I spent the whole morning sitting amidst the ruins of this mysterious circle of stones and then rode up to the lesser-known archeological site known as Woodhenge, which may have served as a temple or meeting hall for the people engaged in the construction of Stonehenge. Here I lounged in the sun and ate lunch, watching the skylarks rise and flutter in the spring sky and thinking of Shelley and Keats, and romantic English springtime, rather than the ancient days of the Druids. The day was still clear and fresh, and all the fields had a deep, rain-washed English green cast, and although the air was cooler, the sun was warm on my face.
There are some three hundred and fifty stone circles, earthen mounds, and long barrows located along the River Avon and the Kennet River, and after my lunch and a short doze, I set off for the largest of all these, the great complex of earth mounds, banks and ditches, burial sites, and sarsen stones at the village of Avebury.
You cannot escape English history and literature in this region. Merlin came through here when he laid out the megaliths of Stonehenge, and long before there was a real England there were giants in the land. Most of them had died out before England was settled by normal human beings, but when Brutus, the first king of Britain, landed at Totnes with his Trojan followers, so the legend goes, there were still a few left. The Roman town of Bath is just to the north, the famous mystic hill of Glastonbury, where Arthur and his knights held sway, is close at hand, and Thomas Hardy’s unfortunate heroine Tess d’Urberville fled through the night here in her last days and ended up on a supposed sacrificial stone in the middle of the heathen temple, Stonehenge. Mysterious power spots known as ley lines crisscross this part of England and there are supposed to be subterranean geodetic phenomena known as blind springs, or spots of negative and positive energies that react to the phases of the moon in this region. The green-clad hills in this quarter were scraped clear of turf during the Neolithic period to create images, such as the famous White Horse of Uffington, or the vast club-bearing Cerne Giant in nearby Dorset.
As I followed the rural roads from Hilcott to Alton Priors and on through the Vale of Pewsey, I kept coming across these reminders of the ancient days of old England, and I found myself stopping periodically to admire the white horses and strewn sarsen stones, and the wide land of the mystic hills in the distance. In time I came to a pleasant little nature reserve, and once again wandered into the forest to rest amidst the bluebells and the heavy boles of the oaks, and then pushed on toward Avebury and found a quiet little inn for the night.
The array of ditches, mounds, stone circles, and lines of menhirs at Avebury is the largest and most striking collection in England and entirely envelops the small town. This prehistoric Bronze Age center, which dates from 3250 to about 2600 B.C, is much older than the smaller, though more famous temple at Stonehenge. The complex consists of a sanctuary, now just a series of post holes, as well as a long since lost stone circle, a grassy ditched and banked henge connected by an avenue between a double row of giant stones, and the 340-foot West Kennet Long Barrow. Just south of the town is the great mound of Sillbury Hill, a vast pudding-shaped burial mound that is said to be the largest in all of Europe. Some of the sarsen stones in the visible sections of Avebury are huge, weighing as much as ninety tons, so vast that they too could only have been set in place by the likes of Merlin, or perhaps the race of giants who used to roam the nearby hills.
I went out to the site after dinner to poke around some of the avenues and the standing stones. As I was walking, at the far end of one of the avenues, staring out to the westering skies and the long summery light, I saw a little man dressed in flannel slacks and a hound’s-tooth jacket. He had his hands clasped behind his back and he was rocking slightly on his heels as he contemplated the serried clouds.
He heard me pass behind him and turned.
“Pleasant evening,” he said. And then hearing my accent after I returned his greeting: “Not from these parts, I gather?”
“No,” I said. “America.”
“Right, North America. Mystery Hill, the Serpent Mound and all that,” he said.
“Mystery Hill?” I said, surprised. “You’ve heard of Mystery Hill?”
He was referring to a strange jumble of grottoes, standing stones, and slabs in a southern New Hampshire town not far from where I live, a site known in the tourist literature as the American Stonehenge. The complex is much debated by traditional archeologists and is hardly known overseas, and in fact is nothing compared to the great temple complexes of Europe, whose authenticity is undebated. I was amazed that this man knew of this obscure site and said as much.
“Well, you know, you hear of these things,” he said.
“Very few even in America have heard of this particular thing though. Are you an archeologist?” I asked.
“More or less,” he said, obscurely.
There are, it should be said, many “more or less” archeologists and New Age Druids and the like who inhabit the ancient sacred sites around Stonehenge and Avebury, especially during the solstices, some of them of dubious religious persuasions. This little man, with his brush-cut moustache and bushy eyebrows and debonair attire did not at all fit the New Age stereotype. But it was clear that he was well versed in the background of Avebury and other prehistoric complexes. He corroborated my theories—which I proposed to him modestly—on the mixing of cultures that had occurred at Stonehenge, only he claimed that it was here, at Avebury, that the best evidence of the transition could be found.
This was not a man who dabbled in the usual small talk about the differences between England and America. He jumped right in.
“You’ve got here your split between the matriarchal and the patriarchal,” he said. “This sarsen stone here,” he said, lifting his head toward a wide-based, diamond-shaped menhir. “That’s your female figure. This one over here,” and he nodded toward a thinner flat-topped stone, “… that’s your male. All these ditches and mounds … that’s the old order. That’s the old earth goddess worship with its phallic fertility rites, blood sacrifices, and dark Paleolithic rituals. Then here and down at Stonehenge, with your stone circles and the like, you’ve got your shift. They all look upward, away from that dark earth towards the sun and the sky. Of course you get your human sacrifices among both groups.”
He began guiding me along the avenue, pointing out stones and mounds and ditches, and we walked on together chatting about the ancients until we could see in the distance the vast mound of Sillbury Hill.
“Now there’s a dark place if ever there was one,” he said. “Burial mound, of course, but there’s some that think it was a charnel house up on top. You’ve got some nasty business going on there back then, defleshing corpses in the sun, and then carrying the bones out during the equinox and solstice and ritual processions through these avenues led by your antler-decorated shaman types, dancing at the solstice festivals, ritual sex, and all that, in order to bring back the warming sun. Your Red Indians did the same thing back then, around the same period too, built these great effigy mounds and the like. The Serpent Mound and such like.”
I began to form a fantasy that this man was a famous archeologist who merely wanted to keep a low profile. Save for archeologists and a few local tourists, very few in America know about the Serpent Mound, which, unlike Mystery Hill, is an authentic site. The great twisting earth mound winds above the Miami River in southern Ohio with its head facing the river. If you stand at the serpent’s tail on the summer solstice, the sun sets directly beyond the open mouth of the twisting snake—the serpent swallows the sun, in other words.
“You must have studied all this though? Have you been to the Serpent Mound?” I asked.
“Right, some years ago back, I’m afraid.”
“And Mystery Hill, you’ve been there?”
“Well, yes. Not much to look at is it.”
He was being polite.
“Now over on your Connecticut River,” he said, “you’ve got some interesting petroglyphs which I believe hav
e some solar symbols. Or are they sexual. Can’t remember. But these are really Scottish in origin.”
This begat, at my prompting, a very long and very bizarre account of the Scottish influences on the tribal cultures of North America, one of the most elaborate of the various popular theories and legends designed to account for the many improbable stone temples, menhirs, grottoes, and the like that are scattered across the northern sections of the United States from New England to Wisconsin.
According to the gentleman’s theory, which I could barely follow, sometime in the ancient past a Scottish seafaring laird had established a colony in New England. This group brought with it the customs of the country and had taught the natives to construct menhirs and grottoes and stone effigies to the sun god. Much of this had been recently suggested in a book published by a Harvard professor named Barry Fells called America B.C. But by some convoluted genealogy, my man connected famous Indian warriors of the nineteenth century to Scotland, mainly Red Cloud, whom he claimed was directly descended from a Scottish laird of the Mackenzie clan.
I considered running all my solar theories by my self-appointed guide to the archeological sites of the pagan temples of Britain, but the light was fading and somehow, with all his talk of human sacrifice and ritual sex and the like, I did not fancy finding myself alone with him after dark at some remote tomb. Mainly I was hungry and thirsty, so I suggested we lift a glass back in town to continue the conversation.
He was an obscure sort. I didn’t want to press him any further, but it occurred to me that he was perhaps some defrocked archeologist, a renegade academic, dismissed from Oxford for reading solar sexual symbols into too many standing stones and earth pits. But he was a likable fellow and a ready talker about the subjects I was interested in, and in any case, you never know who you’re talking with among strangers. As the ancient Greeks believed, any passing stranger might possibly be a god in disguise.
Years earlier I used to worship the sun at a beach on Siesta Key in western Florida. Every night I would go down to watch the sun drop into the Gulf of Mexico, and every night I would see there a well-bronzed little man, sitting on a terrace, eyeing the sun, with obvious appreciation. This was a crowded beach during the day, but at sunset most of the beachgoers retreated indoors to drink or watch television. Over the few weeks that I was there I fell into conversation with this man about light, and the sun, and the role of the sun and light in the history of art. It was he who had explained to me the relationship between the scientific breakthroughs with photography and the spectroscope and Impressionism. Only later did I learn from someone else that the old man was the famous art critic Meyer Shapiro.
Perhaps my English archeologist was Alexander Thom, the mathematician who decoded so many solstice sites. Perhaps he was Gerald Hawkins, or Christopher Hawkes, or any one of the myriad archeologists, engineers, astronomers, and talented amateurs who have concerned themselves with the great mysteries of these ill-understood sites.
What remains is that Stonehenge, like the great Temple at Cheops and the Sun Pyramid at Tenochtitlán, holds a place as one of the greatest archeological sites on earth.
On my way back to the hotel after sharing a glass with my guide I noticed that there was a decided chill in the air and the next morning, for the first time since I had landed, I felt the presence of a true English spring, as opposed to the English spring of song and verse—that is, a low gray sky, the smell of damp air, cloddy earth, and wet grass. I set out for the Saverndale Forest nonetheless and rode slowly through the rolling country, to Shelbourne and Ham. Just before the town of Newbury the sky opened and the dank cold rain that had been threatening all day finally released.
I had by this time on the trip developed an elaborate theory on the physical relationship between atmospheric conditions and the tensile quality of modern rubber. This theory, in its simplest form, holds that if it rains heavily, the likelihood of experiencing a flat tire increases one hundred fold. For this reason, I was not surprised when I experienced the familiar swerving lack of control and felt my rear tire go flat. I pulled off, carried the bicycle up into a field, unhitched my panniers, turned the bicycle upside down, and began rummaging through my tool kit for the proper equipment. By the time I was finished I was soaked.
Alternate theories on the relationship between the proximity to cities and rain, or the proximity to cities and flat tires, might also be proposed. Looking at the map, I realized I was only forty-five minutes or so by train from Londontown.
Throughout this trip, I had been tempted by London, partly because I had friends there and partly because I felt that somehow, since I was thinking about the sun, and thoughts on the sun beget thoughts on time and the measurement of time, and the center of Western Time is Greenwich Observatory, that I should perhaps undertake a profane sort of pilgrimage to this important scientific site.
I pedaled on into Newbury, thinking over my plans, found a tea shop, changed my clothes in the clean, well-lit, heated bathroom, and drank a pot of hot tea and savored scones with strawberry jam, served by two nice ladies in frilly aprons who wrung their hands when they heard my story.
“Oh my, Dottie,” one of them called out, “come all the way from Cádiz, he did, riding that bicycle all the way. You must come and meet the man.”
Whereupon Dottie trotted out from the back room and wrung her hands. “… All the way from Cádiz is it? You must be tired, poor boy. Give ‘im another scone, Mildred.” And Mildred, bless her English heart, brought out another scone, which I dutifully consumed. And then, having topped up, I pushed back my chair, crossed my legs, took a sip of my tea, and began to expound: “A hard coming I had of it,” I told them, “and the mountains cold, and the natives unfriendly.…” And all the while, as I told my tale, I kept my eyes on the mullioned window to watch the progress of the rain outside.
It only got worse.
“Would either of you know, perhaps,” I asked, “where the train station might be located. I’ve a mind to go to London to further my adventures.”
“Oh my Dottie, now he’s going up to London,” Mildred said.
“Don’t do it boy. It’s a dangerous unhealthful city. And there’s crime.”
“And Pakis.”
“Filled with Pakis, now. You mustn’t go.”
“But, actually, I want to see my friend, the vicar.”
“You know a vicar in London?”
“I do.”
I didn’t, of course.
“Well the train is just two blocks on, off to the right.”
“Regular schedule, now, I’m afraid. We’re getting a new type out here now. Bankers and such like.”
By 3:48 that afternoon, I was on the commuter train to Paddington Station.
Eleven
The Last of the Sun Gods
One of my friends in London was an aspiring American actress named Billy, who had tried to make her way in New York, had failed, and then fled to London to try her luck. She and I and a woman named Nancy used to spend a lot of time together in New York, mostly up in Central Park, where we would all head to come up for air. This Billy had a fine mop of black hair, cut in a bowl style, with long thick bangs that fell below her eyebrows, giving her the look of a blue-eyed sheep dog. She and Nancy sometimes would lock arms on Fifth Avenue and go sashaying down the sidewalk singing—shouting really—a little ditty set to the tune of the Old Grey Mare:
The bells of Hell go ding a ling a ling a ling.
Oh death where is thy sting a ling a ling a ling?
I considered staying with Billy in London, but knowing her financial status, I decided to call some other London friends, an older and decidedly better appointed couple whom I had befriended in Corsica. They had stayed at the auberge where I worked, and had insisted I visit them in London the following autumn, which I had. They owned an airy apartment near Regency Park with many interesting artifacts and they had energetic, lively minded intellectual friends. So I called them and secured an invitation.
&n
bsp; Peter and Magda were in their forties and had led adventurous, exploratory lives. He was a painter, who had been a wanderer before he took up the brush. He had motorcycled through India, traveled in the South Pacific and in sub-Saharan Africa, snuck into Tibet, and lived for a while on a houseboat in Srinagar in Kashmir. The only place he had never been was the United States.
“I saw it once from Mexico,” he told me. “But I was afraid to cross the border, too dangerous.”
Magda taught English at the London School of Economics and was a quieter, more stay at home sort, as well she might be. She had grown up in Poland during the war and had seen things that still gave her nightmares. Some nights in Corsica I would hear her cry out from her room. She filled her days with beautiful objects by way of forgetting, flowers, Chinese vases, old books of verse, the poetry of John Keats—which she adored—and a little lapdog named Poufty, a Brussels griffon, one of the most bizarre creatures I had ever seen.
I was given my old guest room, a book-lined study with tall French windows that gave onto a green court. And here I stayed, waiting out the rain.
One day Magda took me up to Keats’s house near Hampstead Heath, a small, formerly rural cottage where the possessions of the poet were preserved in the manner of sacred icons, which Magda surreptitiously laid her hands upon lightly, as if touching the relics of the saints.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 22