Cathedrals and caves: homecoming
Dave Dight dreams of the open road and the timelessness of motorcycle travel…
Each summer I take a long motorcycle trip. Having built and fettled a thirty-year-old BMW, I was ready to head south, for the sun. As usual, with no fixed route and only a vague destination, there was an air of expectancy. Travelling alone by motorcycle frees the mind and being a stranger in a foreign land enriches every human encounter: we are different and the same.
Meandering through France, always keeping to the back roads, meeting other travellers and revelling in the warmth of every social contact – small talk by the road, flirting with a waitress, children trying their English on me.
The sun is merciless: now I’m riding in a T-shirt and sandals; the bike is effortless: heavy but well-balanced and nimble, the throbbing rhythm gently surges through my body as I cruise the rolling countryside, dominated by the cathedral – Chartres (below).
The vast, cool interior is dimly lit by the evening light filtering through the superb windows. The hushed air is trembling softly to an organ; I sit on a stone cold slab whose texture is reassuringly solid after hours in the saddle. Breathing the incense and marvelling at the exquisite tracery, the soaring pillars delicately fanning out high above, I’m lost in wonder, my heart pulsing. Everything is in place, supercharged. Why do I feel such intensity? I’m on a journey with no end in sight, inner and outer, looking for an answer without knowing the question.
I camp on the banks of the Loire. In the cool of the morning, a heron fishes as I gaze at the river sliding by in gentle eddies – or is the movement my restless mind? Stilling, ducks fly through me, uncaptured by thought.
The Romanesque cathedral at Bourges is altogether different, with its massive, chunky stonework. I find myself in the crypt, low voices at prayer echoing in the shadows. With each breath, the soft candlelight penetrates me through every pore. The air is pregnant, holding a secret.
Further on, I camp among the dead volcanoes and glimpse a younger time: the cones boiling over and spilling incandescent molten rock, flooding a lunar landscape beneath a darkened sky. But I’m drawn on, to the mountains in the south, taking care and slowly winding up through the breathtaking ravines of the Pyrenees.
The caverns at Niaux have galleries of paintings. I imagine myself in the minds of their creators, some 15,000 years ago in these chambers lit with tallow lamps. Maybe a family, huddled in animal skins, secure in the cool, echoing darkness, stalactites dripping, predators lurking outside, close and communicating – how?
The bike purrs, lazily zig-zagging up and up and on towards Spain. Her large engine is powerful and relaxed – though the old girl pants a little in the thin air at high altitude, so above the tree-line I pause to adjust her carburettors and, with wispy clouds below, she smoothly glides the snow dappled peaks. I reflect: however we make the climb, from the summit the view’s the same – more mountains…
Now the tarmac is melting in the fierce light; the arid, baking plain shimmers all around; the horizon no longer taut, pools of sky flicker on the road ahead. I wander through the poorer quarter of a dusty, sleepy town; curious, suspicious eyes are upon me for I’m no gawping tourist. So: why am I here? Why? What is this pilgrimage for? Something is close: what have I been brought here to learn?
Alone in the abbey, a relief after the dazzling heat, I am poised – what next? Black figures glide across the stone floor. The monks are chanting, the antiphony like far-away echoes: Spanish? Latin? I cannot understand and so become released, transfixed by raw sound. I feel a soaring within. Something inside dissolves and I surrender. I am enveloped and penetrated by the reverberating waves of sound: the vibrations within me, around me, through me. The air is dancing, my every fibre resonates.
I return: why do these plaintive sounds move me so much? Why sound, and what particular qualities of it? Has the ride tuned me to physical vibration?
Suddenly, it snaps into place. Unknowingly, I seek You. I was in the echoing cave again, the cave that is in us. Only recently emerged, untold aeons before have moulded the human brain; after the African savannah, home was the cold caverns of Europe with ice invading from the north. Just below the surface, we are cave-dwellers. Catholicism awakens the early mind: vaulted cathedrals and incense, candles and resonant chanting, masonry like stalactites, and other liturgical tools. The cathedral, the Meeting house – synthetic caves, solid metaphors in which we can regain nearly-lost telepathy in the silence together, where we can come home: for we belong together, with You…
I leave with a great sense of relief and gratitude, and cross the high sierra plateau, to relax for a few days with friends on their farm in Andalusia.
It seemed so neat and tidy – until I was taken out of myself again, by the wonders of the Alhambra, inspired by Islam. And so to Africa, the continent of our birth, to Morocco and beyond the Atlas – to encounter the trackless desert…
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