One sultry August afternoon at Whitby, back in the late 1800s, a strange and sudden cloud enveloped the seas just outside the harbor and a violent storm swept in. By nightfall immense rollers were hurtling against the shore and watchers on the coast spotted a storm-tossed schooner, her sails tattered, rolling in toward the rocky coast. Those who knew the waters were certain she would ground out on the reef beyond the harbor and a searchlight was played upon the vessel. To their horror, observers saw that the ship was empty, save for a corpse lashed to the mast, its head lolling in the wash. Miraculously the schooner slipped through the harbor entrance, and with a mighty, jarring crash, struck the shore. At that moment, in the searchlight, watchers saw a huge dog leap from the bow and bound up the heights to a churchyard at the top of the cliffs. The schooner, the Demeter, turned out to be of Russian registry, and in the hold searchers found several oblong boxes marked “clay.”
Later in that same week, a local woman affected with sleep-walking wandered away from her bedroom at night and was found near the churchyard with two minor puncture wounds on her throat. She had been overwhelmed by a strange sleep. During this same period in Whitby, a certain tall, dark, and handsome nobleman from Transylvania appeared in the town.
Dracula was the invention of the nineteenth-century novelist Bram Stoker, but he has many of the qualities of the Zoroastrian god of darkness and evil, Ahriman, who heads a company of evil spirits and is the carrier of death and destruction. He is the opposite of Ahura Mazda, the all-wise, all-good, god of the sun and light, truth and goodness. Dracula is nothing if not a depressed character, a figure of melancholy—if depression and melancholy had a god, it would be he. He is, like depression, surrounded by darkness, clouds, graveyards, night doings, and a living death. All the words traditionally associated with depression are somehow related to this lack of light—a cloud hangs over one’s head, the dark night of the soul, and the like. The same, of course, is true of the other Prince of Darkness, the Devil, and all of these figures, Dracula, Ahriman, and the Devil, have the same archenemy—the sun.
Innumerable movies have been made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula story, but the one I like the best is the old 1940s version with Lon Chaney as Dracula. In this movie, there is a scene in the tombs of Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in which the hero, Jonathan Harker, enters the underground chamber where the vampires rest by day in their coffins. Dracula rises up to attack and kill this invader, but as the evil lord of the castle approaches, our hero raises the crucifix. This drives Dracula into paroxysms of rage, but does not kill him. What defeats him ultimately is the sun. While Dracula is raging, Harker bounds to a tall window and tears off the darkening curtains; great dusty beams of light stream in, striking the vampire and forcing him, hissing and snarling, back into his coffin. Once Dracula is rendered powerless by light, Harker delivers the coup de grâce, the wooden stake through the heart.
I spent one more night in Whitby and then the next day began a hard slog across the high moors of Yorkshire, headed for the Swaledale, at the old bicycle man’s suggestion. Immediately outside of Whitby the hills grew steep and precipitous, in some places so steep I was forced to dismount and push my bicycle up to the summit. High at the top of the moors the views across the countryside opened to the wide sky, with sharp, quiltwork, fairy tale hills, sheep meadows, banks of clouds in the western skies, and everywhere now the eerie descending cry of the curlews. I thought to stop early that day since it was such fine country, but had trouble finding a spot. There was no place in the little town of Grosmont so I pushed on to Egton, straight uphill for two miles through a lonely country, with very few cars, and once or twice a passing shepherd with his flock, one of whom I greeted. He stared at me somewhat aghast as if no one on earth had ever spoken to him before and then opened his mouth and pointed to it, indicating, I believe, that he was unable to speak. He had a good whistle though. I could hear him for miles, directing his dogs to work the flocks by means of his whistling.
Eventually I happened upon a quiet country inn beside a small river, with a stone courtyard, a dark wood-paneled pub, and a first-rate, civilized parlor. I had a late lunch and took a little walk along the riverbank to stretch my legs. Here, I was joined immediately and enthusiastically by two house dogs, a smooth-haired energetic Jack Russell terrier and a slow-moving shaggy black Scotty. We set out along the little path working our way upriver through grassy glades and groves of poplar, sloe, and larch. As I walked, the Jack Russell would dart off into the brush, shake something, and then trot on, hardly breaking stride. I went over to see what he was catching and found that he was killing water rats as we walked. Business as usual for him, I supposed.
The trail seemed to go on and on, and the light of the sun fell through the twisting tree leaves, and soon the glades ended and the trail began to climb into the hills. The Scotty turned back at this point, but the Jack Russell carried on with me, still scurrying off left and right, hunting vigorously. It was warmer now, I could hear the rippling river below me and the curlews above me in the hills, and the distant bells of the sheep and the air was filled with the sharp scents of the moors, and it was all fresh and sweet and charged with the glories of the high country of Yorkshire and its deep structure of legend and literature. This was, among other things, the country of the Brontës.
At one point I came to a sheltered spot among ferns and brake where the warming spring sun was beating down with full force. I lay back and folded my arms behind my head and felt the power of my deity on my face. Relaxing there in the benevolent warmth, I could understand why, here in the northern climates, the summer solstice celebrations were so festive, and why the early peoples would become so concerned about the sun’s possible disappearance at the winter solstice.
That night at the inn I had one of the best meals I had had in England, a roast duckling and a good bottle of Chablis, and roast potatoes sprinkled with thyme, along with fresh green peas, wild leeks, and a basket of hot rolls with butter, followed by a salad and a little apple tart for dessert. I was offered coffee and brandy in the parlor and was prepared to accept the offer until I saw there another group of country gentlemen dressed in tweeds and smoking and milling around back and forth between the pub and the parlor. My immediate thought was to duck out—I feared more war stories abrewing—but one of them spotted me.
“You the chap with the old Peugeot?” he said.
Peugeot, I thought. He noticed my Peugeot. Maybe he’s another bicycle man.
“Come and have a drink on us, lad. Any man that braves these bloody hills on an old machine like that deserves a dram.”
I couldn’t hide, and this begat another night of heavy drinking that ended with full-bodied northern males slapping me back heartily and calling me laddy, and trying to get me to go trout fishing with them the next day in the fast-running rivers of the Yorkshire dales.
There was one shy fellow there nodding in agreement to nearly everything the big boys shouted out, and toward the end of the evening he came over and asked quietly where I had come from.
“Cádiz,” I said.
“Oh, Cádiz,” he said. “I would like to go to Cádiz. Someday I want to go back to see my people.”
“Your people are from Cádiz?” I asked. He was a sandy-haired fellow with sky blue eyes.
“Well long ago, yes.”
“And they immigrated to Yorkshire?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“But you have people there still?”
“Well a long time ago, you see. I lived there.”
It turned out he had lived in Cádiz in the tenth century, and had served as a musician in one of the early courts. He told me in a flat, matter-of-fact manner that he had fallen in with one of the caliph’s favorite concubines, and they plotted their escape together. Their plan, he said, was to sneak her out of the harem on a dark night, leap over the city walls, and head to northwest Portugal, to those regions recently reconquered by the Christians.
“I had it in mind to con
vert, you see, and then marry under the Christian law. But our plot was uncovered.”
The poor innocent lamb, standing here before me, with his narrow face, somewhat bucked teeth, and tousled sandy hair, had been ignominiously dragged to the dungeons of the alcázar and beheaded with a huge curving scimitar.
What became of his beloved Jezebel, he did not know.
“But I shall meet her again someday,” he said. “She and I are free, you see, from the restraints of time. I knew her before Cádiz.”
And where was that, I wanted to know. I had a sense of what was coming.
“Egypt.”
“Eleventh Dynasty?” I asked. “Thebes?”
“Right. How did you know that? You weren’t there too were you? Do I look familiar? You must have been there too.”
“Just a sense,” I said.
It was indeed only a good guess, but I had met people with past lives before, and somehow they never seem to have had to live in boring times. They’re always in the courts of the Medici in Florence or in Rome under Augustus Caesar, or Thebes in the period of the worship of the sun god Amon.
“Did you take part in any of those grand processions along the Nile at the solar festivals, when you were there?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. This was three maybe four lives back for me. I did have a little scarab though, the dung beetle. A little image of what’s his name.”
“Khepri?”
“Right. Khepri, the beetle. He rolls the dung across the sky.”
“The sun image.”
“Right. He rolls the sun up everyday. How d’you know all this, though? You lived back then too, I think. Otherwise you wouldn’t know about Khepri and Thebes. Now, maybe you saw her, when you were there. They called her Harakhte, after the falcon, and she was one of the most beautiful courtesans of the palace, with almond eyes, and a lithe brown body, high cheek bones and full red lips, and we used to meet down by the River Nile with the red sun behind us and the white ibis stalking in the bulrushes. I remember her so well. I can see her now. That was the first life in which I met her. The second life she was a slave girl to the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. She was unaged, still a great beauty, even after a thousand years.”
I ventured a line I knew from Anthony and Cleopatra—a favorite of Magda’s.
“‘Age cannot wither her.’”
“Wot’s that?”
“It’s just a line from Anthony and Cleopatra.”
“Right, I remember that.”
I told him I knew about Egypt because I was interested in sun mythologies and that ancient Egypt, as he of course knew, having lived back then, was a solar-based culture. Then I asked him if he remembered anything about all this solar worship, and did his people really believe that the sun god Ra was as powerful as the scholars believe he was, and was it true that even baboons worshipped the sun?”
“Oh yes, definitely. I seen ’em myself. Harakhte and me used to steal away to the cliffs west of the river. You know, to be alone. We’d see baboons out there on the rocks, facing the sun, they were. Their arms raised. Oh yes,” he said, “baboons worshipped the sun. I remember that much. Harakhte, she was right fond of baboons. She had a pet one for a while. And a dog. A white dog.”
“What was its name?”
“Mu,” he said without the slightest hesitation. “Nice little chap. Used to lick my hand. Lived in the house. Not like those other dogs you’d see around in the streets at night.”
Try as I might, I could not keep him on the subject of the sun, not because he didn’t know much, but he was far more interested in his memories of Harakhte. He did tell me about the golden-winged bird of the sun, the phoenix, and the falcon sun, Horus, and he described the little models he used to see of Ra’s boat and contemporary stories of Amenhotep II that he had heard about. But he was mainly obsessed with this beautiful courtesan who had the ability to transcend the ages.
“I am looking forward to seeing her again,” he said.
I asked him if he had lived long in the town and he said he was born and raised and would die here.
“Ever been to London?” I asked.
“Once, when I was twelve. Didn’t stay long.”
I was fishing to see if he had spent any time in the British Museum, reading the labels on the mummies and the statuary there, but he hadn’t been there.
I asked if, by any chance, he knew Herodotus.
“I think not. No, I don’t remember him. He might have been that Greek chap lived down the way from Harakhte’s servants. I’ve heard of him.”
Who am I to judge? There was a famous reincarnated Londoner whom I had learned about from Magda who had some sort of fever when she was young and woke up from a coma feeling disjointed for the rest of her life, until she got to Egypt, where she felt suddenly at home. She had strong memories of the sites of ancient palaces and developed an uncanny ability to locate buried ruins for archeologists.
After an hour or two, the pub started closing up, and I said good night to my Egyptian informant and made my way to my room down a long hall. One of the drinkers emerged from the men’s room as I was walking by, and tipped his head at me.
“Get an earful did you?” he said.
The next morning, after yet another hearty breakfast, I went out into the stone courtyard. The barman was there with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up above his elbows and his tie tucked into his shirtfront. He was throwing a tennis ball at the corner of the courtyard wall so that it would arc back in a high curve. The Jack Russell was there catching it in midair with balletic leaps.
“Getting his exercise?” I said.
“His and mine, too,” he said.
We chatted for a while before I left, and I asked him about the sandy-haired man and if he knew him. He did indeed, the barman said. He lived with his mother in a small croft in the moors high above the town.
“He’s a quiet sort. Comes in Tuesday nights for a drink. Keeps to himself. Got some strange ideas, I believe.”
Maybe the loneliness of the high moors unchains temporal restraints among such people. The winters are said to be long here; and the sun sets at three in the afternoon in winter and does not rise until ten in the morning, and then in thick fogs.
The clouds had returned that morning and I forged on through a less dramatic country toward Glaisdale to Lealholm Bridge, where the hills began to steepen once more. I had lunch at a small empty hotel, crossed the Esk River for the last time, and then began climbing higher and higher over Killdale Moor, all treeless and patched with shades of gray and green and brown. For the next two or three days I pedaled on in this manner across the wild landscape of the Yorkshire Moors, climbing through long, sloping sheep meadows and then winging down to little river valleys with towns at the bridge crossings. Every day it rained, and every day it cleared again, with huge walls of clouds, and then sun and then rain, and a cool wind, which was refreshing on the uphill slogs and chilling on the way down.
On the third day, I began another seemingly interminable uphill climb, the longest yet. At the summit I paused to rest. There below me lay the Edenic valley of the Swaledale, with the river winding through it, banded by woods, and the vast brownish green moors sweeping above the floodplains to hills dotted with flocks of white sheep and, above them, the cloud-banked, blue-rifted sky.
I tightened the straps of my panniers, shifted the gears upward, and flew down the west side of the long slope into the town of Keld, where I found a bed and breakfast on a working farm just beyond the town.
Here there lived a little family of hard-working country people, milking the cow herd, tending sheep flocks, and taking in boarders to make do. We all ate together at breakfast and then again at evening, and it was so pleasant there, and so quiet, save for the lowing of the cattle at dawn and dusk and the cry of the curlews and the sheep bells, that I decided to stay on. It was Whitsuntide, a bank holiday in England, and I feared it would be difficult to find another spot anyway.
On the third da
y there I took a long walk down the valley of the river Swale over to the town of Meeker, alternately climbing into the moors and descending to the river. The sky was mixed with ranks of fast-moving clouds, some of them dark and rainfull, others light and airy and building to vast spires and castles in the air. There were dappled groves on the river valley floor, and wide fields with abandoned houses. At one point there was a hard downpour and I ran for an abandoned barn and sheltered there in the old musty hay while the shower passed. Other hikers and farmers back to 1900 had marked inscriptions on the walls, relating weather and progress of the haying, and I sat there in the hay, crossed-legged in front of the open barn door, watching the sheets of rain stream down. It occurred to me that this must be the actual day of Whitsunday, or Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, the day Christ rose from the dead. Pentecost is based on the ancient Hebrew feast that marks the closing of the spring grain harvest. According to James Frazer, in earlier traditions a king would be selected, would serve for a given period of time, and then would be killed and buried around this time of year. Three days later he would be reborn in the form of grain.
The family that ran the farm, Laurie and Marjorie Rukin, had one son still living at home, and had gathered under their wings a collection of local people who helped out around the place. One of these was a straight-back, blue-eyed woman with a direct stare named Faith Cloverdale. Another was a little postman who always wore black wool trousers tucked into his boots and a baggy red shirt with black pinstripes. He would come up each day to help with the milking, hang around the farm and play with Meg, an excitable little border collie who would crouch on the ground and “swim” on command. “Swim then, Meg,” people were always saying to her, whereupon she would start her dogpaddling.
One day out in the moors I came upon the little postman, sitting on a rock staring into space with his arms folded over his knees.
“Lovely view,” I said as I approached.
He nodded vigorously and looked away.
“That it is, that it is,” he said.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 26