Following the Sun by John Hanson Mitchell Page A

hero of the eighteenth-century novel that I was supposed to have studied here in Madrid. He too had set out for Salamanca in his youth with forty ducats and a mule, and had encountered many people and had had many adventures along the way. Mine was not so auspicious a beginning however. An hour into my ride, hardly clear of the city, the sky opened and it began sheeting with wind and rain. I took refuge in a small rest stop with gas pumps and a bad restaurant where I ate suspiciously undercooked pork sandwiches and waited for the heaviest of the rain to stop. Around midafternoon I made another attempt, only to be soaked again. I pulled in to a roadside bar, fully drenched. The barkeeper became most concerned and made me a hot chocolate, which she laced with brandy.
    â€œDrink,” she said. “On the house. We don’t want you to die here. It’s the storm of the century.”
    In fact it was a horrendous deluge, the streets and side ditches running with muddied waters. Burros in the fields stood with their heads lowered, not even bothering to feed, their coats black with the wet. Birds fell from the sky with the rains, traffic died on the roads. For all I knew the seas were rising over the lands to envelop the earth.
    I called Griggs at home and got Desdemona.
    â€œCome back,” she said. “There is a train at four. I will meet you, Timiteo will be so happy. He wants to talk more about his upcoming bicycle trip.”
    Every day for the next four days I tried to leave Madrid. And every day it was the same story. Heavy rain, cold wind from the quarter in which I was headed, and rumors of more rain to come. I took advantage of the hospitality of Griggs and Desdemona and spent my days sheltering at the Prado and the other museums of Madrid, including the Museum of the Americas.
    Among the many plundered artifacts in the Museum of the Americas is a document known as the Madrid Codex, one of four surviving Maya codices. The codex consists of 56 stucco-coated leaves of pounded-bark paper, painted on both sides and describing the rituals and divinities associated with each day of the 260-day Mesoamerican sacred calendar, which meshed neatly with the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus. It was from these documents, as well as the written descriptions from the conquistadors themselves, and now the extensive archeological evidence, that the story of the complex, solar-dominated Mesoamerican cultures came to be understood.
    Anyone with any sensibility who has traveled in the former domain of these various cultures and looked at their statuary and paintings and temples with any depth cannot help but feel that of all the civilizations that have come and gone on this earth, these groups were indeed some of the most enigmatic. Their art revels in monsters, it glorifies scenes of war and conquest, the torture of captured soldiers, human sacrifice, and death. Their temples, especially those of the Aztecs, were crusted with the dried blood of ages of ritualistic murders, their walls lined with racks holding rows of skulls, actual skulls, and also carved friezes of death’s heads on the walls outside the temples, still evident in our time at ruins such as Chichén Itzá. Even under the benign, green sun of the Yúcatan and the natural energy of the solar-driven tropical forests that surround and still threaten to overwhelm these temples, the horror lingers on. Whatever one may think of these distant, mathematically advanced, ingenious people, the fact remains that the darkest passage in the entire 50,000-year history of the human relationship to the sun occurred among the Toltecs and Aztecs of the Yucatan Peninsula and central Mexico in the first five centuries of the second millennium.
    The Aztecs were the last of a native American high culture that had evolved out of the Olmec civilization, which had developed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico around 1500 B.C. and worshipped as one of the prime gods a sort of