Following the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

some older visitants in bathrobes and slippers, others younger, carrying small backpacks with towels and suntan lotions. Here, like seals on a rutting beach (which this somewhat resembled, as many of these beachgoers were young and presumably unmarried), the happy throngs stretched out to enjoy the famous sun of Andalusia. Except for a few packs of dark-haired young males, most of these sojourners were northerners judging from their winter-white skin and their light-colored hair. The locals, I noticed, stayed clothed, the northerners tended to strip to le minimum .
    None of this sunbathing is especially good for human skin, as we now know. As a part of this life-giving fire, the star we call Sun throws off a wide complex of rays that combine to produce the electromagnetic radiation that we term light. We actually see only a small part of the spectrum, the white light that contains all wavelengths, which, when separated or dispersed by a prism or a rainbow, reveals its full range of colors. But there are other species of rays streaming off of this burning star, including X rays and invisible ultraviolet radiation. Some of these rays are beneficial. Ultraviolet radiation can kill germs and convert a certain amount of vitamin D in our skin. But the healthy bronze of a suntan is, in fact, a sign of damaged skin, a reaction that serves as a form of protection from what is essentially an assault of ultraviolet rays.
    Our current concern over the presence of these tanning rays is nothing new; nineteenth-century women also worried about excessive exposure to the sun and pale, lily-white skin in the 1860s was considered as beautiful as the bronzed skin is to the fashion conscious of a later time. But this current fear of exposure to the sun, dangerous though it may be, seems to be part of a larger social phenomenon concerning the many perceived dangers that lurk in the natural world. The outdoors—as opposed to the indoor world of cyberspace—is rank with disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks, poison ivy, and sun, as well as kidnappers, criminals, hunters, and, perhaps worst of all judging from the ominous nightly reports, bad weather.
    I’d hoped to get in shape for my bicycle trip, but I never did get around to taking the long practice rides that I had intended to take before leaving. As a result, not four hours into my pilgrimage, I began to feel my muscles tightening. I wasn’t worried though, having no particular schedule in fact I calculated that if I got to Puerto de Santa María, and liked it, I might as well stay there. So I pedaled on slowly through the pastoral landscape, stopping often to look at frogs or birds, and in due time came to what seemed to me a fine overlook, an ancient ruin with crumbling arches just beyond a gully. I was leaning against my bicycle looking at the ruin when a small falcon shot over my head and flew straight into one of the arches, so I wheeled my bike up a narrow sand road and came to a grassy spot among the olive trees and sat down to watch.
    In a minute or two the falcon flew out again; clearly it had a nest in among the broken crevices. This seemed a propitious sign for this journey. In the ancient Egyptian cosmology, the sun god Ra would often appear in the form of a falcon. It was he, Horus, the falcon, who represented one of the visible forms of Atum, the first creator.
    It occurred to me, while I sat there, that I was getting hungry, so I unpacked my bread, sliced some tomatoes, and uncorked the wine bottle.
    The ruined arches were on the other side of what appeared to be an old dried-out streambed. Although I was not sure whether I was in the right spot, there was a Moorish tower marked on the map in about the same place. So here yet again, or so I imagined, was evidence of the great age of the Caliphate. The ruin, whatever it was, appeared to be medieval, which would have dated it back to that singular period in European history when the Moors held sway over the region