“He was so good a man,” she said reverently. “So feeling and tragic.”
“Was he not also a worshipper of the sun?” I asked.
“No, you are thinking of William Blake, who used to bask naked in his garden—to the horror of his neighbors.”
I asked this because Magda herself was a confirmed nudist. I used to come upon her sprawled flat out on the red rocks of the Corsican coast on my afternoon ramblings. It was as if she was attempting to bake out all memory of the Polish winters and the war. Peter had something of the sun worshiper in his soul as well. He was an obsessive spear fisherman but would sometimes crawl out of the water like some primordial sea lizard and join Magda on the rocks. She was small and blond, he was a lanky Englishman, but browned like an Arab. In fact he had been born in Tunisia to English parents and was trilingual. He told me once that he had befriended a white-eyed sanyatsi in Gujarat who had gone blind from staring directly at the sun.
Magda and I poked through the quiet rooms of the John Keats house, and then went out into the rainy garden, where the lilacs were blooming. Sparrows were fluttering about in the lower limbs, the leaves were dripping, and the stone benches were cold and damp.
“Not much change here since the 1800s,” I suggested.
She looked over at me sadly.
“Many changes, I’m afraid.”
John Keats died at the age of twenty-six. The rainy, indoor English climate, or, as some say, the stresses of critical reviews and an off-again on-again relationship with Fanny Brawn, got the better of him and he suffered periodic bouts of tuberculosis. Finally, his doctors recommended the ultimate and only known cure—a sunny climate—so he fled south to Rome, where he lived in an upstairs apartment just off the Spanish Steps. He died there in 1821.
One of the longer poems in his substantial body of work was a blank-verse epic called Hyperion. The story dealt with the Titan Hyperion (“Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire”)—who was an early god of the sun, overthrown by Apollo, one of the new generation of Hellenic gods whose chief figure was the sky god Zeus. Hyperion, like Apollo after him, lived in a high palace “Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold” and wore flaming robes that streamed out behind his heels.
Keats was not the first Romantic poet to flee southward to the supposedly sunny climate of Italy. Lord Byron and Shelley were already spending time around Leghorn (as the English called Ligorno) before Keats went to Rome. In fact they encouraged him to join them. The idea of the south, of warm air, light, and a vibrant, colorful peasantry, began attracting northern Europeans around the turn of the nineteenth century, and still attracts them today, as anyone who has spent any time on Capri or Positano or for that matter Majorca will attest.
Some fifty years after his death, Keats’s apartment on the Spanish Steps was taken over by another northern sun follower, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who made a name for himself among the rich and famous expatriate community, and eventually fled even farther south to Anacapri, where he restored—more or less—the former villa of the emperor Tiberius. By this time, half of the well-heeled patronage of northern Europe were spending at least part of the winter season in Italy it seems, and Munthe managed to make himself a favored physician for them all.
Italy was so popular with the British that there were English churches and English newspapers and journals in Rome and especially in Florence—which in my experience is not much warmer than London in winter. Be that as it may, the northerners flocked there, and as late as the Second World War still formed a permanent community. In the postwar years they were still coming, although for shorter stays, and by the 1970s they were beginning to crowd onto some of the then unspoiled coasts of Europe, the isles of Greece where Byron sang, the Moor-haunted coast of southern Spain—the newly named “Costa del Sol”—and, most densely populated of all, the Côte d’Azur. The quieter, more contemplative sun lovers were forced to seek ever more obscure coves, islands, and undiscovered crescent beaches. It was here, in a little auberge on the northeastern coast of Corsica, that I had first met Magda and Peter.
One night in London, Magda and Peter held a dinner party to which they graciously invited my friend Billy. She came dressed in black with a Spanish lace shawl knotted around her hips and wore silver hooped earrings and many spangles and baubles and black eye shadow. I caught Peter eyeing her favorably at one point.
There was another couple there who had recently returned from Peru. As do most tourists, Peruvian and foreign alike, they had made the ascent to Machu Picchu, a site Peter had visited years earlier. This led quite naturally to a discussion of the Inca and the brutal Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his hometown of Trujillo in Estremadura, where a statue of the brave man is displayed on the town square aloft on his heroic horse. Ultimately, at my prodding, we even managed a little analysis of the role of the sun in Inca society, about which Peter knew a thing or two.
Peter, in fact, knew a thing or two about almost any subject, especially exotic distant cultures. He was in the habit of collecting images such as mandalas and the round, wheel-like solar symbol of Ashoka that you see all over India and would work these into his obscure paintings. He knew all about Moche pottery and Nazca lines and soon we were launched into a seemingly interminable and heated discussion of the relationship between culture and altitude.
Billy had remained uncharacteristically silent during most of this dinner, but at one point during all this Peru talk, during a rare pause in the stories, she spoke.
“I’ve been to Peru,” she said quietly, “to a place called Chavín something.”
All eyes turned to her, waiting for more. But she held her silence.
“That’s very interesting,” one of the guests said, a degenerate sort of fellow named Robert who had just come back from Peru.
“Rather,” said his wife, Patricia. “Did you get terribly sick?”
“No. Why would I get sick?”
“Doesn’t everyone who goes to Peru?”
“I don’t know, perhaps.”
People waited for more. I had heard a little about this trip earlier; she had been traveling with an American ethnobotanist.
“Is that when you were traveling with what’s his name?” I asked, trying to draw her out.
“Right.”
“Wasn’t it a lovely trip?” Magda asked. They all wanted to hear more from this exotic-looking figure.
“Well, actually, it was quite a trip.”
I alone knew what she meant. The man she was traveling with was researching hallucinogenic plants.
“Rather,” said Patricia. “For us too. We got sick as dogs in Machu Picchu. Partly the altitude though.”
“This Chavín,” Peter asked. “Do you mean Chavín de Huántar? There’s a pyramid there, isn’t there?”
“Actually it’s not only a pyramid,” Billy said finally. “It’s a whole series of passages and stone columns. There is a monolith or whatever you call it and I think there are images of birds and a rare plant there or something. Shamans used to eat this plant, a cactus I think, and travel to the sun and on into outer space.”
Within a few minutes, the old theatrical Billy emerged, throwing her arms akimbo and relating histrionic tales of her travels with this Charlie, from the Amazonian lowland tropical forests to the heights of the Andes in search of hallucinogenic plants, any and all of which Charlie would consume, sometimes after enduring daylong rituals with crazed shamans who would pierce his skin with thorns and sharp stems of grasses.
“Were you not afraid there?” Magda asked. “It sounds dangerous.”
“I was,” said Billy. “I was terrified all the time, but excited. We met a man named Valencio in the upper reaches of the Orinoco, I think it was, in Venezuela anyway. Valencio knew some Indians who promised to give Charlie a sacred powder that would cause the world to fall apart, disintegrate totally. Charlie of course, being Charlie, had to have some, and so we spent a week motoring up to some village in a narrow canoe, and all the people
, naked people, came rushing out when we got there and they rubbed my skin and felt my body, and the old women squeezed my breasts and said approving words.” And here she grabbed her breasts like fruits (to the approval of Peter, I noticed). “But Charlie, all he could do was make Valencio translate and ask for some of this powder that takes the world apart. And do you know what the translation was for the name of this stuff, do you know what it’s called?”
She looked over at me, smiling wickedly.
“What’s it called?”
“Semen of the sun.”
“By God,” said Peter. “That’s what the Egyptians used to say about some column they maintained somewhere, it was the solidified semen of Atum, the sun, left over from the time when he created the world, I believe. That’s an interesting image.”
“I say, did this Charlie fellow eat some of this semen?” Patricia asked, sufficiently horrified.
“He did.”
“What happened?”
“Who knows,” Billy said. “He sat in a dark hut for three days, looking terrified. Then he got sick and the Indians gave him some black stuff, a drink, and he recovered in a few hours, and then he and the shaman and Valencio had a long talk. I was getting bored. The women took me to the stream to wash. They liked me. A white queen. They thought I was the queen of the north. When I asked Charlie what had happened he said he knew what it was like to be dead.”
Magda shook her head, as if to perish the thought. “This is most unpleasant. Tell us about your sun pilgrimage to lighten us up,” she said to me.
There was nothing to tell to this eclectic group. What could I say except that every day I would pedal along the rural roads of Europe, eating local dishes and drinking wine and contemplating the sun.
“I shall walk on air and contemplate the sun,” Robert repeated drunkenly.
“Who said that?” I asked.
“Don’t know.”
“One of your Cynics, I daresay,” said Peter. “Who was it who told Alcibiades to step aside so as not to stand between him and the light of the sun?”
“That would be Diogenes,” Magda said. “And it was Alexander he told to step aside, I think. But how about some music, Peter? Let’s listen to some music. We’re getting too glum here.”
“Let’s listen to Bach and get lost in the fugue,” Patricia said.
“And travel into space …,” Billy said airily, throwing out her arms.
Peter and Magda glanced over at her quickly, unsure of her drift, and then Peter rose from the table and went over to the stereo, and began rummaging through records.
“Put on the Goldberg Variations,” Magda said.
Billy rolled her eyes at me and I winked. We were used to younger music.
Peter agreed and rummaged some more.
“Ready?” he asked. He carefully placed the needle on the record.
What sounded out was not Bach but the chanting of pygmies from the Ituri Forest, accompanied by the drumming of their bark hammers. Everyone feigned outrage, and Robert began laughing approvingly. Then his laughter grew, and soon he was coughing and sputtering and pounding his chest.
“He’s had enough, I think,” said Patricia. “We must put him to bed.”
“My Charlie knows of a plant concoction that will sober up a drunk man in ten minutes,” Billy said.
“Get some for Robert,” said Patricia.
“Don’t need,” said Robert. “… can walk on air.” He began laughing apoplectically again.
All this talk about Peru left me wondering about the last of the great solar kingdoms.
In 1513, when the Spanish arrived in Peru, the Inca had established a vast solar kingdom stretching from Ecuador south to northern Chile. Ruling over this kingdom was the Son of the Sun, the supreme ruler, Intip Cori. According to their legends, the father sun sent the first Inca out with his sister and wife to establish a city wherever a golden wand that the Inca carried should sink into the earth. This place happened to be Cuzco, a strategically located city at the head of a gently sloping valley, 11,000 feet above the sea. Here the sun king, the Sapa Inca, built a vast stone complex of palaces and temples, shrines, and museums of power, all interspersed with wide plazas and buildings devoted to learning and science. The whole was dominated by a great fortress, but the main building was the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun. It was the chief temple of the Sapa Inca and the royal seat of the Son of the Sun. Surrounding it, as in the heavens, were lesser structures dedicated to the moon, to Venus, to stars and rainbows and lightning. The doors of the main temple were sheathed in gold, and on the western wall there was a rayed sun disk with a jewel-studded plaque arranged so that the rays of the sunrise would strike it and flood the interior of the temple with a bright reflected light.
In the tightly controlled Inca hierarchy, the solar king was a direct descendant of the sun itself. In order to maintain his pure blood line he took his full sister as his chief wife, Qoya. He also maintained a vast harem of Chosen Women, selected at intervals by officials who were sent throughout the kingdom to find the most beautiful girl children. These were sent to live in an enclosed, luxurious harem where they were favored and pampered, but doomed. A few of them would be sacrificed to the sun god on special occasions, such as a victory, or a coronation of a new Sapa Inca. In exchange, they were assured a blissful afterlife. And, indeed, archeologists excavating the cemeteries near the city of Pachacamac found the mummies of several girls who had been richly attired before burial but had been ritually strangled.
The other women lived either as concubines to the Sapa Inca or were given as prizes and awards to favorite nobles or successful soldiers. A few were selected to serve as the equivalent of Vestal Virgins, or Virgins of the Sun as they were known. These, like the Vestal Virgins, tended a sacred fire, the sun’s holy fire, attended to religious ceremonies, and wove the splendid vicuña robes for his majesty. Others in the harem provided the great lord with many children. These “Children of the Sun” wore distinctive headdresses and large ear lobe plugs.
Every morning in Cuzco, carved aromatic woods were set on fire by priests, and everyday, as Inti, the sun, began his descent into the underworld, a chestnut-colored llama was sacrificed to him. Just before the summer solstice the people fasted for three days and no fires were lit, then, on the longest day, crowds gathered in the central plaza dressed in finery made of feathers and gold and silver. The Sapa Inca appeared before them and poured a libation to the sun from a golden vase and led a procession of the Children of the Sun to the Coricancha temple, where they made public sacrifices of flowers, grains, and llamas, and occasionally a Virgin of the Sun. At the height of the festival, a burnished concave mirror of bronze was held in such a way as to catch the god’s rays, and the light was sent to kindle a ball of bunched cotton. This fire was turned over to the Virgins of the Sun and was used throughout the year to make burnt offerings.
If, on one of the solstice festivals, clouds covered the god’s face, the sacred fire had to be ignited by friction, and there would be much anxiety and concern among the priests and nobles for the coming year. The same held true if the Virgins of the Sun allowed the fire to go out at any time during the year.
The weather on the day of the summer solstice in Cuzco, in the Julian calendar year of 1531, is not recorded. Nor is it known if the sacred fire of the sun, so carefully tended by the Virgins, was accidentally extinguished in that year. But if the Sapa Inca and his priests and nobles and their deep, legendary history has any merit, the day of the solstice in 1531 was cloudy.
In that same year, on the coast north of Cuzco, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed with his contingent of horses and men and began moving towards Cuzco.
On November 16th, hearing that the current Sapa Inca, Atahualpa, was decamped near the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca, Pizarro moved a force of 168 soldiers, cannons, and horses toward the city. As they approached, the Spanish could see the encampment of the Indians, and one wonders if they did not think at this time
that they had undertaken a deadly folly. There, spread over the surrounding hills, was a vast tent city of some 80,000 Indian warriors and nobles. Undaunted, Pizarro ordered the men into the main square of Cajamarca and prepared for battle. He split the cavalry and sent the horses to either side of the plaza and then hid his men around the walls.
That night they could see the campfires of the Indian soldiers shining like a clustered galaxy across the hills. The next morning a messenger came from Atahualpa and Pizarro sent him back, inviting Atahualpa to come into the city. He would be received as a friend, Pizarro indicated, and no insult or harm would come to him.
Around noon the Indians began moving toward the city. All afternoon they marched forward and finally the Spanish could see Atahualpa himself. Thousands of Indians in multicolored robes came ahead of him sweeping the ground clean of every stick and leaf. Behind them came squadrons of dancers and singers, and behind them, warriors armed with shining metal plates that caught the afternoon sun. Then, finally, in their midst appeared the Sapa Inca himself. He was borne on a high litter of many colored parrot feathers, held aloft by ornate timbers sheathed with silver, and carried by eighty lords in blue livery. He wore a golden crown and a huge necklace of emeralds and sat upon a saddle cushion fixed on the litter. Behind him was the company of warriors, an immense horde filing into the square.
So great were the numbers of warriors, and so vast the approach, that some of the brave conquistadors wetted themselves in fear. Pizarro held firm, and when Atahualpa was set down in the center of the plaza he sent out a priest to deliver the word of God and demand that the Sapa Inca subject himself to the law of Jesus Christ. The priest proclaimed that his power rose from a book, the Bible, and Atahualpa asked to hold it, but he did not know how to open it. So the priest stretched his hand to show him and the Sapa Inca struck his arm. Then he opened the book, looked at it, and threw it down in disgust. This enraged the Christian man of God, who called for revenge.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 23