Following the Sun Read online

  Also by John Mitchell

  Ceremonial Time

  Living at the End of Time

  A Field Guide to Your Own Backyard

  Walking Towards Walden

  Trespassing

  The Wildest Place on Earth

  Following the Sun

  A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Hebrides

  John Hanson Mitchell

  for Prince Averino

  Contents

  Invocations, Prayers, and Poems to the Sun

  Preface: A Solar Transit

  One

  Genesis

  Two

  The Breath of the Sun

  Three

  The Virgin and the Minotaur

  Four

  Dark Star

  Five

  Half Course in the Ram

  Six

  In the Hall of the Mountain King

  Seven

  Sun Song

  Eight

  Holy Light

  Nine

  The City of Light

  Ten

  Ancient of Days

  Eleven

  The Last of the Sun Gods

  Twelve

  A Certain Slant of Light

  Thirteen

  Apparell’d in Celestial Light

  Fourteen

  Chariots of Fire

  Fifteen

  The Longest Day

  Acknowledgments

  Invocation, Prayers, and Poems to the Sun

  Creator of all and giver of their sustenance

  Egyptian: Hymn to the Sun

  You rise glorious at the heaven’s edge, O living Aton!

  You in whom all life began.

  When you shone forth from the eastern horizon

  You filled every land with your beauty.

  How manifold are thy works!

  They are hidden before men,

  O sole God, beside whom there is no other.

  Thou didst create the world according to thy heart.

  Egyptian: Akhenaton’s Hymn to the Sun

  Surya with flaming locks, clear-sighted god of day,

  Thy seven ruddy mares bear on thy rushing car.

  —To the refulgent orb

  Beyond this lower gloom, and upward to the light

  Would we ascend, O Sun! Thou God among the gods.

  Indian: The Rig Veda

  This divine and wholly beautiful universe, from the highest vault of heaven to the lowest limit of earth, is held together by the continuous providence of the god—has existed from eternity ungenerated, is imperishable for all time to come—the beams of the sun—the King of the whole universe who is the center of all things that exist.

  Julian the Apostate: Hymn to the Sun

  I offer, offer cocoa

  That I may be sent to the House of the Sun.

  Beautiful and rich is the crown of quetzal plumes:

  May I know the House of the Sun, may I go to that place.

  Aztec

  For it is after the solstice, when Christ, born in the flesh with the new sun, transformed the season of cold winter and vouchsafing to mortal man a healing dawn, commanded the nights to decrease at his coming.

  Paulinus

  —Above all Brother Sun

  Who brings us the day and lends us his light.

  St. Francis of Assisi: The Song of Brother Sun and of All His Creatures

  Now this day, my Sun Father,

  Now that you have come outstanding

  To your sacred place.

  That from which we draw the water of life

  Prayer meal

  Here I give unto you.

  Zuni

  In the abode of light are the origins of truth—In the hand of the prince of light is dominion over all the sons of righteousness—

  The Dead Sea Scrolls

  The royal palace of the Sun rose high

  On lofty columns, bright with flashing gold,

  With bronze that glowed like fire, and ivory crowned

  The gables, and the double folding doors

  Were radiant with silver. Manner there

  Had conquered matter, for the artist Vulcan

  Carved, in relief, the earth-encircling waters,

  The wheel of earth, the overarching skies.

  Ovid: The Metamorphoses

  (description of Apollo’s palace)

  Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,

  Came slope upon the threshold of the west:

  Then, as was wont, his palace doors threw ope—

  His flaming robes stream’d out beyond his heels

  And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire

  That scar’d away the meek ethereal hours

  And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,

  From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,

  Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,

  And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades …

  John Keats: Hyperion: A Fragment

  Saule wears silken garments

  With a silver crown

  With a silver crown

  Made of gilded leaves.

  Saule crosses the lake, brilliant as tinsel,

  A crown of gold on her head,

  And polished slippers on her feet.

  Goddess mother Saule

  Reached her hand above the river

  Her shawl, her gilt shawl,

  Slipped from her shoulders.

  Latvian

  We sacrifice to the undying, shining, swift-horsed Sun. When the light of the sun waxes warmer, when the brightness of the sun waxes warmer, then stand up the heavenly Yazatas by the hundreds of thousands. They gather together in its glory, they make its glory pass down, they pour its glory upon the earth made by Ahura, for the increase of the world of holiness, for the increase of the creatures of holiness, for the increase of the undying, shining, swift-horsed Sun.

  Zoroastrian: Hymn to the Sun

  O Day-spring, Brightness of the Light eternal, and Sun of Justice, come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death

  Roman Catholic: The Great Antiphon

  (traditionally sung on the day of the winter solstice)

  E pur si muove

  (Nevertheless it moves)

  Galileo

  (sotto voce after recanting his heliocentric theory at his inquisition)

  Oh, Shamash, when thou enterest into the midst of heaven

  The gate bolts of bright heavens shall give thee greeting,

  The doors of heaven shall bless thee

  Oh valiant hero, Shamash, mankind shall glorify thee

  O lord of E-babbara, the course of thy path shall be straight.

  Go forward on the road which is a sure foundation for thee.

  O Shamash, thou art the judge of the world, thou directest decisions thereof.

  Babylonian: Hymn to the Setting Sun

  [Whan] the younge soone hath y in the Ram his haf course yronne,—Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

  Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

  Preface

  A Solar Transit

  Long ago I lived in a little stone cottage at the end of a lonely road in one of the hill towns of New England. Winters in that country were sharp and snowy and subject to fierce storms, and after three years there, as the shadows lengthened and the days grew shorter, I began to feel a vague chill in my soul, a need to follow the swallows south with the sun. That January I went down to the Everglades at the southern tip of Florida. I stayed for weeks, making little kayak forays into the unpeopled rivers of saw grass and mangrove and getting myself badly bitten up by mosquitoes and other creatures of warmer climates. Toward the end of that winter, I reversed the journey and traveled slowly nort
hward with the increasing light.

  By this time I had devised an ambitious plan: I would continue this northward migration by bicycle. Starting in southern Spain on the first day of spring, I would ride slowly northward along the sun-blasted rural roads of Andalusia, through western France to England, and on to Scotland and finally west to the Outer Hebrides and the ruins of a great stone circle I knew of that marks the former solar temple at Callanish on the isle of Lewis. My plan was to arrive at Callanish on the day of the summer solstice.

  With this idea in mind, I booked passage on a freighter outbound for Cádiz from Norfolk, Virginia. On a blustery, bright day in mid March, I wheeled aboard the freighter an old bicycle I had inherited, an antique Peugeot, constructed in the original Peugeot bicycle factory in France in the mid-1950s. It was a heavy old horse by modern standards, all black, with low-slung handlebars, ten gears with two ranges of five changes each, and a small rack over the rear wheel—not the sort of vehicle on which to undertake a fifteen-hundred-mile journey. But for me the Peugeot was a good means of getting from one place to another without losing touch with earth, air, and light, although to be true to form I suppose I should have walked or ridden a horse all the way.

  In point of fact, I had begun to imagine myself a pilgrim on this journey, one of that ancient company of questing sojourners, traveling scholars, and troubadours who had once wandered the countryside of Western Europe during the twelfth century. I imagined the old Peugeot as one of the great horses of history, Alexander’s Bucephalos, or El Cid’s loyal horse, Babieco, or perhaps more to the point in my case, since this was nothing if not a romantic, misguided quest, Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. My horse bike would carry me through storm and sun, over the parching dry plains of La Mancha, and up foothills, steep valleys roaring with treacherous rivers, and mountain passes where wild beasts still snatched unfortunate travelers from their saddles. Or so I hoped.

  As soon as we cleared the shelter of the harbor in Norfolk a roiling chop of whitecaps frothed the sea around us and high, bitter winds and cold sprays swept the decks. Flocks of gannets wheeled and dove in the gray waters, the sky was lowering and charged with scudding, fat-bellied clouds, and little bands of scoters and shags arrowed away just above the crests of the waves. Day after day, the freighter plowed eastward against the heavy weather, the great bow sometimes nose-diving into mountainous, rogue waves and rising again, streaming with foaming waterfalls. Fewer and fewer passengers left their cabins, and even some of the crew members looked grim about the mouth. But we crashed onward, the decks empty and washed with salt waves, the skies low in the east and black in the west at dusk. Then, finally, on the sixth day out, the weather warmed and the sea calmed.

  That night I went out onto the foredeck. Just below me, I could hear the shush of the bow wave, and astern, like two plowed snow furrows, the white foam of the wake rolled off into blackness, tumbling and sparking in the starlight. It had been three months since the winter sun plunged into the icy sea and made the long nights linger. Now there were only six more days to spring, and only seven hours to sunrise. The Lion was rising in the east; Orion was sinking into the black sea sky astern, and northward, on our port side, the great circle of stars known as the Bears was wheeling past Arcturus. It was a moonless night, a black, star-spangled night when the tribes of constellations march in their courses across the sky and time and the circle of the sun seem for the moment eternally suspended.

  The next morning, before dawn, I went out on deck again. There had been a warm, passing shower in the night, and the waves were subdued and steaming. Eastward a rose-colored slash of sky appeared and spread out over the gray horizon. To the north and south, churning horse-herds of clouds were forming and re-forming, creating towers and mountain valleys into which a silvery glow expanded. Slowly the colors changed; great sheets of yellows and reds flared upward above the horizon, the towers of gray black clouds began to crumble and sink into the sea, and then abruptly, like a rayed diadem, a golden bead of crowned light rose up, grew and spread, and formed into a full round orb of radiance. The sun had risen.

  Three hours later we raised the toothy peaks of the Azores.

  It was Rafe, the second mate, who pointed the Azores out to me through his binoculars—a few green stubs, barely visible on the torn line of the horizon. These grew all day as we steamed eastward, and by late afternoon we slid through St. George’s Channel, with sperm whales rising and spouting off the starboard side as if in greeting and, on the port side, the sharp, volcanic hills of Sao Miguel, with its verdant sheep pastures dotted with white houses and its raking little vineyards where the locals grew the grapes for their vinho verde.

  I first met Rafe when I boarded the freighter back in Norfolk. He eyed my bicycle as I wheeled it up the gangplank. It turned out that he was a serious bicycle rider, and had carried aboard his own, upscale, multigeared machine, plus all the associated equipage. Whenever he was in port long enough, he’d roll his bike ashore and speed around the countryside, logging sometimes as much as eighty miles before returning to his ship. I was no match for him, but when it was announced that we would not be sailing from Norfolk on the appointed date because of high winds, he invited me to go for a spin.

  Rafe was the only African-American on the ship’s crew and one of the highest-ranking officers. He had green eyes and an aquiline nose, but I supposed from the slight ripple of tension that we experienced in a small local diner that afternoon that his crisp hair and chocolate-colored skin were enough to classify him. Rafe did not seem to notice; he rambled on in his discursive way with stories of his adventures at sea and his wild bicycle rides along the dusty roads of the various developing countries where his ship would dock. He came from a small village in upstate New York, went through high school longing for the sea—which for no especially good reason sometimes strikes twelve-year-old boys—and then entered the American Maritime Academy. He had worked on all manner of ships, and had had no small number of adventures.

  On one of his first voyages, shortly after graduation, he had a watch that required him to circulate the ship at night and cut, or otherwise cast overboard, the grappling hooks and lines of sea pirates in the South China Sea who would come alongside in small boats and throw lines over the rail and then clamor up to break into the containers that were stored on deck. On one occasion he happened upon the pirates scurrying along the deck and was attacked by knife-bearing Sea Dayaks, in the style of a Conrad character. He drove them off by firing over their heads and allowed them to scramble back down to their small boats.

  With the weather clear and the seas calm, for the first time I began meeting some of my fellow passengers. They emerged from the cabins, looking gaunt and pale. There was an older retired couple from Pennsylvania whose custom was to travel the world by freighter. They would sign on and then stick with the vessel until it stopped at an American port close enough for them to catch a bus back to Pennsylvania. After a few months of recovery, they would find another ship and set out again. In this manner, there was hardly a place in the world they had not been.

  There was one other passenger other than myself who was not ill from the heavy seas, a woman of about thirty, named Dickey, who was from New York City and was crossing by freighter to buy antique furniture. Dickey was fond of marijuana and smoked on deck each night, after dinner, carefully walking to the leeward side so as to have the smoke carried away and not tempt the crew. She had reddish, hennaed hair, smooth, creamy skin, and green eyes, and for all the world could not figure out why I would want to ride a bicycle from southern Spain to Scotland when I could rent a car.

  “It would be so much easier,” she said. “And bikes are dangerous.”

  She had lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years and had learned to hate bicycles. “Silent killers” she called them.

  It was no use explaining my desire to be close to the sun.

  Dickey, it turned out, had a mother on board, who only now, after a day or two of calm, emerged from her c
abin. The two of them were headed to Cádiz and from there they were intending to travel on to Portugal to buy their furniture, which they would then ship back to New York from Lisbon to sell in their shop. Seasickness notwithstanding, they liked traveling by sea.

  On one of these calm days I saw another new passenger, an Arab man standing by the starboard rail with a radio clapped to his ear, smiling broadly at some private information. He swept the radio away and held it out when he saw me approach. “Listen,” he said. “Arab music. The first time in years, I hear Arab music.”

  We were now close enough to the North African coast to catch the local radio stations.

  In some ways, this solar transit was the culmination of a lifelong pilgrimage. I had long been in thrall to the sun and this devotion began, as all true religions do, in my youth, in a consecrated place.

  Every Sunday of my childhood, I was forced to dress in a hair shirt, that is to say, an itchy wool suit, and was banished to an uncomfortable wood pew set beneath a vaulted ceiling with dark, soaring beams. Here, for what seemed like half of one of the only two days I had free from that other prison—school—I sat fidgeting while my old father, a well-read Episcopalian minister, delivered seemingly interminable sermons. All natural light was obscured in this place. Through winter, spring, summer, and fall, the bright sun cast a distorted, broken image through stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ—innocent lambs holding crosses, virtuous donkeys bearing the Virgin and Child, and white-bearded men dressed in what I always thought were their bathrobes.

  Much to my father’s dismay I was an irreligious child, and by way of entertainment during these long services, my friends and I would sometimes mumble prayers to idolatrous gods—prayers to the Buddha, to Shiva, Mohammed, or our favorite, the Great Spirit of the Sioux, Wakahntanka. This sacrilege came to a head one brilliant autumnal Sunday when the leaves in the landscaped church grounds were in their full glory and the earth was moist with night rain. I was suffering through yet another two-hour confinement while my father read from an account of St. Paul’s missionary work as recorded in Acts.

  In his travels through Greece, Paul had come across an altar dedicated to an unknown god, and he announced that he now intended to declare that god to the people of Athens. For once, I was listening, and I began to wonder who this god could be; he sounded more attractive than the one my father was always talking about. Paul explained that this unknown deity was Jesus Christ. But as my father read on, the pallid image of the autumn sun crossed one of the stained glass windows. It suddenly struck me that the real god of all things, the unknown god of the Greeks, was not Jesus, or Mohammed, or even Wakahntanka, but this giver of all light, this force of all rivers and streams and cataracts, the driver of weathers, the creator of heaven and earth, our own star Sun.