political environment in Scotland, the role of the United States in international affairs, the Chinese situation, and other local matters. “It’s a world economy,” he said, “a one-world economy, and we must face it.”

Martin was from Broadford, I learned, and rarely left town.

Everywhere I had been on this trip people in rural areas, the farmers and local tradespeople, were very wary of this approaching world economy. I told him as much. I told him they all feared homogenization of both culture and food, especially the French peasants.

“I dinna like it either,” said Martin. “Look at our poor fish trade here, look at the condition of it,” he said. “But we’re stuck wi’ it.”

He poured me another dram.

“Ah hell wi’ it,” he said, belting down his whiskey. “Let’s go look at the sunset.” We walked out again over the flats under a fiery green sky.

The next morning the wind came up again, a stiff charger out of the northwest, just the direction into which I was headed. It was a clear, bright morning, with clouds rolling in and out of the high wild peaks of the mountains of the interior, and I began a long and difficult climb, against both the wind and the hills. Of the two, the wind was far worse. Hour after hour I pushed and pedaled and pumped up the coast, past Scalpay Island, up along Loch Ainort, with the hardest slog of all at the end of the loch where the wind funneled down through a cut in the hills.

Unlike the Highlands, which had been cool and misty, with periodic showers, the weather had changed at Inverness and I had been riding under clear skies all the way west, with only an occasional shower. Here on Skye the fine weather continued, but the light had changed. The air was sterling and sharp so that even distant, cloudy mountain peaks seemed close at hand and the sunlight seemed brighter and more translucent than anywhere I had been so far. It was a clear glass landscape, like looking through new black ice, and the light held all the way to Portree, where I found a place for the night.

The light was still clear even after the late sundown, with green sheets of fire rising up in the slopes above the town, and a clean blue black sky rolling up to the east over the isles of Raasay and Rona. On a walk after dinner in this green, half-lit world, as I was passing through the town square, I heard a distinctive echoing of clipped footsteps, and into the open plaza, still at a quick-paced stride, came the full-kilted Scotsman, his plaids rising and falling with each hearty step. He made directly for me.

“Didn’t I see you on the ferry?” he asked. To my surprise he had the broad flat accent of an American midwesterner.

I told him, yes, I had been on the ferry and had passed him on my bicycle. I couldn’t resist asking where he was from. “Certainly not Oban?” I said.

“Racine, Wisconsin,” he answered, curtly.

He was over for a little walk, he said, and would come every year at this time. His family had come to America from Lewis in February of 1842 and Scots have long memories, as he explained. He had spent the day in the mountains, and now was hunting for a place and having no luck. I told him where I was staying but he had already been there. It was now almost midnight, and true to Presbyterian form, things had shut down everywhere.

“Thanks,” he said, and strode off purposefully.

I was bound for the small town of Uig on the northwest coast and was disappointed to find that the wind was still blowing the next day, meaning another hard plod into its teeth. It was even worse than the day before, blowing harder, with long eight-mile level stretches and no pleasant downhill grades to coast and rest. At Uig I found a sheltered bed and breakfast run by an old couple from Glasgow. I also found a benign grove of deciduous trees with a little freshwater stream running down to the sea loch, and as soon as I was settled I went out again, headed for the greenwood and began climbing a little trail under the trees. Here the air was calm, although I could hear the wind howling overhead and buffeting the upper storey of the trees. I was tired from fighting headwinds, and for the first time went to bed before darkness had completely fallen, which in these parts was not that early, eleven-thirty or so.

I took the morning ferry across Little Minch to North Uist, and landed at Lochmaddy, surrounded all the while by wheeling gulls and lines of shags. Just as the vessel was pulling away from Uig, out onto the pier, apparently hoping to catch the boat, came the American Scotsman himself, looking none the worse for all his walking, and still moving at his high-paced longstride march. When it was clear that he had missed the boat, without hesitation he turned on his heel and marched back up the pier.

That night at a small hotel in Lochmaddy I had a whiskey and enjoyed a long warming meal, followed by coffee in a warm parlor with a coal stove. Here groups of outdoorsmen and women had gathered and I fell into conversation about a wildlife sanctuary I had heard of on South Uist, where there was said to be an aerie of golden eagles with young.

A pretty, sensible woman with crinkly ginger hair cornered me and, fixing me with an unblinking stare, commanded that I must go see them, if I was interested in birds.

“You should go there,” she said. “You can na come here and not go out to see them.”

“I will,” I said, not knowing whether I actually would.

“No, but you must,” she said.

“I know, I will.”

“Yes. Go then.”

Later she brought over her gentleman friend, a florid Scot in a Prince Charles jacket.

“Tell him to go out and see the eagles, Angus,” she said.

“Go lad, you’ll like it,” he said.

“I intend to.”

“It’s a bitter ground, there,” he said. “Like the end of the earth.”

Suddenly it did begin to sound interesting. I got directions, including a recommendation of a bed and breakfast within striking distance.

“What church are you?” Angus asked, seemingly out of the blue.

I stumbled at this one, but before I could answer Angus explained.

“Not Free Kirk, I take it, you not being from these parts. But be sure to stay put Saturday night, or make your way down to South Uist by Sunday. They won’t take you in, no matter what on Sunday up here in the north, you must get down to the Catholic island.”

Back at the bed and breakfast I had a talk with Johnny McLeod, the owner, about the wildlife sanctuary and the eagles. He too knew of it. “A desolate, glorious place,” he said. He also knew about the otters that you could see from time to time in the harbors. In fact he was partial to otters and had worked to help conserve them. He knew Gavin Maxwell, author of the otter book Ring of Bright Water, who had lived at Sandaig, not far from the ferry landing for Skye. Maxwell’s house had burned a few years back and then Maxwell died a year later. But the otters of the Hebrides were doing well, Johnny said. “You’ll see them up and down the west coast here, and over on Harris,” he said.

As luck would have it, the next day as I was crossing a causeway in the wind, I did see one out among the rocks. I also saw seals basking on the bars and sporting in the deeper coves.

At the hotel at Lochmaddy the night before, among the bird and wildlife people, I had, I’m afraid, instigated a fairly heated (for Hebrideans) discussion about seals. I had pointedly asked if people here thought seals “worshipped” the sun. This was not entirely out of context. I had been telling them about the lemurs of Madagascar, whom the local Madagascans believe are sun worshippers, and had held forth perhaps a little too long on the bears of North America. I told them how some Native American tribes there believe that bears worship the sun. Then I asked if they thought that seals worship as well.

“After all, you see them out basking, like turtles and shags,” I said.

“Seals do no’ worship the sun,” Angus said. “They’ve no god at all. They’re dumb animals, they just like to dry out from time to time.”

“No, he’s got a point though,” said a small dark-haired man, who seemed to have had his share of single malt. “After a fashion, they worship. They haul out in sun, and throw back their heads like.”

“They haul in fogs and rain, too, Jimmy,” someone else chimed in.

“Na, but more i’ the sun,” said Jimmy.

“Wha’ they got no god—neither sun, nor moon, nor Jesus Christ hisself, Jimmy, don’t be daft.”

Jimmy said something in Gaelic.

Angus said something back in Gaelic, and then someone said something else in Gaelic and then they all laughed, except for the ginger-haired companion of Angus.

“Keep civil, lads. There’s ladies present.”

“And visiting dignitaries to boot,” said Angus, winking toward me.

The standard cliché is that the Scots are an unfriendly, dour, and taciturn lot, but you could not prove that by me. From Edinburgh to Kintore, from Kintore to Inverness, all across the Highlands, and now out to the last bastion of taciturnity, the Hebrides, everyone I had met was not only friendly but generous and talkative. One man in the Highlands, in a small car, seeing me pushing my loaded bicycle up one of the mountains, offered me a lift, not considering the fact that there was no room for me and my bicycle as well. He apologized for not being able to assist me and drove on.

There was a big debate raging on the islands about whether to “cull” the seal population at this time. There wasn’t much argument here, however. These people in the hotel were all conservationists and against the cull, and to some degree, I noticed, against the fishermen who wanted the seals culled.

I had also asked them about Selkies. But they were a sophisticated lot and informed me that no one on these islands believed in the Selkies anymore.

The American travel writer Lawrence Millman, who passed through these parts a few years after I was there, collecting stories for a book, did report finding older people who believed in Selkies, however.

The Selkie legend takes many forms, but the basic story holds that the Selkies are seal people who occasionally take up residence on land. They are, in their human form, exceptionally beautiful, especially the females, who sometimes marry with local men and have children. In one tale from this region a man unknowingly marries a Selkie who gives him three beautiful children. The Selkie mother has a strange habit of disappearing from time to time, however. One day her husband follows her. She walks down to the coast to a hidden cove, takes out a full sealskin she has hidden, strips her human clothes, dons the sealskin, and swims off into the sea. In some versions the jealous husband hides the skin or destroys it, and the beautiful seal woman dies. In one sad ballad version, she disappears forever into the sea after she is discovered, taking all her children with her.

Although it seems unlikely (except perhaps for their purported sun worship), Selkies are by tradition celestial beings, driven out of Heaven for some minor sins that were not bad enough to land them in Hell.

While he was in North Uist, Millman encountered a man in a pub who pointed out a darker man, drinking with some others. “Do you see that fellow,” Millman’s informant said. “He’s a MacCodrum; all his people are seals.” Apparently the entire MacCodrum line is descended from Selkies. The old man told Millman that whenever a MacCodrum is buried, the wild seals follow the funeral procession, swimming just offshore, barking and moaning for their lost relative.

“That family will never eat seal, like other people in these parts,” the old man told Millman.

Try as I might, I could not collect any Selkie stories while I was there, nor yet confirm my oddball theory that seals, along with lemurs, turtles, snakes, bears, cats, and other beings that bask, worship the sun.

In the morning, even before I woke up, I could hear the wind again, rolling in like a battering ram from the northeast. This confirmed my plans to go downwind to Benbecula and on to South Uist to visit the wildlife sanctuary and the aerie of the golden eagles. That way I would also be on the Catholic island if I happened to find myself on the road on Sunday.

I left early and headed southwest across the brown moors and lochs and the long, rolling barrens. All along the road I began passing little bands of men and women cutting peat for the next winter’s fuel. They all looked healthy and happy and were dressed against the wind, the men in flat peaked caps and worn-out Harris tweeds, the women in flowered shirtwaist dresses and thick cardigan sweaters with kerchiefs tied tightly around their heads, and all of them, men and women alike, shod in high rubber Wellingtons. They looked up from their work as I swept past with the wind, and waved and shouted to see so marvelous a thing as a bicycle flying with the wind.

Lawrence Millman met an old man near here who had moved to Harris as a young man from the island of Scarp, where trees are unheard of. Millman had asked him if he was afraid when he first saw a tree on Harris. “Na,” he said, “I was na afraid a trees. I was terrified when I first saw a bicycle, though.”

Apparently the idea of a wheeled man scared him.

The cutters were stacking the peat in neat piles and I stopped at one point to chat them up about their work. Now, in June, they told me, was about the end of the cutting season. The crofters all have cutting banks on the common grazing lands of the townships, and they try to do all the work between May and June, which is the sunniest time of year in the Hebrides. Peat needs a spate of clear weather to dry out once it is cut from the bogs, and they stack it in little piles, like roundhouses, the peat slabs set vertically in a circle, damp side outward, and topped with a slab to hold the peats in place.

“Peat needs sun if it’s to burn,” one of the crofters said.

The place where the crofters were working was probably a lake seven thousand years ago, about the time that the glacier began retreating from this area. Slowly over the following eons, sphagnum moss, the dominant inhabitant of these acid bogs, began to creep over the waters from the soggy shores where it first took hold. Sphagnum moss is a self-perpetuating, self-promoting sort of plant that seems to have an almost everlasting life. The fresh green stems grow profusely on top of the old brown stems of the former growth and in this way the moss tends to pile up on top of itself. Year after year, generation after generation, it thickens and deepens and spreads and eventually covers whatever body of water it started to grow upon, absorbing the waters and compressing the dead stems into the soggy, brown, spongelike material called peat.

Like all green plants, the chlorophyll of the leaves absorbs the energy of the sun and stores it in the stems and cells of the plant as potential energy. The sphagnum on this bog on the lonely moors of Benbecula may have been laid down long before the pagan worshippers and sun cults of Callanish set up their stones. It may have been growing in that remote period when aurochs, the wild ox ancestor of today’s cattle, and the great-horned Scottish elk roamed these parts. But nonetheless, after it is cut and stacked and dried, once ignited, that potential energy is released and the heat of the sun, absorbed so many thousands of years ago, will warm again. Peat gives off a poor, smoky, weak heat, but in this treeless expanse, where the winter wind cuts like a chisel, it’s all the crofters have.

Sphagnum moss is an ambitious plant. Given moisture enough it will climb trees. It will cover wet rocks. It grows out over still waters and forms soggy, bouncy islands, and if anything falls onto it, or into it, the peat will cover it and preserve it in its acid, brown depths. It buried the famous sun chariot of Trundholm bog nearly three thousand years ago. It buried and preserved the bodies of Celtic princes and Celtic criminals and sacrificed human beings who were strangled and tossed to the bogs. It even attempted to bury the standing stones of Callanish. When the circle of stones was first identified on Lewis in 1857, they had to be excavated from peat to reveal their full height.

“Wherr’ye be gayne ain tha’ becycle a’ yurrn, lad?” one of the older peat cutters called out as I made to leave.

I could barely understand him. Although everyone speaks English in the Hebrides, the native tongue is Scots Gaelic and the accent of the Western Isles is thick. But I caught his drift.

“To the wildlife sanctuary,” I said.

“Ha’ care th’aigles don’ carry y’off,” he said. “They’re fond’ a’ young lambs.”

I’m not sure what the old man meant.

It was a great pleasure riding with the wind for once. On straight flat roads I had gotten in the habit of pedaling along no handed, and was even able to execute easy curves by leaning from side to side, riding with my hands on my hips. Here the narrow, winding road was perfect, and I sailed along with the sun ahead of me and the wind at my back, stretching my arms and flying over the moors, sometimes curving to and fro and weaving across the road like a gull. But at the end of Benbecula, the joy ride came to an end. The wind shifted to the west and I had to turn into the teeth of it, bending low, keeping my head down and shifting gears ever downward. Within a half hour I was worn out and had to stop for a little picnic lunch overlooking a small loch. After lunch I crossed over the tidal flats on the causeway that connects Benbecula with South Uist and then turned to the southwest, with the wind again, riding along stretches of machair, the grassy plains on the west coasts of the Hebrides. In some places here, electric wires ran beside the road and they whined and moaned ominously in the wind, sometimes rising to a high eerie wail.

Eventually I came to a turnoff for a gravel road that led out to the reserve, but it gave out after a few hundred yards and became a rutted track, too rough for a bicycle, so I left it and hiked on across the rolling moors, under the screaming wind. There had not been a single car on the hard-topped road that morning, not so much as a sign of tire tracks on the gravel road, and no footprints other than those of sheep and red deer on the track. It was a lonely barren ground, stretching off to the gray water, with hollows and sucking fens, and the empty groan of the wind. Just where the track narrowed to a path, I saw the body of a large ram that had got himself caught in a barbed-wire fence and died there in the wind, one leg up on the wire, his eyes emptied by ravens and his great curling godlike horns making a mockery of his former power.

For an hour I walked southeast toward the aerie, across the low hills, and farther and farther into this strathy, rolling land. There were bogs and ponds becoming bogs, and bogs becoming drylands, and lochs piercing the shores, and shorelines trying to reclaim the sea, and all of which I had to circumvent, backtracking and forging onward to the south. The wind was howling ominously; overhead in the sky, great charging horseherds of clouds began to obscure the sun, making the wind all the colder, and sometimes I had to duck down in the shelter of the hollows to rest from the incessant battering on the open ground. In time I came upon a little horseshoe-shaped cairn, a low wall of rocks that could have been the remains of a sheep pound, or, for all I knew, the barrow of some long dead Celtic prince. The high end of the wall blocked the wind, and the open end faced south, out over the loch, so I went in and lay back against the stones to watch the sky.

The gray herd of the cloud cover was moving fast, and there was a warm island of blue sky forming in the breaks and moving eastward. I watched, anticipating that moment when the patch of blue would meet the sun. Slowly, it sailed on, then it sank, and then it rose again and then, like a fire blast it opened and the full force of the late spring sun struck my face. At that very moment, there was a great outcry and gabbling from the gulls and the graylag geese that had gathered in the loch. Into the rift of blue flew a huge flat-winged bird. It was a golden eagle, the lord of the skies, the ancient emblem of the Greek sky god Zeus.

I left South Uist the next day and rode back up to Lochmaddy, where I spent the night in the hotel. The following day I caught the ferry that skirts the east coast of South Harris and puts in at Tarbert and from here began a slog into the wind, across the moorlands of Lewis toward my final destination, the small town of Callanish. Here, just outside the village, I located an isolated croft that provided bed and breakfast and settled in to wait for the solstice. It was a cozy little house, sheltered from the incessant wind, with two small upstairs rooms and thick whitewashed walls. The croft appeared to be under the leadership of an energetic matriarch who wore her Wellingtons inside the house and fed her family and guests on shortbread and tea, fish stews, and lobster, with no variation.

The standing stones of Callanish are located in and around the tiny village on the west coast, and are now under the charge of the state. The place has become the most famous prehistoric site in Scotland, and like Castlerigg, in the Lake District, it is set in a dramatic location. The circle stands on a rise beyond the town and is visible over a wide area from both land and sea. Even after the advent of Christianity in these islands, local people used to gather at the stones around May Day for reasons lost even to those who attended the ceremonies. The Free Kirk, the strict Presbyterian Church of the northern islands of the Hebrides, long opposed the tradition. In the early years of Christian settlement, the stones were more or less stubs in the landscape. Their full size, the drama of the site, and the overall layout were not brought to light until 1857, when outsiders took an interest and excavated the stones from the peat.

The actual stones consist of local Lewisian gneiss and are set in a ring that encloses a huge monolith at the center. In the middle of the ring are the remains of a chambered cairn, whose existence became apparent when the peat was cleared and may be a later addition to the circle of stones. Running north from the stone circle are two parallel lines of nineteen stones forming an avenue, and lines of four stones head off to the other three quarters. If you observe the layout of the site from the air, or map the stones on paper, it becomes apparent that the whole arrangement takes the exact shape of a Celtic cross, which is an interesting anomaly—Callanish, which is generally presumed to be a solar temple, predates Christianity by at least a thousand years. So which came first, the solar cross or the Christian cross, or was the cross a solar symbol all along?

Much research has been done over the last eighty years on the astronomical orientations of Callanish. Early scholars believed that the northern avenue was positioned to indicate the rising of the star Capella, about 1800 B.C., when the temple was first constructed. The shorter rows of stone match the setting and rising sun, as it would have appeared at about the same period. There is also a possibility that two stones outside the circle, lying to the northeast and southwest, mark the northernmost and southernmost points of the moon in its annual coursing. More recently, researchers have come to believe that this is a far more complex celestial observatory, and that the southern line of stones together with the large monolith in the center of the circle is a north-south meridian line, designed to mark the pole around which the stars revolve and to indicate the highest position of the sun on any given date.

Local legends of the origins and purposes of the stones abound. There is one story of a being called the “Shining One” who emerges from the loch at midsummer dawn and walks up the avenue of standing stones to the cairn. When Millman was at Callanish interviewing oldsters of the Western Isles, one man told him in all sincerity that the stones were living beings, and like any living thing, were fond of drinking (as was, perhaps, Millman’s informant). Periodically at night, he said, they would go down to the loch to refresh themselves.

“One night I was out there,” the old man told Millman, “and the stones were na’ there. Down by the water’s edge, they were, taking a drink.”

I spent the next day resting from the wind, having tea and shortbread and taking little bicycle excursions north and south among the many lochs to look for birds. I thought about riding up to the main town of Stornaway to see if I could find a restaurant that would not serve fish stew, but the wind was in the wrong quarter and still blowing hard, and I had no stomach for any more of the hard work of the road. The weather held clear, although cool, and the forecast for the midsummer dawn was good.

On the evening of the solstice, after dinner, around eleven o’clock, I wandered out to the site again. Now I was not alone. Several people, some of them obviously local, some obviously strangers to this place, had come out and were sitting on the ground, facing west, watching the skies. There was a black cloud lying along the western horizon, like a dark, sleeping dragon, its slightly upturned pointed nose resting on the northern horizon line and its riffled, jagged back already glowing in gold. The sun was still above the cloud, and still to the south of the standing stones, and there was heated discussion as to whether it would be obscured in its descent by this dragon-cloud. From my point of view, it looked as if the sun would drop into the sea well to the south of the short avenue of stones, but I was assured that, as it sank, it would be sweeping northward along the sea rim and drop down near the avenue line.

One fellow in a tan windbreaker and a deerstalker cap was especially keen on celestial observations at this site and was setting up a quadrant. He was intensely mathematical in his observations and had charts and graphs and record books of the rising dates of various stars from ancient times onward, and was calculating the solar angle and the like, checking his chronometer every minute or two and marking the time and the angles.

Others were not concerned with the science, but with the holiness of the place. One man wore a silver Celtic cross on a chain around his neck, and there was a small group in Druid hoods and robes, and two long-haired couples in beads and loose, Indian clothing were sitting some distance off from the site, honoring the temple by smoking a sacred herb that they ritually passed among themselves with ceremonial formality.

As the sun drew nearer its descent, the collected few grew quieter, and then quieter still, and by the time the sun reached the horizon, they spoke only in whispers, if at all. I drew apart and moved back to the east slightly to get a good view of the whole scene—the temple, the people, the loch beyond, the small island lying just beyond the loch to the southwest, and the great blue arc of the sky, the black dragon-cloud, and this honored god, the sun, who was now moving almost imperceptibly along the line of the sea, as if unwilling to let go his handhold of day.

The great fiery horses of the solar orb, those who fed on the fields of ambrosia by night, could not be seen, nor could we see the golden, resplendent chariot of Helios. The sunhorse of Trundholm bog was not visible, nor the barge of Ra, nor the Vedic charioteers, nor Sula, nor Sol, nor Surya. But they must have all been there that evening, hard at work, slowly reining in the horses, steering the chariot of the sun ever downward at a decreasing angle into the western sea. Their work for the day was almost over.

Just to the north, as if in reaction to the sun’s mighty presence, the dragon-cloud began raising his head and twisting himself into unlikely shapes, transforming himself, as dragons will, into various configurations. Now he was a tower, then he became a hill, and then, as if in surrender, he began to break apart, and moved upward to join the golden, fretted sky, which by now was charged with greens and reds and rays of blue and orange in those places where the cloud had spread out.

And then, in a hushed silence, almost humbled, the great god sun, the source of all life on earth, dropped with his horses into the sea. First his light touched the sea rim, the ball of flame moved downward and distorted into an ellipse, and, as we watched, the ellipse spread out and became a glowing pool of molten gold.

A minute later it was gone.

Acknowledgments

The events described in this book took place in the early years of the Common Market, long before the creation of the European Union and the advent of the Euro and their effect on the customs, food, language, legends, and landscape of rural Europe. More recently, thanks to a generous grant from the Vogelstein Foundation, I was able to retrace the route of this journey (by car this time, not by bicycle). I had expected a great deal of change, and around the cities and in the shops and suburbs much has changed indeed. But I am happy to report that on the rural roads that I had originally followed, especially in the more remote areas of Spain and Scotland, there was hardly any change at all.

I managed to hook up with a few of the old friends I had made along the way, and to these happy few I am indeed grateful for their detailed remembrances of my sojourns with them. I am also grateful to certain individuals with long memories and information on isolated areas in the Hebrides, Andalusia, and western France. In particular I would like to thank Martin Reiter for his extensive field notes on these regions, as well as Margie Wheeler and Randon Rynd, fellow travelers. I want to thank Lawrence Millman for his notes on the Hebrides, Henry Brown for his Bordeaux digs, and Jill Brown for all her sweetness and light. I also want to acknowledge the generosity of Señor Rafael Alonso and the graciousness and long-suffering goodwill of Mr. Timothy Griggs, wherever he is. I extend my thanks to the collective wits of Lawrence Buell, Richard Forman, Wayne Franklin, and Kent Ryden for their comments and advice on the manuscript and the theme, and I thank Jim Kile for his help with the confusing science of astronomy. As always, I am grateful to my editor, Merloyd Lawrence, and her sharp eye, and also John Thomas and especially Trish Hoard and the energetic production staff at Counterpoint.

Were I of a mind to invest inanimate objects with personality, I suppose I should also give thanks to my loyal bicycle, who carried me across the windy machair of the Hebrides, the steep roads of the Highlands of Scotland, the bull-haunted pastures of Andalusia, and the gentle green landscape of the Loire Valley. I still own that old horse and still take it out for a spin periodically, in remembrance of things past.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2002 by John Hanson Mitchell

Cover image by Gordon Morrison; design by Neil A. Heacox

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7536-0

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