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

by John Hanson Mitchell

  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 be
yond 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 Arc
achon 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.