Thomson Bike Tours Blog

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours
so simple and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together
and make a fairy tale. I sat down for a little outside a café
with a row of little toy trees in front of it, and presently
a cyclist (as we should call him) came to the same place.
He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen, a type not
common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian Frenchman,
huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort
of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English.
And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations.
For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets,
this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise–
as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some
talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality
of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness
or embarrassment that he should take me with my bike and him with his for an hour’s
ride in the hills beyond the town.  And though it was growing late
I consented; for there was one long white road under an archway
and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord.
We rode through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans,
and I remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we
passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds
which are the trinity of France. They make what some poet calls
“a tangled trinity,” and I am not going to disentangle it.
Whatever those three things mean, how or why they co-exist;
whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are reconciled already;
the three sounds I heard then by an accident all at once make up
the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino gardens behind
me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some ramping tune
from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on I heard
also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible loyalties
and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having
left France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world.
And, indeed, there was something in the landscape wild
enough to encourage such a fancy.  I have seen perhaps
higher mountains, but I have never seen higher rocks;
I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and sensational,
splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of churches,
cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from heaven.
There was also a quality in the ride which was not only astonishing,
but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have noticed
if they’d ridden rapidly up mountain roads.
I mean a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole
earth turning about one’s head. It is quite inadequate
to say that the hills rose and fell like enormous waves.
Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails
of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings.
As we rode on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset this
dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof.
I stared at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a
wooded plain.  Below me steeps of green swept down to the river.
I stared at them until I fancied that they swept up to the sky.
The purple darkened, night drew nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer
the chasms and draw higher the spires of that nightmare landscape.
Above me in the twilight was the huge black hulk of the cyclist,
and his broad, blank back was as mysterious as the back
of Death in Watts’ picture. I felt that I was growing
too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things.
I called out to the cyclist in French, “Where are you taking me?”
and it is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same
language without turning around, “To the end of the world.”

Apologies to GK Chesterton.