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

by John Hanson Mitchell

  “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 conquist
adors 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.