Pilgrim's Road

Diploma, and when, finally, no further prevarication was possible, the cathedral authorities were forced to plead that the original document had gone missing. Only an allegedly faithful twelfth-century copy was available and this fooled no one. Few people concerned can have doubted for a moment that the whole affair was a fraud cooked up by the cathedral authorities in order to pay for the cost of building their magnificent church. Nonetheless it was not until 1834, exactly one thousand years after the debated battle, that the tax was finally abolished.
    While I was looking at the saint on his dashing charger and wondering how he would have viewed the crooked tax exacted in his name, I was hailed by an old man. He turned out to be a local pilgrim who had been to Santiago four times on foot and who was eager to tell me about it. He looked set to be another Ancient Mariner had not the lack of a common language prevented him going into details. As it was, it made a pleasant meeting; I awakened his memories of the pilgrimage, while for me it was another reminder that I wasn’t making an isolated journey, solitary though it might seem for much of the time.
    The low arched gate by which I left Logroño was the prettiest thing I had seen there. It was also like Alice’s Looking Glass; once through it and I was back abruptly into the twentieth century, trying not to be intimidated on the death-defying road to Navarrete. Six miles of purgatory followed, during which I tried not to nurse uncharitable thoughts about the speeding drivers. And then the day’s struggle was over, as I reached Navarrete and settled into the peace and quiet of the refugio in the grounds of the Seminario of the Padres Camilos.
    There was nothing particular about the small town of Navarrete except its atmosphere of being left behind with its memories of ancient battles and great events. But again, side by side with the modern road, and only a short distance from it, I was back in familiar territory. Scraps of finer masonry had been incorporated here and there into more modern walls and thresholds, and the lovely Romanesque portal of San Sepulcro, the hospice of the Knights Hospitallers, had been rebuilt as the entrance to the town’s cemetery — sparse mementoes for a town that was more important than Logroño in its day, and yet enough to retain the aura of the Camino Francés , which by now was unmistakable.
    To celebrate the safe ending of another day’s journey I bought a bottle of white Rioja wine at the small store. A patient, motherly woman leant her bulk comfortably on her forearms at the counter and watched while I shopped. She corrected my Spanish, naming each item very slowly and clearly after I had mispronounced it from my dictionary and waiting for me to repeat the words correctly after her. It was like being back in the kindergarten class, a nice warm feeling of comfort and security.
    Returning to the refugio I found that two more pilgrims had arrived; Kurt, a retired doctor from Bavaria, and Theo, a twenty-two-year-old engineering student from Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Theo, like me, was travelling by bicycle and Kurt was walking the route from Arles. All three of us expressed delight at finding fellow pilgrims, and since we were all going to eat at the refugio , we decided to pool our provisions and have a civilised meal together. There was no dining room or kitchen, just two small dormitories and a cold-water-only bathroom, but by pushing beds around a little, we rigged a table and seating and spread out a simple meal of bread and cheese, fruit and salad and the Rioja. In fact we had two bottles of wine as Theo had bought one too, which certainly helped in the time-honoured pilgrim tradition of sharing our stories. We talked far into the night and when we had parted the following morning I found I knew more about them than I did about acquaintances I’d known for years. There is a freedom in talking to people you are unlikely to meet again.
    Theo was a tall strong young man who had cycled at least four hundred miles further than I had, and in about half the time. He wasn’t really interested in old churches and things like that he said, so he did not stop much. He was making the pilgrimage because he had read about it in a travel magazine, and had thought it was something he would like to try. It was a challenge. He was fed up with his course and wasn’t sure any more if engineering was really what he wanted to do. He