Twelve
To be complete, any true solar pilgrimage really should include a visit to Whitby Abbey, since it was here in A.D. 664 that a synod of bishops met and set the date for Easter, an act that unintentionally involved the Roman Catholic Church in the advancement of Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy.
With this in mind, I headed northeast and spent the next several days alternately pedaling through the flat farmlands of East Anglia and taking trains whenever boredom or the wind or rain got the better of me, and since I was off course anyway I decided to ride over to the fens and marshes of the Norfolk Broads to look for birds. It was easy riding. The land was flat and watery, with ditched farm fields, and there were huge skyscapes of welling cloud banks in the west that reminded me of a Constable painting, which, I later learned, made a great deal of sense. John Constable lived not far from this district, at Flatford Mill in Suffolk.
I spent one day at Hornsea, and passed a few hours at Hornsea Mere, watching the swans and the white-fronted geese and pochards, and then the following day rode on to the high cliffs at Flamborough Head to look for seabirds. Here I found a pleasant if somewhat formal hotel near the lighthouse and wandered out to the high chalk cliffs.
A thousand feet below were sharp formations of spiky stone towers, arches, and thundering sea caves, with white clouds of thousands of kittiwakes circling and mewing around their nesting sites on the cliffs. Below, rafted on the great green sea wash, scuttling across the waters in black lines, and spearing like white arrows from great heights down into the blue green depths, were gannets and guillemots, razorbilled auks, puffins, fulmars, herring gulls, and shags. The noise of these seabirds, the wind, the lack of human presence, the sheer energy of this scene held me in thrall and it wasn’t until I realized that I was starving that I could bring myself to leave.
Back at the hotel I was told that if I wished to eat, I would have to join a private party that was even then in progress in the bar. Here, in a well-appointed room with a gray rug and silver bowls set on the white-painted window ledges, was a crowd of ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, all of them well-attired in sensible tweeds and blazers, all of them drinking whiskey or sherry, smoking cigarettes or pipes, chatting happily and eating while standing up. I was ill-dressed for the occasion, tousled and browned from the sun and wind, but they seemed a friendly lot and went on talking without looking up when I entered. One older gent caught my eye and winked as I came in, as if to say “not to worry,” and I went to the bar and ordered the only dish available, a thick, bloody steak and chips, which I attempted to consume standing up.
The man who had caught my eye came over to me while I was eating.
“You the chap on the bicycle?” he asked.
I told him I was and at his prodding told him a little of my journeys.
“I did the same thing in reverse once, back before the war,” he said. “Rode from York to Rome by way of France and Germany, and I’ll tell you, Europe was a different place back then. You had your Frenchies partying all night long, dressed up for their art balls in feathers and white robes and the like, and Berlin the same, only worse, men dressed up like girls with lipstick and all that, and dancing till dawn. But then, you know, out in the countryside, in the little villages, at dawn or late in the night, I’d hear tramping and marching in the streets, and troops of Brown Shirts would pass by in the dark, singing their bloody patriotic songs. We didn’t see it coming, did we?”
He had made the trip on a heavy, three-geared bicycle, and had to walk uphill in many places in the Alps, and then again in the Dolomites. But from the Italian lakes all the way down to Rome he was able to stay in the valleys, he said.
“It was the finest country, Italy, save, of course, for Mussolini and his band of gypsies. Friendly people. They would always put me up in the little hill towns, took pity on me, don’t you know, fed me, sent me on with directions to some cousin one day’s ride away, and all the way down to Rome like that. And it was better coming back four years later.”
He meant the war. He had landed at Salerno and fought his way northward, hill by hill, town by town, all the way to France.
“We were fagged by the time we got up into Umbria. March into the little villages and the old men weeping, the women smiling through their tears and shouting viva l’inglesi and so on, and the flags and the pretty girls. But we didn’t care. We’d been liberating villages since Sorrento.”
It was hard to believe that this frail old fellow, with his papery skin and thin fingers, had undertaken such a journey, and following this had spent four years fighting against boys his age, who not three years earlier stood him to rounds of lager in the beer gardens of Germany. But such, I suppose, are the ravages of time.
I told him my own traveling plans, and he began giving me very good advice about routes through the highlands, and suggested that rather than slog up to Fort William in the west of Scotland, I take a train on the last leg. And then he told me that since I was in the general area, I should take a ride along the Swaledale, which was, he said, one of the most beautiful valleys of the region. I stood him to another whiskey and soon he was reminiscing on the beauties of the past, and that eloquent, somehow ominous calm before the storm of the war years when everyone was poor, and life was, as he phrased it, “topped up” and there was nothing that could stop you.
“It’s why I made that bicycle trip. I wanted to see the fountains of Rome and I could not for the world of me think of any reason why I should not go. I had not a shilling to my name, but I kissed me mum goodbye, rolled me old bike out the garden gate, and rode off without a fare-thee-well. Oh, those were fine times we had before the storm,” he said, “and all the girls knew what was coming”—he winked at me knowingly—“and I do believe the sun shone more brightly and more often back then and it was none of this gray you see nowadays.” He glanced out the back window toward the North Sea, where a lowering sky had covered the gray brown chop of the waters.
I think this joie de vivre must have been more a question of his chronological age than the spirit of the times. I had heard other stories from the thirties in England when there was no coal, and the only time people would heat a parlor was when someone in the household was about to die. But I knew what he meant. I felt the same way as he once had. What’s to lose? You’ve got the strength, you make the time, and so you ride on.
The next day I pedaled over to Bempton Cliffs, which are even higher than the rocky heights of Flamborough Head. I watched more seabirds circling and then skirted the curve of the coast, with kittiwakes never out of sight or sound, and a cold North Sea wind biting at me. At Filey there was a great expanse of smooth sandy beach stretching off to the sea, and, having found a room for the night, I took a walk along the strand, trying to fight the wind as well as the sense that it was about to rain. This was a small, dreary spot, not a place where one would want to wait out the rain for a few days.
My premonitions proved true. That night on the roof I could hear the drumming of a serious northern downpour.
In London I had purchased some better foul weather gear for just such an occasion, and so I set out in the teeth of the rain, riding, fortuitously, with the wind. All along the coast under the whipping downpours there were wild tides and huge gray breakers roaring in, growling and smashing up on the rocky shores or wailing at the base of the sea cliffs where the kittiwakes and the gannets circled and cried. In the afternoon the weather began to clear, and I came into a country of sharp hills, with pastures and planted pine forests and sweeping, high moorland. Then the grades smoothed out, the sun appeared, and I stripped off the rain gear and began flying over long easy grades like a kittiwake over seas of brown heather, with islanded shades of green and banks of yellow gorse.
This was desolate, empty country, and as I tripped along, I heard for the first time a sound that would be with me for the next week or so, the high descending whinny of the curlew. In late afternoon, beaten up and tired, I turned off the main road, such as it was, and descended again to the coast, down a precipitous, narrow track to the little town of Robin Hood’s Bay. The road was so long and steep and curving and wet that I actually had to get off my bicycle and walk it down. By the time I got to the town I was chilled again and stopped in at a little well-lit tea room and had poached eggs with toast and a pot of tea. They were so good I had another plate.
As often seemed the case in the precious village tea rooms of the British Isles, there were two sympathetic waitresses serving.
“Any little bed and breakfasts in this town?” I asked one of them.
“Well, not really,” she said.
“You do have Harry’s place, though,” said the second one, a plump woman named Betty.
“Right,” said the first. “You’ve got Harry’s. I suppose.”
“And this Harry’s …?” I asked, tipping my head.
“Oh it’s nice, all right,” Betty said.
“Right,” said the other.
“But …?” I asked.
“But then you got Harry.”
“We’ve got the key if you like.”
“Any place else?” I had a sense that Harry’s might not be the best place in town.
“No. I’ll fetch the key,” Betty said. “Harry might not be home tonight. You’ll have the run of the place, if he doesn’t come home.”
Harry’s turned out to be a snug, narrow little house, set, like a beached ship, right out on the very rocks of the coast. The seas were beating against the east walls. In fact the whole of Robin Hood’s Bay was very much like being on shipboard. Narrow companionways that served for streets led down to a shingle beach, and huge breakers swept in at high tide and smashed up against the sea walls that protected the town, spraying the windows of the coast-facing houses, only to retreat a quarter of a mile back across the seaweed-strewn flats at low tide.
By six that night the town closed up, and I was left with the run of Harry’s house.
Nice Betty had set me up in a shiplike little cabin in an upstairs room, paneled in blond wood, with a heavy white comforter and a good clean smell. She showed me the kitchen and a study with a big television in it, and then brought out a shepherds pie and showed me how to warm it.
“Now you just make yourself at home here. Harry won’t mind. And if he comes home, it’ll be all right. He’ll understand he’s got a house guest tonight.”
“I hope Harry won’t become enraged when he finds me here,” I said.
I was beginning to imagine an ogre who stomps in and then eats his house guests, like Polyphemus.
“Don’t you worry. Harry won’t eat you for dinner,” Betty said.
I tried to make myself at home, cooked up my shepherds pie as instructed, made a pot of tea, and was sorely tempted by Harry’s whiskey cupboard, but felt I would be overstepping my bounds if I took a nip. I cleaned up after my dinner and then began perusing Harry’s books: Glories of Scotland. A Pictorial History of the Second World War. Great Battles of History. The Holy Bible. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Great Medical Mysteries, and finally The Royal Family.
I was tempted to poke around some more but instead went out for another walk. By now it was low tide and I crossed the slippery green flats looking for sandworms and “winkies” as the locals called the myriad species of periwinkles that forage on the flats.
The tides were huge here. When I had come into town the waters of the North Sea were breaking on the shore, and now the surf line was barely visible, set way out across the tidal flats. This is, of course, as we learned in sixth grade science class, the work of the moon, the theory being that the gravity of the moon exerts a pull on the waters of the globe. The side of the earth nearest the moon experiences a slightly greater pull as a whole, while the far side experiences a lesser pull. The effect of this is most evident in large bodies of water, such as the oceans.
The length of time that it takes the earth to rotate completely in relation to the moon causes two high tides and two low tides each day, and the size of these tides can vary tremendously from season to season and month to month because of the changes in the positions of the sun and moon over the course of a year. All this celestial-driven ebb and flow, this changing half-land half-sea environment, has created here on the planet earth a whole range of species such as the periwinkles and limpets that are able to survive in both environments. But the sun has an influence even on those species that live in the deep oceans.
The same cycles of growth, death, and decay that are at work on land also function in the seas and are regulated, as on land, by the solar cycles. In spring, as the life-giving rays penetrate deeper beneath the surface and the temperatures warm, there is a sudden and rapid growth of phytoplankton, which, especially in shallow areas, is stirred and mixed by spring storms and currents. The warming waters and the increase in plant food supplies beget blooms of planteating plankton, which in turn encourages plankton-eating species, everything from tiny newborn fish fry to immense creatures such as the baleen whales. The whole cycle reverses in winter. The weaker sun and the subsequent colder temperature slow the process and the oceanic year of growth and decay comes to an end.
In spite of the fact that the summer season on the sea was approaching, it was cold out on the flats, with an east wind whipping in, so I went back into town to look for a warm pub with one of those little gas fireplaces where I could take the chill off. All the streets in the town were steep and wet and glistening with salt spray and there was no green save for a few flowerpots, and no trees or shrubs to speak of anywhere. And no pubs. After a few explorations I went back and sat down in front of the blank TV and turned on the space heater to try to warm myself.
Around ten o’clock, just as I was about to head up for bed, I heard keys in the lock and a burly man with a graying beard and a heavy white cable sweater came in.
“I heard you were here,” he said, gruffly. “I’m Harry. And you would be the chap on the bicycle, wouldn’t you?”
“I am he, I believe,” I said.
“And it was you down at The North Light Inn, drinking whiskey with Old John Dawkins and talking of the war in Italy.”
“I was.”
“And I take it you believed that drivel he spilled about Italian girls and liberating the villages.”
“Well he did tell me some stories, but wasn’t any of it true?”
“Some. Maybe. But it wasn’t like that, and I’m here to tell you.”
This begat a history of his own wartime adventures, stories of imprisonment in Lithuania, long discursive rants against communism, the righteousness of the American position in Vietnam, Stalingrad, the Battle of the Bulge, attempts on Hitler’s life, the despicable nature of Poles, the dangers of the Chinese, the future of the Labor Party, why Royalty should be restored, and, finally, a long discourse on the history of the Standard Bearers of Her Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, an elite band of pensioners of which, he said, his father, god bless his dear departed soul, was a long-standing member. This went on and on until one in the morning, when, on the excuse of an early start, I managed to extricate myself and get up to bed.
At least I was able to have a glass or two of the whiskey I had been coveting.
Sometime in the night I heard his heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and woke up, fearing he would break in, roust me out, and make me stand at attention and listen to more stories of Lithuanian prison camps.
After a fitful sleep I woke up the next morning to find a note instructing me to pay Betty and have my breakfast at the tea room.
“Get a little history lesson, last night?” Betty asked, when I came in.
After a filling breakfast of fried eggs and rashers, a stack of hot buttered toast, and coffee I rode up to Whitby along the coast.
The town itself is an ancient fishing port at the mouth of the River Esk and consists of a maze of alleyways and narrow streets that run down to the busy quayside. The village is dominated by the looming skeleton of Whitby Abbey, which sits high on a cliff and ranks as one of the most haunting ruins in all of England. The wall of arches and crumbled stone seem to hover above the landscape and the ruin is visible both from sea and land for miles around.
The sky had cleared by the time I got there and the green carpet of grass that had overgrown the flags of the old abbey floor was wet and sweet smelling, and here, in the sheltered corners of the ruins, I discovered a warm place out of the wind and put my face up to the sun to bask.
Whitby Abbey was founded about 657 by Oswy, one of the powerful kings of Northumberland, and was made famous by its first abbess, St. Hilda, who enlarged the community of monks and nuns and constructed new buildings on the site. The monastery flourished until about 687, when it was reduced to ruins by the raiding Danes. The community of monks dispersed, and the abbot fled to Glastonbury, taking the relics of St. Hilda with him.
The abbey’s finest hour occurred in 664 when a synod of bishops met there to settle a long-standing dispute concerning the actual date of Easter, which had divided the Christians of northern England, who had been converted by the Celts, from Christians in southern England, whom the Romans had converted. Such small matters, and even so small a matter as the correct tonsure of Christian monks, mattered greatly to these early Christians and, of course, would matter even more after the Reformation. But in the seventh century the issue had become especially pressing to King Oswy, who followed the Celtic rule, whereas his wife, Queen Eanfleda, followed the Roman. After a month-long debate the king decided in favor of Rome, and the date of Easter was set as the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. All that remained was to predict exactly when the vernal equinox would occur.
This was easy enough in theory: You simply note when the day and night are equal length and then wait for the next full moon. The trouble came with the elaborate celebrations that would take place in the Christian church at Easter. Given the communication systems of the period, under the old method, there was hardly time to announce the holiday and prepare for the events. Furthermore, both the equinox and the full moon occur at different times at different places on the earth, which meant that there still was no general day of celebration—something that did not serve an institution such as the Roman Catholic Church, which was attempting to make claims to universal truths. As a result, in the twelfth century the popes, some of whom were greatly interested in astronomy themselves, encouraged a closer examination of the apparent motions of the sun and moon in the heavens and a means to enable them to predict far in advance when the vernal equinox would occur.
During this period, Europe was operating under the Great Compilation of Ptolemy, which had been introduced in Córdoba by Maimonides and Averroës in the tenth century and had spread through France and Italy. Under the Ptolemaic system, the earth sat at the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars circled around in perfect symmetry. In order to calculate the time of the return of the sun each spring, astronomers determined that they would have to lay out a meridian line, north to south, in some dark building with a hole in its roof. They had but to mark the spot on the line where light from the sun crossed at noon on the day of the vernal equinox, and observe how long the sun’s noon image took to return to the same spot on the line a year later.
Buildings of the right sort already existed it turned out—the great Gothic cathedrals of Italy and France. And so astronomers laid out meridians in stone on the church floors, pierced holes in the cathedral roofs or high walls, and began studying the heavens inside the churches. In effect, the churches became solar observatories. The irony was that in the very house of the Christian God, at the center of church power, and no more than a few feet from the sacred altars of Christianity, astronomers uncovered the great flaws in the dominant Ptolemaic earth-centered system that had dominated Europe and church doctrine for four hundred years, and ended up proposing a solar-based system. This development eventually shook apart the rock foundation upon which the church was based.
In 1543, by studying ancient astronomical records, Nicolaus Copernicus determined mathematically that the sun must be at the center of the solar system, but he still accepted the Ptolemaic model that held that the planets move in perfect circles. Fifty years later, by studying the skies with a newly invented device, the telescope, Galileo determined that the Copernican heliocentric model was correct. But even though he privately taught the system to his students, he did not openly declare the doctrine, since it was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. In 1616, the system of Copernicus had been officially denounced as dangerous to faith. Word got out of Galileo’s teachings and he was summoned to Rome and instructed to stop teaching the system. In spite of this pressure, in 1632 he published a work that supported the heliocentric theory. That brought down upon him the infamous courts of the Inquisition. He was recalled to Rome and tried, found guilty, and forced to recant, which he did. More or less. Legend holds that as he rose from his knees in front of the judges he mumbled “Epur si muove” (“Nevertheless it moves”).
Some four hundred years later, in 1992, the Church officially accepted the theory and apologized for its error.
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 convert, 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 day 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.
“Beautiful day today,” I said.
The sun was shining clear of clouds for the first time since I had arrived.
“Right. That it is.”
“Nice spot you’ve chosen.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Nice spot. Very nice. Lovely views. Yes. Right.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Well I’ll be off now.”
He leaped to his feet and started down the trail toward the farm.
Why he felt it necessary to rush off I couldn’t figure.
I saw him the next day and asked if he was going up to the moors today.
“No. Not me. I’ll be staying here. Got me chores.”
Try as I might I couldn’t figure out why he was avoiding me. Everyone else at the farm was outgoing and friendly. Finally I asked Faith Cloverdale about his behavior.
“Well, you’re an American, are you not?”
“I am,” I said.
“He’s afraid of you. He thinks you’re armed. He’s heard about Americans on the telly. Don’t believe he’s seen many though.”
This little valley had a strange hold over me. I was actually reluctant to leave. The family that ran the place had been on the same farm for nearly four hundred years, and they had acquired a seasonal rhythm driven by weather, crops, and animals. There were many animals around, Meg, the dog, a clutch of puppies, two or three pregnant cats, a herd of thirty-eight cows, each of whom had a name and known character, a less well defined flock of sheep, with many “lambykins” as Faith called the lambs, chickens and chicks, doves in the dovecote, a goat, two pigs, and a community of valley people including the postman who would come to the kitchen part of each day or evening to chat. I grew very lazy there, sometimes sleeping through the rains, and I began wondering if I could live like this in this spot.
There was some ineffable, almost mythic quality to the place. It was this very attraction, the hold it was beginning to wield on me, that made me think I had better leave. Pilgrims on the way to their various shrines often get waylaid or tempted by earthly attachments. The strange power the valley was exerting was somehow increased by the fact that almost every day it rained at least a little. This no doubt accounted for the deep greens of the hills and valleys, the freshness of the brooks and the river that ran behind the house, and the wealth of bird life—the thickets and high moors were alive with thrushes and warblers, the cry of the curlews filled the air all day, and there were continuous bursts of red and speckled grouse in the thickets of heather on the heights. The weather was part of the attraction, however. In Andalusia I came to take the sun for granted in spite of the fact that I hit some patches of rain. In southwestern France the presence of sun was a regular part of the journey. I would ride on under the warm skies, day after day. But here in the Swaledale, the appearance of the fulsome, silvery yellow sun in a cobalt blue break in the clouds was a near religious experience. The slanted, raking light that filled the valley at dawn and dusk was infused with a radiance I hadn’t ever noticed before, anywhere.
When I announced that I must pedal on, I sensed a vague, unexpressed sadness at the dinner table that evening. These Yorkshire people did not have the effusive, overbearing, almost smothering qualities of some of the bed and breakfast “mothers” that I had encountered, but they had a warm, country directness, the famous north country kindness that made me feel at home. I wasn’t really a guest there, I was just there, a part of the place.
On a clear, warm morning, I packed my things, helped feed the lambs, wandered around the farm, seeking people out to say goodbye, and then, while the family stood by the kitchen door, not saying much, I bid them all farewell and unhappily mounted up and began the long climb out of the valley. About halfway up the eastern slope on the road to Kirby I came upon the postman walking down the hill. I stopped to say goodbye.
“Leaving us are you then?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “On to Kirby, then Sedbergh, then the Lake District.”
“All the way there? The Lake District is it? It’s a long way off.”
“I’ll make it,” I said.
“Right.” He looked away.
“Cheerio,” I said, and held out my hand.
He shook my hand, tipping his head downward and to the side as he did so and nodding without looking me in the eye.
“Goodbye, then.” He let go of my hand quickly.
Poor little man, I thought.
“I’ve got to do the mail now.”
“Yes.”
“Must be going.”
“Well I’m off, too.”
“I wish you luck in your adventures,” he mumbled and clipped off at a fast, nervous pace without looking back.
I crossed a bridge over the headwaters of the Swale at the crest of the hill. It struck me that at the rate the postman was moving, he would reach the farm at about the same time as the waters now running under the bridge.