The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Americans who are arriving every day. You foreigners never thought that we Spaniards could hustle; you always thought of Spain as the country of mañana.”

MUROS, GEORGE BORROW, XANAS AND SIRENS

    From Pravia the road ascends to the little old-world town of Muros del Nalon, which is perched in a picturesque position above the river estuary. Muros was one of the halting-places on the Jacobean Road and there was a hospital for pilgrims there in the eighteenth century, according to the map of T. López of 1777. * Muros had often been a halting-place for me, too, on the journeys by car to Galicia and Compostella, where in past years I have enjoyed the hospitality of my dear friend and colleague Mrs. Carmen Wiggin, the granddaughter of the Marqués de Muros whose bust is in the plaza. According to the late Felix Fierro, who wrote an interesting history of Muros, the dominant family in the town in the late Middle Ages was that of the Marqués of Val Carzana who owned the castle which stands at the entrance to the town. Portions of the castle, which are of the twelfth century, are embedded in the mansion which was built in the sixteenth century by the Val Carzanas. The gateway is imposing and recalls the Gate of Burgos of Charles V with its two little turrets. The coat of arms on the gate with the emblem of the hundred flames belongs to the Cienfuegos family.
    Muros had a grim couple of days in the Peninsular War when in 1809 Marshal Ney entered it on May 27 and stayed until May 29. During die two days’ terror several citizens were executed.
    I was delighted to be able to locate the house in Muros where George Borrow, or ‘Jorgito el Inglés’ as he is still called in Spain, spent the weird night which he describes in The Bible in Spain . * Halfway down the road on the right of the church called Cuesta de Arango there is an ancient two-storeyed house with a big roofed balcony and a dilapidated stable, opening on to the street. That house was called El Mesón in 1857, and was the inn at which George Borrow stayed after his fatiguing ride over the seven hills in Asturias called the Bellotas from their resemblance to acorns. Borrow describes it as a rather singular place: ‘Just one of those inns which romance writers are so fond of introducing in their descriptions, expecially when the scene of adventure lies in Spain.’ Certainly the two guests whom he met in that inn were singular personages, for according to the innkeeper one was tall as a giant, with a full tawny moustache like the coat of a badger, and the other was diminutive and looked like a jorobado (hunchback), “but Válgame Dios !” cried the innkeeper, “such eyes like wildcats! So sharp and full of malice.” The innkeeper, like my friends the Basque fishermen, no sooner saw a hunchback than he considered him the Devil in person. George Borrow adds a touch of mystery to his description of the giant servant in riding boots, who slept on the floor outside his master’s door and talked an unintelligible lingo, and the hunchback master himself who spoke good Spanish. The mysteries deepened when next day, after the strangers had departed, the innkeeper was arrested for having harboured spies and emissaries of a foreign power, but Borrow, the linguist, from the word Batuschea, which the innkeeper had heard the giant continually saying to his master, ascertained that they were Russians. Borrow’s story of those Russian spies at Muros is typically Spanish, and even in our present day, a little over a hundred years later, a Russian visitor seen in a Spanish pueblo could cause even still greater commotion, as happened two years ago when the rumour spread like wildfire all over Spain that Beria, the dreaded chief of the o.g.p.u., after his fall from grace, was seen peacefully walking along the road into Algeciras.
    In Muros I had plenty of opportunity to indulge one of my pet hobbies—namely, collecting stories about Xanas. Many of the older inhabitants of the town are as obsessed by Xanas, as we in Ireland are by the banshees, who are much more forbidding and sinister than the litde fairy-like princesses of Asturias, who haunt fountains, caves and rivers, washing their clothes in the foam of cascades in the misty Asturian dawn and spinning their gold when the sun shines on the neighbouring fields. One old woman, the owner of a little shop in the plaza, told me stories of the Xana who haunts the Aguilar beach.
    The cave of the Xana is covered at high tide,