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

by John Hanson Mitchell

  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 sham
ans, 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.r />
  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.”