Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides

by John Hanson Mitchell

  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 t
hey 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.