Pilgrim's Road

gave a clean bill of health. I found it not nearly as memorable or attractive a town as many I’d seen along the way. But it did seem to have remained prosperous and bustling, and the river still flowed below it, with some lovely Benedictine cloisters beyond. There was even a scrap of the medieval town remaining with the Church of Santiago in the middle of it, graced by a superb Christ in Majesty on its west wall. The fact that for once I was in time for mass also made for a closer sense of the continuity of the pilgrimage, although the entire congregation was no more than about twenty persons.
    But the next day brought a change. Pushing on across the same desolate plateau that I had reached soon after leaving Burgos, which now seemed weeks, instead of just days ago, I began to understand something of the monotony that other pilgrims had suffered on this stretch. With no blue skies to lighten the harshness of the Castilian landscape, a sense of bleakness overshadowed everything. The sense of joy in the journey had faded. With the prevailing westerly wind once more blowing the dust of the eroding land strongly in my face, it was all once more a struggle, while my mind searched about for distractions.
    With my head tucked down out of the wind I did not see the spare figure in shirt sleeves swinging along with staff and knapsack until I was almost level with him. An unmistakable pilgrim, I thought, as I stopped to greet him, and must have said as much, for he turned a fine craggy face towards me and after shaking hands and introducing himself in an unmistakably Dutch accent as Harrie, let me know how he felt about being described as a pilgrim. ‘It’s the only thing I’ve not enjoyed about this journey, the cars and buses are stopping all the time to take photographs. Every town I pass through there’s someone wanting to photograph a pilgrim. Even the priests say “Come here, because you are a real pilgrim. Come and be photographed with these tourists.” But I am not a real pilgrim. I’m walking to Santiago that is all. I hate all this commercialism.’
    A conversation that gets off to such a fine impassioned start without any preambles could not, I felt, be abandoned until it had been explored a little further. I suggested we had a drink while we talked. As it was a particularly lonely part of the Camino with no bars anywhere near, we sat by the roadside with the thin green wheat fields at our back, shielding the flame of my stove from the wind while the kettle boiled for coffee. Harrie seemed not to feel the cold. He was a sculptor from Leiden, he told me, somewhere in his mid to late-thirties, I guessed, and appeared very fit, with not a spare ounce of fat on him. He looked, in fact, exactly like someone who had been walking all day and every day for seven weeks, and this included his rather otherworldly expression. In spite of his modern dress I thought he bore an uncanny resemblance to the pilgrims carved on the church door panel at Burgos, and was not surprised that people found him a good subject for their cameras — not an observation I thought it wise to share with Harrie.
    He was walking to Santiago, he said, because he had come to a point in his life where he needed ‘space to think, to work things out; a time away from everyday problems’. There were not so many places left he thought where you could walk so far through such fine countryside, as well as seeing so many marvellous works of art. The people in the villages and in the bars were charming, and didn’t bother you with all this pilgrim business. This was an ideal journey for anyone wanting to walk and think.
    Soon after starting off from Le Puy, he said, he had met up with two other men walking the route — a priest from Belgium and a Swiss gynaecologist. They had quickly established a pattern of staying together each night at an agreed rendezvous, usually a refugio , but they always walked alone during the day, each valuing, indeed needing their solitude. Harrie said they had met quite a number of other people doing the route, many of them rushing to get to Santiago as fast as possible. He thought it mad to hurry, it was wasting the journey. The travelling was the easy part, you had nothing to worry about; the problems began when you reached the end and took up where you left off. When he started out he said he had far too much in his rucksack, half of it he had sent home: one of the best things about the walk for him so far had been