These winter dreams were soon supplanted by more immediate concerns, so I retired to a fine roadside pasture, sliced my tomates, onions, and sardines, tore off a tranche of bread, and uncorked a bottle of Sancerre I had bought to celebrate the first of May. Here, in the warming sun, I sat cross-legged, admiring the cows in a pasture on the other side of the road, and watching intently the sparse traffic pass.
Working over the wildflowers in the pasture were many honeybees. They would dash frenetically from blossom to blossom, drinking up nectar and packing the pollen baskets on their hind legs as they did so, and then fly off in a straight line, apparently with a clear purpose. I tried to follow the line or the angle at which they were coming and going. They seemed to be moving up the pasture from a low swale to my left, at the bottom of the hill and slightly behind me. Years ago I had learned to track bees like a native hunter. You follow their bee line, place a stone at the spot where you lose track of an individual bee, wait for another to fly past and follow that one, placing stones along the route. In this manner eventually you will come to their hive.
How the bees manage to find these flowers, return to their hive, and then communicate the location of those flowers that were filled with nectar was long a mystery to insect watchers. The problem was solved in the 1950s by the entomologist Karl von Frisch, who made a study of the strange tail-waggling “dance” as it was called that bees do whenever they return to the hive. A returning bee, having found a rewarding cache of flowers, will execute her dance while other bees gather round in a circle, watching. Then the watchers fly off and somehow find the flower patch and return with nectar and pollen. It occurred to von Frisch that the dance must have something to do with directions to the source. After years of observation, he noticed that bees are not as lively on cloudy days. In fact beekeepers will warn you that their bees are more likely to sting when it’s cloudy. Von Frisch calculated that the dance must have something to do with the sun. He learned through measurements and observation that the bees were using the position of the sun above the horizon as a fixed point or meridian. The dance was essentially a communication of the coordinates of the flower patch based on the angle of the sun above the horizon and the meridian line.
Below me on the road, speedy little Fiats and Renaults wailed past. Then I saw an old lumbering farm truck drive by with a few workers rocking in the bed, and then, headed southward, in a scene more reminiscent of one of the old French fairy tales, or medieval venta tales from la Mancha, I saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat clomp by on an old gray nag. He was dressed in brown corduroy and had a duffel bag slung over the horse’s rump. On top of the bag, swaying with the gait of the horse, a small, shaggy white dog was perched. I spotted the horseman immediately for a Santiago pilgrim, and dug into my pack for my binoculars to see if I could spot the characteristic scallop shell. But by the time I managed to focus on him, all I could see was his back. He swayed on by at an easy pace, slouched over slightly, his loyal companion balancing bravely on top of his equipage, periodically sniffing the air. I was sorry to have missed him.
This seemed to be a period of missed stories. First the reluctant storyteller, then the ghost of Sleeping Beauty, now the Santiago pilgrim. As I watched him plod off I began to feel a little lonely for the first time on my journey. I was headed for England where I had friends. But England was a long way off, and here I was, perched on a hillside in a French pasture with no one to share my Sancerre. I began to think of Paris and the Rue St. Jacques, where all the Santiago pilgrimages of the thirteenth century began. And then I began to think about all the other ancient streets on the Left Bank, and then I thought of my old friends there and the good times we used to have, drinking and carousing and ending up at dawn at Les Halles to drink one more glass at the zinc bars where butchers in bloodied aprons and late-night opera goers in evening dress all mixed together to eat onion soup. I could almost smell the cold dank air of the market and the musky odor of vegetables and see the old, now moribund heart of Paris. How sad it all was. Then it struck me that they must still be there, my friends, some of them at least. I could look them up. Paris: The City of Light. The Sun King, and all that dappled, broken light of the French Impressionists. One after another, fantasies of Paris crowded in until, feeling sad and rather nostalgique, I limped down to my bicycle and slowly pedaled off to look for coffee to improve my mood.
Late that evening, having dawdled along all day, I entered Richelieu and after some sniffing around found a place to stay. I then went out for a good country boeuf Bourguignon with a hearty Côtes du Rhône, followed by a fresh green salad and then, at the patron’s insistence, a plate of select cheeses. I had a coffee and, again at the patron’s insistence, a cognac, and after that a little chat with him about the old days and how much better it used to be in these parts. Then, feeling aged and overweight, I went out for a walk. There was a quarter moon rising between the spires of the churches of Richelieu, and the streets were dark and lined with plane trees, which, for once, had been allowed to stretch their limbs over the streets—unlike most small French towns whose good burghers generally decree that all limbs be pollarded each winter.
The town was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, whose family had come from this area. Once the Cardinal had risen to power during the reign of Louis XIII, in the early seventeenth century, he set out to establish a monument to himself and ordered the construction of a vast château and also a new town. For ten years, more than two thousand workers were kept busy constructing the buildings and laying out the streets.
Richelieu is now a very orderly sort of place, which reminded me for some reason of Savannah, Georgia. But even here, in the quiet French countryside, chaos lurked. At one point on my stroll, I found a beautiful cecropia moth pinned, for some unknown reason, but still slowly pumping its wings, to one of the plane trees. Worse things have happened in this part of France, of course, some of them instigated by Richelieu himself. He had all the competing châteaux in the region dismantled so as not to rival his own, and was not fond of Protestants—to say the least. But then Protestants were not fond of Richelieu, nor any other Catholics. They were both fond, it seems, of murdering one another, and this peaceful river valley, winding beneath the low wooded and pastured hills, saw some of the bloodiest atrocities during the wars of religion.
I got a late start the next day and rode toward Champigny sur Veude and then on for Chinon. By this time the bright May morning had declined and there were storm clouds in the north, above Chinon, just in the direction I was headed. About twenty minutes later I ran into showers, so I fished through my gear, brought out my poncho, and forged on, and by the time I could see Chinon in the distance, there were breaks in the clouds.
A bridge crosses the Vienne River that runs along the southern end of the town, and there beyond the bridge, arcing over the city in a vast half circle, I saw a magnificent rainbow. One end rose out of a green meadow in the east, swept upward over the town, and then descended into a collection of buildings to the north.
When I was a child growing up in the green American suburbs we used to make rainbows by twisting down the nozzle of a garden hose to a fine spray and then squirting the water against the sun. One friend of mine and I used to play for hours, barefooted on the grass, making rainbows and disproving (unfortunately) the old myth that there is a pot of gold at the end.
We had of course learned in school why rainbows form. Each droplet of water, as we were told, acts like a tiny prism. As light waves enter the raindrop they are slowed, and bent and broken up, revealing the range of colors from red to orange to yellow, green, blue, indigo, and finally to violet, the spectrum of the prism, in other words. The same principle is the cause of other celestial phenomena such as sun dogs, which are often seen at sunset and look like small bright versions of the sun itself, although not as brilliant. Under good conditions, that is, with the proper amount of moisture or ice in the upper atmosphere, you can see two of them, so that it appears that there are three suns in the sk
y. This may have given rise to the pagan and Hindu traditions of multiple suns.
More rarely the atmospheric conditions are such that there is a column of light near the setting sun, and periodically, often before a change in the weather, there may be a halo, or corona, or “glory” around the sun or moon, a sign that is often taken for an omen. The night before the famous mid-nineteenth-century wreck of the schooner Hesperus, off the coast of New England, for example, there was a silver ring around the moon. “Last night the moon wore a silver ring,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem about the event. “Tonight no moon we see.”
All of these celestial phenomena are caused by the refracted or reflected light of the sun, either by ice crystals or by uniform cloud droplets. While all the colors of the rainbow and corona are always present in full, unreflected sunlight, we can’t see them until they are split up by a prism and separated into the spectrum, which arranges and displays the colors according to their individual wavelengths. All light is waves, and all light on earth proceeds from a single source. Long before waves were discovered, mystics had discovered and honored this.
In ancient Jewish tradition, an emerald light surrounds God’s throne and beings in his presence were said sometimes to glow or shine with an interior light. Zeus had many of the same attributes, and later, Roman gods often appeared bathed in light and shining through a cloud. According to Christians, the son of the Hebrew god carried his father’s luminosity. Jesus appeared as a flame or fire, and once on Mount Tabor he was transfigured in front of his disciples into a column of pure light. In Roman and Hellenic art the heads of gods were depicted surrounded by a disc-shaped circle of light, the halo, or nimbus, a tradition found also in Persia and Syria. Some of these nimbi exuded actual rays, like the sun, some were mere circles of light, or halos, and some evolved into aureoles, or mandorla, which are elongated almond-shaped spheres of light that surrounded the whole figure of holy persons. The symbol of the halo, and also the mandorla, was adopted in the Middle Ages to portray saints and other divines and appears regularly in the Christian art of the Renaissance.
In the little Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome, there is a small fresco of the Madonna and Child on the eastern wall. There is nothing particularly unique about the image; it was executed sometime in the thirteenth century by an unknown artist, and it has all the traditional symbols and coloration of the Christian paintings in a thousand different churches throughout Italy. But the celestial symbols worked into the painting are striking. Both Mary and Jesus are surrounded by halos, of course, but the baby Jesus is also holding a golden sun disc in his left hand, and Mary’s blue mantle, trimmed in gold, is festooned with stars, one of which shines with particular brilliance.
The connection between a divinity or supreme being and light occurs throughout world religions. The mandorla is found regularly in Buddhist art and still appears even in the folk art of Hindu India. Hindu divinities shine or exude light from their foreheads, or whole bodies, or hearts. In various Hindu and Tibetan practices, a series of meditations on light have developed, the most basic of which is the sun meditations, intended to balance the seven chakras, or points of energy that are located at various spots in the human body. These chakras, according to eastern traditions, are formed of clear spinning balls of light, tiny suns within the body. During the sun meditation, the practitioner imagines a great external fire in the sky, and absorbs its warmth and energy. After years of practice one is said to be able to actually become pure light. In some solar meditations, the three suns are used to vitalize the chakras or nadis, the meridians that in many eastern traditions are believed to provide an internal structure inside the body. In one Tibetan meditation on light, five suns are imagined, two in the feet, two in the hands, and one at the base of the spine. In heightened states, these can combine into a column of fire; and in some states of a higher level of meditation they will stream upward through the spine and leave the body through the top of the head and spout forth in a fountain of golden or white light that cascades down the outside of the body and returns at the base of the spine, forming the mandorla. The Hindu holy men often went right to the source in their veneration of this sacred fire and stared directly into the face of god—the sun—for hours and subsequently went blind. The Jews knew better. One does not look directly at the face of god, nor even speak his name.
In many so-called primitive religions, the rainbow provided a bridge from earth to sun. Archeologists have discovered images from the late Paleolithic era painted or engraved on cave walls or pebbles and bones that depict the rainbow as a symbol of connection between earth and sky, and there are many extant legends and myths of pilgrims and questing heroes who ascend rainbows to visit (or in many stories steal from) the king of the sky, the sun. In one tradition, after a grueling five-day ritual, select members among the tribes of the Carib Indians were able to climb to the sky on a rainbow bridge with the help of a figure known as Grandfather Vulture. Aboriginal Australian medicine men of the Forrest River region used to travel to the sun on the back of a Rainbow Serpent, and in an East African myth, Kyazimba, a poor but honest farmer, travels on a rainbow to the land of the rising sun and meets the brilliant sun-chieftain who bestows wealth upon the poor pilgrim.
For twenty minutes I stood beside the road outside the town watching the changing sky and the coming and going of the rainbow, until finally the show ended and I pedaled over the bridge and went into town to look for a place to stay. Above a door on the Rue Diderot I saw a tiny sign for a pension and rang the bell. There was no answer. Just as I was about to push on, the door opened a crack, and I saw a glittering eye in the shadows. Then the door opened a little more.
“Monsieur?” a cracked old voice demanded.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for a place for the night.”
I thought I had rung the wrong bell, perhaps.
“A lodging for tonight?”
“Yes, Madame,” I said politely, backing away. “I must have rung the wrong bell.”
“You are looking for a room, then?”
“Yes, if you know of any.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Silence.
“But one thing,” she said. “You must not make any noise.”
“No noise?”
“Make no noise.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here. No noise, though. Enter if you please.”
Given this beginning, I was not so sure I wanted a room in this place, but I followed her in. She was dressed in black, with a white ruffled collar, and had white hair pulled back in a bun and fixed with many hairpins, and she had a long crooked Gallic nose and bright black weasel eyes. I was certain that if I dared to take the room and made any noise that night she would either poison my coffee in the morning or, worse, cast a spell over me and turn me into a toad. But taking my heart in my hands, I followed her up the creaking stairway, then down a dark hall to a narrow oak door. Here she selected a long-shanked tarnished key from a large brass ring, and with her bony fingers, and a great deal of maneuvering, inserted the key in the lock, swung open the door, and stood aside.
Outdoors, the weather had cleared, and in the fading light beyond the streets great yellow and red streaks were fretting the sky. There was a tall French door on one end giving onto a small terrace and through this the yellowing light spilled into the room to reveal a huge canopied bed with a finely sewn counterpane, a high, vaulted ceiling above carved plaster cornices depicting angels and putti, and well-wrought dentils and fleur-de-lis along the sides. The walls were thick and plastered and musty, and there was an ancient armoire opposite the bed, also carved with putti and Greek warriors in plumed helmets. There was a single bed stand with spindled legs, and a single brass electric light on the table. Except for the electric light I might have been in the world of Catherine de Medici or Cardinal Richelieu.
The old crone stood beside the door, just outside the room, wringing her hands an
d eyeing me suspiciously as I looked around the room.
“Is the room to your liking, Monsieur?” she asked.
“It is beautiful,” I said.
“The price for this room will be exactly forty-two francs, twenty centimes,” she said, “but I suppose it is too much for you.” She wrung her hands again and tipped her head to the side, nodding sadly.
“No, no, no,” I said, “I think that would be all right, thank you.” Forty-two francs at the time was not a great deal of money, by any means.
“Very well then, you may have this room. But on one sole condition.”
“Yes, fine, what is that?”
“You must not make noise.”
“No, no, not me, I detest noise. Is it noisy here?”
“No, quiet, generally, but there are those …,” she said, nodding again. “One must take care, you understand.”
“Yes of course, Madame. I will be quiet here.”
“Good, that’s done, then.”
Chinon’s great claim to history is the fact that Joan of Arc stopped there to meet the dauphin. The young dauphin attempted to play a trick on her and disguised himself among his courtiers when she was ushered into his quarters. The legend is that she recognized him right away and even insisted that he was who he was after he denied his identity. It was at Chinon that she declared that the King of Heaven (she meant God, not the sun) had sent her to help the dauphin raise the siege of Orléans and would escort him to Rheims to be anointed king of France.
Chinon is a pleasant little town that is lined with gnarled trees that range above the clustered houses and is dominated by the towers and walls and oval keep of the great castle of Chinon. The local story is that Henry II died in this town and at one point during their stormy marriage met here at Christmas with Eleanor to try to settle the estates of their feuding children. These included Richard the Lion-Hearted and the bad king, John, who never managed England very well, did worse in Ireland, and was so hated by Robin Hood and his peasant associates. Richard took over the castle at Chinon after his father’s death and maintained it as an impregnable fortress until his own death, whereupon his brother John took control. But Philippe-Auguste of France envied it and laid siege for a year before he managed to drive the English out.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 17