Cycle paths in purgatory

During the Bordeaux-Parigi bicycle race, the automatism of the Englishman Mills was such that he had to be grabbed at the end of each leg, and placed on a stretcher with his legs in the air. He would continue to pedal in the air and to see the road and dust in front of him. They gave him water and a restorative syrup to drink with a pump.

Then they put him back on the saddle: four men attempted to hold his legs still and a fifth one quickly strapped his feet to the pedal cranks. This was a perilous moment both for the men and the bicycle.

Then they launched him off on the road once more.

He would occasionally regain consciousness and look to the left and the right, and if there was nobody there, he would shift to the side and, still pedalling furiously, answer the call of nature. Immediately afterwards his automatism would once more take over, and he would maintain the same identical rhythm both uphill and downhill. In general, he tended to go in a straight line, but he was able to predict the bends through an unerring sixth sense, and he took the bend on a fixed radius, as though he were calculating it and seeing it, but he never altered the force of each pedal stroke.

After the finishing line, they lowered him into a bathtub full of water and covered his head with snow. Then he appeared to wake up and stopped pedalling. The contracture of his muscles ceased, he smiled and he said a few kind words to his friends and his trainer.

He could not remember anything. But on just one occasion, he said he had often dreamt of purgatory where everyone was on a bicycle, but the dream was so full of dust and rubble that he could not say anything very definite about the landscape.