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

by John Hanson Mitchell

  Michéline and Chrétien, promoters of the new Europe and the then aborning Common Market, were indifferent, even dismissive. They had grown up with the myth of France and were unimpressed by glories of the past. After a few turns around the Hall of Mirrors and other extravagant splendors, since the day was lovely, we retired to the gardens to stroll and reminisce.

  The sponsor of this garden, Louis XIV, ruled France from 1643 to 1715, having inherited the crown at the age of five upon the death of his father, Louis XIII. The regency, confided to his mother, Anne of Austria, the much despised “Austrienne,” was marked by a period of rebellion known as the Fronde, which was instigated by the nobility and later taken over by the urban commoners and eventually suppressed. The boy king, it was rumored, was both humiliated by the arrogant nobles and threatened by the people of Paris—and would someday have his revenge.

  There are political kings and decadent kings, and power-mongering kings, and kings who are interested in the arts and culture and kings who are interested only in sex. Louis XIV was all of these and then some. Under his reign France experienced an extraordinary blossoming of music, writing, architecture, decorative painting, sculpture, and even the sciences—it was during his reign that the French royal academies were founded, including, in 1661, creation of the Académie Royale de Danse in a room of the Louvre, the world’s first ballet school.

  Louis XIV was one of the few kings who had a genuine interest in dance and he was himself a skilled performer. The young king made his ballet debut as a boy, but in 1653 when he was still a teenager he appeared in his most celebrated performance.

  Cardinal Mazarin, the king’s closest advisor, had promoted Italian influences in the French court spectacles that eventually gave birth to the ballet, and had imported the musician Giovanni Baptista Lulli from Italy, who was rechristened Jean Baptiste Lully for work in France. Lully was a skilled dancer as well as a composer and became one of the king’s favorites. Together they arranged a series of court dances called Le Ballet de la Nuit. For the final piece in the group, the young king attired himself in a golden mask, a golden, Roman-styled corselet, and a kilt of golden rays. Thus costumed he strutted onto the dance floor, bowing and dipping and performing his finely executed pas de chat and jetées, to play the part of Apollo the god of the sun.

  It was a memorable performance. The sycophants and the courtiers applauded daintily, the ladies swooned, the grand dames fanned themselves, and the marshals and the ministers and the lords and the financiers schemed and bowed and glanced at one another sidelong. And then they gave the boy a new epithet. After that night, they referred to him as the roi soleil, the Sun King.

  His majesty was well pleased.

  Louis XIV adopted the name and soon chose the sun as his emblem and Apollo, the god of peace and the arts, the god who gave life to all things, as his personal god. Louis, one suspects, imagined himself to be very like Apollo. He brought peace to France, he was a patron of the arts, and, like the benevolent sun, he dispensed his bounty throughout the courts, if not throughout the land. Furthermore, Louis assumed a certain celestial regularity in his work habits. His ritual morning rising, his levée, was associated with certain set ceremonies and formulas. His retirement at night, the couchée, was equally ritualized, and in between the day proceeded with set times for various events, including the pleasure of the gardens, the boudoir, and the hunt. The metaphor of the solar transit was reflected and imitated as a theme through the palace, the decorations combining images and attributes of Apollo in the form of the laurel, the lyre, and the tripod. The sun king’s portraits and emblems, the royal crown, and the sceptre are fixed with solar symbols. The great Apollo Salon, the main room of the Grand Apartment, was originally the monarch’s state chamber, and the path of the sun was the organizing principle for the layout of le Nôtre’s famous gardens.

  Versailles garden is without question the grandest, the largest, and the most ambitious garden in all of Europe, rivaled only by Caserta outside of Naples, which attempted, but failed, to outdo Versailles. The gardens were cut from an earlier royal garden. But the grounds here were hardly suited to the creation of a grand garden; they were without woods, marshy, and underlain by sandy soils. The earth was so low in the area that tons of soil had to be imported from afar and then graded and leveled and shaped according to the grand design of le Nôtre and his assistants. Aqueducts and a new road from Paris were laid out, and some 36,000 laborers and 6,000 horses were employed for construction. It was, according to the perhaps uncritical French historians, the condensed genius of the whole culture of France embodied in a garden, a formal and orderly landscape of flower beds, sparkling waters, and marble, and all of it arranged in a schematic and harmonious geometrical figure that used sunlight as the unifying concept.

  Straight down the center of the garden from the Basin of Latona with its red marble fountain, depicting gilded tortoises, frogs, lizards, and the white marble image of Leto with her two children Artemis and Apollo and the long green carpet of the lawn, lies the Basin of Apollo and the Grand Canal, with fountains, more lawns, flower beds to the left and right, and walks leading off in every direction past statuary in marble and bronze.

  The garden of Versailles actually preceded the construction of the palace and took over fifty years to fully complete. But when the work was done le Nôtre had succeeded in creating precisely what Louis himself imagined that he, the Sun King, symbolized. The land had been completely altered and subjugated to the taste of the seventeenth century with clipped and tonsured trees and water gardens and fountains laid out to reflect the sky and catch the sparking light of the sun. It was a perfect Apollonian world, a world of order and beauty, a reflection of the divine cosmos, with the sun as its center and the sun king as its ruler.

  All this was to come to an end, of course. Less than seventy years later the French began crying for liberty, equality, and fraternity and took to the streets. For those who share a solar perspective on history, it is interesting to note that the revolutionaries who crowded the Place de la Concorde, the prophets of the light of reason who instigated the Revolution, adopted as their emblematic uniform the red Phrygian cap of the sun god Mithra.

  In December of 1999, the sun, and its stepchild, the wind, wreaked further havoc at Versailles. A freakish windstorm with gusts up to 105 miles an hour blasted through Europe that month and destroyed some 741,000 acres of forest all across France and killed ninety people to boot. Ten thousand trees were uprooted at Versailles alone.

  The following evening, my last night in Paris, the three of us met once more and retired to a small restaurant on the Right Bank, not far from the old Jewish Ghetto. Here, under the watchful eye of Chrétien, we ordered a full menu and two bottles of Bordeaux and stayed on late into the night talking. Micheline spotted a rare Vacherin cheese on the menu for the cheese course and shared it with us at the end of the meal. We had coffee and liqueurs and more coffee and had a long discussion—not about our pasts, but about Micheline’s cheese. It had a vague woody flavor of pine or spruce that I thought had something to do with the region it came from—the Jura Mountains—but that I was told in fact came from the strip of bark that was the traditional part of the packaging.

  It was another one of those sad endings. I did not know when I would be back, and after dinner we walked for an hour, ending up once more at our old haunt on the Left Bank, where we kissed goodbye and vowed to write and I said I would come again to Paris soon, even though I knew I wouldn’t, and we would walk again in the Bois de Boulogne, and on and on, in the fashion of the Old World farewells. After we parted I wandered some more by myself and reflected on the unforgiving passage of time, and the fact that, really, those energetic student years when you thought you could bring down governments and stop all wars were mythic little café entertainments. In any case I was cut more in the style of a Santiago pilgrim or a troubadour. I was glad to be moving on. The green and sceptred isle of England loomed ahead.

  The next morning
, rather than struggle through northern France, I took a train to Le Havre and caught the night ferry to Southampton.

  Ten

  Ancient of Days

  One of the things I had learned on my various pilgrimages was a knack for finding a good place to sleep in unfortunate conditions. The night ferry to Southampton was a case in point. Probably because of the strike the ferry was surprisingly crowded and there were no empty settees to stretch out upon. But poking around through the bowels of the vessel, I spotted a bulkhead lined with shelves of luggage racks and climbed to the uppermost with my panniers, stacked them up to prevent myself from rolling out, and fell into a deep sleep.

  True to form, the English Channel was rough that night and we began pitching and rolling and diving into frothy valleys of water as soon as we cleared the shelter of land. At one point we took a dive that was steep enough to dislodge me from my nest and send me skidding forward on my rack, toward a steely gray bulkhead, my pannier barricade racing forward with me. I gave up on sleep and went out on deck to look at the sea.

  There were sheets of rain and spray washing the decks, and the waters were black and Stygian and mixed with white toothy breakers that charged toward the vessel as if they were attempting to bite it. As I watched, suddenly in the terror of darkness, great horizontal bolts of lightning began flashing ahead of us.

  Bravely, the little ferry chugged onward. Chairs and luggage came free and went scuttling to and fro along the decks. Below, in the companionways and in the main salons, tired, ill passengers clung to bars and doorways, while thunder growled around us and the great thud of waves pounded the topsides of the vessel. The lights flickered out at one point and the whole interior was illuminated by a bolt thrown down by one of the great sky gods. I was now midpoint between two worlds—the Mediterranean gods Jupiter, Jove, Zeus, and Apollo, and the hammer-bearing Norse and Celtic gods and goddesses of lightning, and the thunder god Odin.

  Traditionally, in almost all cultures, lightning was a fostering agent that came down from the solar-associated sky gods, often in the form of a spear, and by extension the phallus, to fertilize the world. It was lightning that gave birth to the sun god Mithra, for example. In England in the early Middle Ages, lightning was absorbed into Christian mythologies; Lanceor, or the Golden Lance, was an archaic name for Lancelot in the Grail cycle of myths, and was also associated with Arthur’s sword Excalibur.

  All this seemed to arise quite logically from the natural phenomenon of a powerful storm. I could see ahead of me great fingers of fire casting about here and there on the waters around us, as if attempting to find the proper range to sink us—or fertilize us—as the case may be.

  At one point in the deluge it occurred to me that this storm was not a good omen for an entry into the green and flowery English spring and that I should perhaps have stayed in France. But after an hour or so, the storm abated somewhat and the gray line of dawn cracked the horizon to the east, under the cloud cover. Ahead, in the dim light, I saw the low-lying dark coast, blinking with kindly lights, and within the hour we landed.

  Rather than spend the day fighting through a cold drizzling rain, I found a place in the student quarters of the town and went to sleep for the rest of the morning. The next day I set out for Lymington.

  After a bad ride on a big, noisy road, I found a peaceful lane that led to Marl-wood and from there rode southward through the greening spaces of the New Forest, where I kept spotting seemingly wild ponies out in the brush. The tiny New Forest ponies run free here and the people fence the animals out, not in. This was the original style of fencing in England at the time of William the Conqueror, who landed at Hastings not far from this spot. The New Forest is in fact over a thousand years old, having been established as a “new” forest in these parts after the Conqueror instituted the dreaded Forest Laws, which forbade all but the Royal Hunt in this region.

  As I pedaled along, I began seeing hedgehogs along the road. There seemed to be more of them here than in France or Spain. At one point, in the distance, I saw a lapwing executing a courting flight, and I could hear the whines and whispers and tweets of thousands of unseen warblers and sparrows and finches back in the brush. Bushtits and chaffinches, robins and thrushes appeared and disappeared, the sky cleared, the air was warm, the rainy fields were scented, the wind dropped, and the time of singing birds had come. It was, withal, springtime in old England.

  At Beaulieu, a quaint little town at the upper end of a tidal river, I stopped for a cup of tea. Here for the first time I was surprised to realize that I was actually speaking English, my native tongue. I pushed on, singing little English ditties about springtime, the merry, merry ring time, and the like, and slipped through rolling farmland, passing en route the ruins of an abbey and the little towns of Bucklers Hard and St. Leonards, East End, and then finally the little yachting port of Lymington on the Solent, where all the happy sailors, men and women alike, were dressed in tricoleur sweaters and baggy blue trousers, and the pubs were full by twelve in the morning.

  Everywhere in these little villages the lilacs were just opening and scenting the air. In fact the air had been scented with flowers throughout this splendid little sojourn, orange blossoms in southern Spain, horse chestnuts in el Retiro in Madrid, lilies of the valley, lilacs, and wisteria in France, and now again wisteria and lilacs and sweet violets.

  On a back street in Lymington I found a tidy little whitewashed bed and breakfast and stopped in to secure a place. A fulsome, motherly woman with sea blue eyes and curly gray hair, dressed in a frilly flowered apron, came to the door and looked me up and down sympathetically.

  “You poor lamb,” she said, glancing over at my loyal horse bicycle and deducing instantly, in that motherly way, the fact that I was a long-distance traveler. “How far have you come on that thing?”

  I explained.

  “You’ll be having tea first,” she said, and ushered me into a sparkling kitchen set with china geegaws and lacey curtains and flooded with white sunlight. “Sit,” she commanded and set the kettle boiling. “Drink,” she ordered when the tea was brewed. “Now, tell me where you’ve been, poor boy, and was it very hard, and were there many brigands in the mountains of Spain?”

  I spent the next two days with Mrs. Saunders, resting and feeding up for the hard journey northward, an expedition that she, in her ancient wisdom, advised me against—strongly.

  “Scotland is very, very hilly. Nothing but sheep and heathland, and a bitter chill in the air, and aren’t people a hard lot, they say, although I don’t know many, but they feed on hideous things like sheep belly and they are not, I’ve heard …,” and here she nodded vaguely, waiting for the polite term, “… they are not an intelligent race, it is said.”

  “Nevertheless …,” I said.

  “A poor small boy among so brushy a people, I durst not think on it.”

  That night I had fresh green peas, a joint of lamb, and mashed potatoes, washed down with tea. For breakfast I had strong black tea, rashers, fried eggs, and hot buttered toast o’erspread with gobs of orange marmalade and scones with clotted cream and a bowl of fresh strawberries, and more tea and a glass of fresh milk. That afternoon I came back and was offered clotted cream and scones and fresh strawberries and more orange marmalade, and five cups of tea. And then I was sent on my way to a restaurant called The Diver, where I was assured I could get stewed elvers, a local dish I coveted. The next night I had roast beef, mashed potatoes, and more local green peas. And all the food was fresh, with no sauces, and no wine to speak of, and only a few hard cheeses—and that for lunch only—and soft white bread with the crusts sliced off, interspersed with minuscule thin cuts of ham. And then the following morning at Mrs. Saunders, fried eggs with crispy burnt bacon and her strong tea and stacks of hot buttered toast, and by now she was fretting even more about my journey to Scotland and had become especially distraught since I had made the grave error of informing her of my intention to push on to the Outer Hebrides.

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��Good God boy you cannot go there,” she shouted. “You’ll die of exposure in the empty wind like a poor lamb. No one in their right mind ventures out to the Hebrides. It’s a brutish church-crazed lot they are and a hard people. I shall call constabulary and have you guarded. You’re not to go. You’re better off in the gaol in Lymington than the freedom of the Hebrides.”

  “Palm trees grow there,” I said.

  “Palm trees?” she shouted. “There’s not a single tree in all of Scotland, boy, save perhaps a larch or fir in the parks. If you want palm trees go back to Spain. Turn around and go down to Italy and ride your bicycle to Salerno. Mr. Saunders saw palm trees in Salerno in the war. Go down to Sicily if you must. But God almighty boy do not go to Scotland, I beg of you. You’ll be speared and eaten.”

  I was tempted by the Italian alternative. I remembered the little lizards that bask on the sun-warmed fallen columns in the ruins at Ostia Antigua and Paestum, and the hillside groves of lemons around Sorrento and mozzarella, and olive trees and Chianti and the tall glasses of bubbly prosecco, and the sundrenched ruins of the great temples to the old solar gods of the Mediterranean and forest glens where Pan and his company of dryads and naiads might still lurk. All this was indeed the opposite of the wind-swept regions of the murderous Scottish Glens and the empty moors of the Hebrides.

  “These were my people,” I said to Mrs. Saunders. “Long ago my ancestors emigrated from this region.”

  “They were a wise lot, then,” she said.

  As I poked around the streets of Lymington, I began to develop another grand unifying theory of the role of the sun in the religions of various cultures of the world in which those nations that almost daily experience the sun and its effects, such as Greece and Egypt, should develop a central solar deity, or at least some powerful sky god, such as Zeus, and those cultures of the dark cloud-covered north should adopt some dark religion based on war and storm clouds. But in fact worship of the sun seems to be universally spread over the world cultures. For those such as the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, where the sun at the end of summer leaves the green earth parched and brown, the sun god achieved his (usually his in these climates) greatest glory. And in the tropics, where the sun stands straight overhead and blasts down with a withering force, cultures seem only more acutely aware of its majesty and power. The sun-blasted West African peoples worship a sun chieftain, the Egyptians have Ra, the Aztecs worshipped Tonatiuh. And yet among those who dwell under mists and clouds and rains, sun worship still prevailed. The sun goddess Amaterasu was an important deity in the primordial Shinto faith of Japan, where it rains all the time, and among Celtic nations the tracking of the sun in its annual course through the heavens fostered the construction of elaborate rings of stone designed, as we now know, to function as solar calendars. The nearest of these, and the one that helped reveal the purpose of these curious rings of stone, was Stonehenge, where I was now headed.