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 t
he 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.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 11