Following the Sun (17 page)

I grabbed the bars and rode on, subdued.

At St.-Julien-en-Born I found a small pension with a tiny courtyard and a private entrance to my room. The night was warm and sultry, there was a crescent moon between the tree limbs, the crickets were singing, and a periodic breath of wind rolled into the little room carrying the odor of the night fields and raising the lace curtains sensuously. I fell asleep to the sounds of the countryside and dreamt I was home on a little porch bedroom where I used to sleep in the summers at my family's place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Around twelve or one in the morning I was awakened by a beautiful warbling song just outside my window. The song consisted of a series of sultry trills and eerie, fluted whistles that bubbled along, built to a crescendo, halted briefly, and then started all over again. It was a song I had read about all my life, but had never actually heard—the long sad complaint of the fabled nightingale. This bird would sing softly for a while, then stop, then start again, and as I listened a phrase came to me: “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.…” I lay awake trying to remember who wrote the lines. I attempted to summon up Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale” but all I could come up with was “already with thee, tender is the night” and “O for a beaker full of the warm south,” and something about light-winged dryads of the trees. Quandaries of this sort can keep one up all night if you let them and I was soon swept into a wakeful review of world literature involving nightingales, beginning with the sad story of Procne and Philomela, two beautiful sisters who ended up as birds, Procne as a swallow and Philomela as the nightingale.

I thought of Juliet and Romeo arguing over the birdsongs at the end of their fateful night together, the harmonious madness of Shelley's skylark, Keats's drowsy owls and nightingale, swan song's, and gull mew, and Anglo-Saxon gannet cries, and on and on into the night.

It was a fine night for no sleep, however. The warm air, the smell of the vegetation, and the languorous song of the literary nightingale were entrancing, but I realized I'd be awake all night if this kept up and tried to banish Keats and the dryads, and all of the warm south. Every time I would start to drift off, the nightingale would start up again, I would wake, and my reveries would continue.

There are not many birds that sing by night—the loon of North American lakes, the mockingbird, and of course owls. In Europe the nightingale is the most famous nightsinger, although the sedge warblers and even the skylark will sound off periodically. Unfortunately, this beautiful singer is rarely found anymore in England, except in the south.

The disappearance of the legendary singers, such as the loon and the nightingale, and the decline of the full-throated dawn choruses of North America and Europe are some of the saddest losses brought on by the multifarious environmental ills that beset the modern world. Birds still try to sing at dawn, of course, but any older person who has lived in the country or well-aged suburbs will tell you that they don't sing as fully as they used to. And yet birdsong was once the essence of poetry. The nightingale alone could fill pages of critical analysis.

Birds don't think of poetry when they sing, of course. They are thinking nasty thoughts, like “War” or “Territory” or “Sex.” But if indeed they are considering the matter at all, they are also thinking “Light.”

Although birds call and make noise throughout the year, most do not sing in winter. They reserve the organized combination of notes they produce to attract mates, identify and broadcast their territorial boundaries, and advertise themselves as good mates for spring, the mating season. And in the birdly mind (actually in the birdly gonads), spring begins on their winter grounds with the increasing sunlight, as early as February.

Ornithologists have conducted elaborate and detailed studies of the role of light in the inducement of song, one of them undertaken by the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold, who, using a sensitive photometer, measured the relationship between morning song and light intensity. He uncovered some interesting but logical facts about birdsong. For example, a cloudy dark dawn will delay the onset of singing, and a bright moon will start birds singing sooner. Other naturalists have documented the fact that different species begin singing at different times as the dawn light increases, a fact that was well known to those in the past who lived closer to nature than we do. Even in so crowded a place as sixteenth-century Verona the residents were familiar enough with the different hours at which birds would begin singing to tell time by the song. We know this, or can guess at it, because Romeo and Juliet knew by means of birdsong when their night together was coming to an end. Romeo thinks he hears the lark and dawn is breaking. Juliet says it was the nightingale, and that it is not yet day. Romeo persists, and then they see the streaks of light lacing the clouds in the east. The song of the nightingale has ended. The lark begins to sing and their night of love has come to an end.

(They also knew a thing or two about resounding metaphors: “It is the east,” Romeo opines, “and Juliet is the sun!”)

There is a schedule, more or less, of birdsong, even after the first light. Robins start off the dawn chorus in North America; they begin singing as soon as they wake up. European robins delay their singing by a few minutes. The European blackbirds wait even longer, and the chaffinches longer still. It all reverses at dusk, and some of the most beautiful songs, such as those of the wood thrush and the veery, emerge from the mystery of the North American eastern forests long after the sun has set.

If ever there is any question as to the role of light in birdsong, one has but to spend time in the field during an eclipse. The year before I left on my solar transit, there was a full eclipse of the sun around three in the afternoon. I went out as the light began to fade and noticed all around me the onset of bird calling, chirping robins, cardinals whistling sadly, titmice sounding off, and the little “phoebe” whistles of the chickadees. The calling and singing continued as the moon crossed the sun and the darkness increased. Then, for about eleven minutes, the woods were quiet as night. As the sun slowly reappeared, the calling began again.

It was an eerie event, the first time I had ever been in a full eclipse, and it was not only the birdsong that created the bizarre natural environment but also the strange, ghostly light hanging over the woods and fields, a haunted coppery dusk at three in the afternoon.

Up to that time, all I knew about eclipses was a scene from some old racist jungle movie in which the captive white explorer, who is about to be burned at the stake and eaten by the restless natives, knows that an eclipse is about to occur and orders the sun to disappear just before the fires are lit. Terrified, the natives free him. He then commands the sun to return and is declared a god.

Experiencing the real thing, I could understand why so rare an event as the disappearance of the sun, or even the moon, would cause consternation among preliterate people. Many elaborate rituals evolved during eclipses to encourage the sun to return. In North America, the Ojibway people used to shoot flaming arrows at the sun to rekindle it, and one of the northwest tribes, the Chilcotin, would desert their huts, pack up for a long journey, and then circle the village as if traveling, thus encouraging the sun on its passage through the eclipse.

In the past, much of the magic and the sky observation and the development of astrology and, later, astronomy began as a means of predicting eclipses. In the earliest eras of civilization, astronomers in both China and the Near East had worked out the astronomical schedules by which eclipses occurred and were able through their record keeping to announce the event. Part of the power of the priestly classes sprang from this nearly incomprehensible ability.

The next day I rose late, took a café au lait with a few hunks of buttered bread with jam, and then rode at a leisurely pace through the pines toward Arcachon. By late afternoon I came to the Dune of Pilat, a vast mountain of sand, much dominated by tourists, but relatively clear at the time since it was still off-season. I climbed the dune, sat there watching the sea, scanning Cap Ferret on the other side of the bay, and decided to push on, feeling more and more crowded by summer houses and tourist shops and roads. It was clouding up now, and a little colder, and by the time I got to Arcachon it was raining, so I found a small hotel, docked my bike, and made the best of it, although there is nothing sadder than a summer resort area, off-season, in a cold rain. I went to a restaurant and tried to drown my sorrows with Arcachon oysters and hot fish soup, but it didn't work. I needed Griggsy and his long drunken discourses.

It was still raining the next day, but I set out through the now seemingly dreary pines for Pyla, pedaling along amidst the whir of passing cars and trucks. By the time I got to the town it was sheeting down and I stopped in a café to warm up. There was no apparent rural road to Bordeaux on the map, and I knew from previous experience that the land between the coast and the city was flat and tedious and that approach to the city itself was a hideous termite nest of ugly roads. So, taking a cue from my Madrid experience, I called my friend and told him I was taking the train to town that afternoon. He gave me directions from the station and said he would try to prepare an evening meal.

When I had first come to Europe as a young and innocent student, I had spent a few months in Nice and had fallen in with a crowd of fellow student vagabonds from various parts of the globe who would collect every day in a small café on a back street and eat each night in a cheap restaurant run by a fat man with a pet rabbit named Doudoule, who ranged freely among the tables begging salads. Derek was one of the group, a rather lost fellow who was working on his novel (nothing rare about that, it should be said, everyone was working on a novel, including me). Sad soul that he was, this Derek had somehow attracted his opposite, a lively, blue-eyed girlfriend from Paris named Geneviève, who accompanied him everywhere. They were forever splitting up and then getting back together, and when Geneviève moved to Bordeaux, Derek, like a loyal dog, had followed. She commanded him to live apart, however, and found new company.

Derek's quarters in Bordeaux were actually far better than those he had had in Nice. It was a narrow, somewhat dark little spot with a courtyard and a tiny kitchen, but a warren of small bedrooms upstairs, where I was escorted by the shuffling Derek, who greeted me wearing slippers and a bathrobe, even though it was four in the afternoon.

“Sleep here,” he commanded, pointing to a narrow palette on the floor.

He had put on a little weight since I last saw him and wore horn-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose and was unable, or did not bother, to control his hair.

That night we went out to dinner with Geneviève and her new gentleman, an amusing fellow named Bertrand, who during dinner tried to convince her that veal meat came from an animal called the veal, which was raised in mountain pastures along with sheep. She was a city woman, born and raised in Paris, but she knew enough to realize, insistent though he was, that this was yet another one of the fantasies with which he amused himself. Derek plodded through his soup and fish and slurped his wine, while Geneviève and her gentleman bantered.

Geneviève had not changed at all, even after eight years. I remember her well from sunny beaches at Juan les Pins, where some of us would repair to bask. I had only been in Europe a few months when I first met her, and most of that time in Catholic Spain where, among certain classes at least, it was still the custom for proper young women to be accompanied by an older female escort when you took them out. I remember my pleasant surprise when, at Juan les Pins, Geneviève and her friend Suzie stripped off their tops to sunbathe. You could still be arrested back in America for that.

Truth be told, while in Nice I had rather envied this Derek and his relationship with Geneviève; I coveted her myself. What I remember best about her were those sunny afternoons at the beach, usually without Derek, who would stay at his café table writing. I had come to Nice out of the dark squalor of New York City—the narrow, windy, litter-strewn gray streets where the sun rarely penetrated. I was working there to get the money to go to school in France, and I left in darkness in a thankless snowy March and arrived in Nice in late May just as the spring sun was reaching its full force. The first day in town I went down to the little rocky beach below the promenade and leaned back against the seawall and blasted out all the evils of a winter in the city.

Bordeaux, by contrast, was turning out to be reminiscent of March in New York. Another period of rain set in so I stayed put for a few days and sniffed around the city, sometimes having a drink or lunch with Geneviève, mostly trying to avoid my living quarters.

On one of these excursions, in the local history museum I came across some fresh news on an ancient Roman cult that I had been interested in ever since I began my solar obsessions.

Some years back workers in Bordeaux were excavating a foundation for a new parking garage when the backhoes burst into an underground chamber. Inside was a sarcophagus with a carved figure in a Phrygian hat seemingly emerging from a stone. He held a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. Other figures were discovered in the chamber, and the artifacts and the statue were identified by archeologists as one of the many underground sanctuaries of a late Roman cult known as Mithraism.

According to the tenets of this cult, the god Mithra, who was born out of a rock, was a solar deity, a sort of Promethean intermediary between the god of the sun and humankind. The cult arrived in Rome, brought east, it is speculated, by Roman soldiers or prisoners from Syria and Persia. Scholars theorize that the cult, with its solar-based tenets, was an offshoot of the Zoroastrianism in which the god Mithra was a mediator between the god of the sun, Ahura-Mazda, and the evil god of darkness, Ahriman. But recent scholarship suggests that the cult was an original and new faith, similar to Christianity, which had appeared in Rome at about the same time. The two cults share many attributes, and as Christianity gained in power, the established church began to see the Mithraic cult as a blasphemous parody of their own practices. In fact the opposite may be true; Christianity seems to have adapted its rituals from the earlier cult, including its solar origins. One of the reasons Biblical scholars are so interested in Mithraism is that the cult holds the promise of shedding new information on the cultural dynamics that led to the rise of the Christian faith.