Pilgrim's Road

something about the Spanish character. To judge by the gory effigies of tortured saints and the severely realistic crucifixions in the churches we had just visited, Spanish Christianity places a special emphasis on suffering. The Spanish Inquisition was the most fanatical branch of that most sinister institution, the Holy Office, with a reputation for cruelty and zeal that outstripped all others. That it succeeded so well in Spain was because of its popularity with the Spanish people. The autos da fé (acts of faith) at which the punishment of convicted heretics was carried out publicly, usually by burning at the stake, were great national festivals. Perhaps with the Inquisition abolished, the bull-fight fulfils some deep need in the Spanish psyche. Certainly, listening to Isbil extolling it made me think of how easy it is in the twentieth century to forget that suffering and sacrifice are at the heart of the Christian faith.
    Back at Cizur Menor, Isbil settled me in and collected the small charge for the night’s stay. Her talk was so full of pilgrims and their doings that it occurred to me to wonder if the pretty and selfconsciously rustic little refugio did not fulfil some unrealised childhood dream of hers. It was curiously reminiscent of a doll’s house, carefully constructed at no small expense, and with every item of furniture chosen to be in keeping with the image. It had everything that twelve well-behaved house-trained little pilgrims could possibly want, a set for each, right down to their twelve, highly polished knives, forks and spoons. Comfortable though it certainly was, it also had a somewhat zany feel to it and I found myself toying with macabre ideas — like being confronted by a row of eleven stiff little wooden pilgrims and knowing that I made up the set, or suddenly finding a gigantic child’s eye peering in through a window.
    No nightmares disturbed my sleep however. In the peace of my neatly curtained wooden bunk bed I read the ‘Office of Compline’ with its appropriate opening of ‘May the Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end’ and was aware of nothing after that until six the following morning.
    Estella was to be the next night’s stop. Not a demanding journey, for even with detours it would only be about thirty-five miles. But there were places I wanted to see along the way, and in any case I had no wish to hurry. I still had two weeks in which to reach Santiago which was less than five hundred miles distant at this point.
    Isbil had recommended I start with a detour in order to avoid the horrors of a particularly villainous stretch of main road, notorious for martyring modern pilgrims. Accordingly I set off into a landscape of low, rolling, grassy hills dotted about with strange-looking industrial machinery used, I decided eventually, for some sort of quarrying purposes. Heavy lorries transporting aggregate rumbled past occasionally, requiring the whole width of the unfenced lanes that had become crazed and pot-holed by their great weight. I found it sensible to take to the grass verge as soon as I heard them approaching. With all the stopping and the ups and downs it would have been hard work had the stiff little wind not still been at my back.
    A short spell on the death-defying N111 convinced me of how wise Isbil had been to suggest the route which had kept me off it until this point. Praying hard to St Raphael, the special guardian angel of travellers, I survived a few kilometres in safety until I reached my next detour where minor roads would connect me with the last few kilometres of the fourth of the classic routes to Santiago, before it joined the other three at Puente la Reina, the Queen’s Bridge. This was the route from Arles that was used by those coming from the south of France and from Italy. Alone of all the routes, it crosses the Pyrenees by the Somport Pass. Apart from escaping the N111, I had chosen to cycle these last few miles of it in order to see the church of Eunate, another famous burial place for medieval pilgrims.
    The lovely little octagonal Romanesque church is situated in solitary splendour among wide flat grain fields, newly green at this season. The gently curved cupola capped with an open bell turret and a small rounded tower known as a lantern of the dead, were sharply delineated against wide blue skies, and in the open landscape the delicate building had a suitable melancholy air that went well with its role.
    These round or