Following the Sun (34 page)

“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.