Pilgrim's Road

steadfast in the faith.’
     

7
     
    Into the Rioja
     
    F ROM Estella the Camino takes a south-westerly course, which brought me directly into the teeth of a strong cold wind. The wide exposed terrain provided no buffer at all to its force; even wearing most of the clothes I had with me — two shirts, shell-emblazoned sweater, windproof jacket, with the waterproof jacket over everything, still I shivered and my eyes watered behind their cycling glasses. But for all it offered little comfort, the landscape was arresting. Bright green fields made a single seamless carpet that rolled on to the foot of a great white falaise to the north. Other diversely painted hills reared up all around sharply drawn under a harsh blue sky splattered with black clouds. The vastness of the view was daunting and the absence of detail made progress seem infinitely slow and laboured. It was the sort of stretch where foot-weary pilgrims might well despair of ever reaching Santiago. For criminals who were sent on the pilgrimage as an alternative to a prison sentence, a practice still followed by Belgium up to the present century, such days must have made them wonder whether a cell would not have been much the easier option.
    On a bicycle, energy conserving machine though it undoubtedly is, it was the sort of day where it would have been infinitely better to have been going in the opposite direction. My efforts appeared to be getting me nowhere. Where the hills rose in my path, the combination of wind and gradient frequently brought me to a complete standstill. Sheer determination is all that keeps one going on these occasions, together with the belief — based on experience, but nonetheless not easy to remember — that it will prove worth it in the end.
    In such conditions any excuse to stop is a blessed relief and my first halt at Los Arcos, in the ornate, gold-dripping parish church had the additional advantage of total contrast. The lofty Gothic interior, overlaid with a great mixture of styles was neither restful nor of great architectural distinction, but it was a delight, particularly the exuberant Baroque altars and furnishings which dominated everything else. What I particularly enjoyed were the organ pipes jutting out horizontally like brazen trumpets from high up on either side of the narrow choir. The larger ones had faces on them, with wide square mouths painted around the vents:
     
‘O Lord open thou our lips
And our mouths shall show forth thy praise’
     
    I had to go first to the padre's house to get the church opened, and, kind man that he was, he gave me coffee and made me comfortable by his fire while he found his sello to stamp my certificación de paso. With the aid of my small dictionary and a few words of French and English he told me what a good idea it was to travel to Santiago at this time of year. ‘People have time to speak to you,’ he said. ‘In July it is terrible, so many people, buses, and many, many cars. You cannot get through the street. That is not the time for real pilgrims.’ All of which made me feel much better about the cold and the wind and the lack of other pilgrims — an absence that had begun to worry me.
    I pushed on towards the next stop, far more concerned about the possibility of an early lunch than about seeing another octagonal chapel at Tones del Rio, for thoughts of food seem to dominate everything on such days. When I arrived at the tiny hamlet and realised there was no likelihood of any refreshment, I could hardly be bothered to climb up the short hill to the church. This would have been a great pity as even from the outside the elegant little structure was worth a longer detour than the hundred yards or so I had to make. The steep village street with its antique houses was not to be despised either, with stout ladies leaning out of windows to scream to one another concerning the whereabouts of Señora Miranda who had the key. Torres del Rio’s octagonal church was another Crusader foundation, but unlike Eunate, it was a Templar church and had been built by Moorish architects. A great feeling of space had been achieved within its small compass, largely because of its fine vaulted roof that incorporated a lantern, and it was in fact far more reminiscent of Holy Land architecture than Eunate had been. But lovely though it was it did nothing to assuage my evergrowing hunger, and I had to struggle on for a further seven miles against the bully of a wind, which clearly had no