The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

but at low tide I was able to walk into it from the shore. It is a big cave with five entrances opening out into a secret little cove which must have been an ideal hiding-place for smugglers and pirates.
    The Xanas in Asturias are believed to be the daughters of kings, who for some fault have been condemned by enchantment to live in fountains, caves or rivers. Thus the Xana of Aguilar was the daughter of a powerful king who, as a punishment for some fault, condemned her to live in the cave under enchantment, like Briinhilde the Valkyrie, until the day should come when a brave man would carry her in his arms from the cave to the sea without stopping on the way or letting her fall to the ground. The man capable of performing this feat would become the owner of untold wealth, for the Xana would bestow upon him the treasure lying in the cave wrapped up in the hide of a dappled ox. The poem says:

    En Castiellu de Aguilar
    dónde trigo se mayaba
    hay un pellejo’ güey pinto
    lleno de plata labrada.

    (In the Castle of Aguilar
    where they used to grind the wheat,
    there is the skin of a dappled ox
    full of chased silver.)

    The Xana played bowls on a golden bowling-alley, and she spun the gold thread that poured out of the fountain near the cave and laid her tiny washing out to dry on the slope of the mountain. Year after year the Xana waited disconsolately for the deliverer, but no man brave enough to disenchant her appeared on the scene. At last one day when she was trimming her cloak at the entrance to the cave a man passed by who asked her who she was and why she lived in such a place! The Xana told her sad story and explained what he would have to do to release her from her enchantment. The man then offered to disenchant her and took her up in his arms and started to carry her towards the shore. As he moved away from the cave the Xana began to be released from her enchantment, and as she became disenchanted she became heavier and heavier. The man pressed on as fast as he could, for he saw that the miracle of disenchantment was beginning to work, but the sky darkened, the waves billowed and foamed and a mighty tempest suddenly arose. Owing to the bursts of thunder and the flashes of lightning and the weight of the Xana, which increased and increased, the young man in terror dropped her. Immediately, as she had warned him, she fell again under the spell, this time forever, and she returned weeping to the cave. And never since that day have the inhabitants of Muros seen the Xana of the Castle of Aguilar playing bowls on the seashore, but many fishermen say that she can sometimes be heard wailing at night in her cave.
    Such is the story of the Xana as it is told by the people of Muros, but my Asturian friend, Juan Antonio Bravo, who does not believe in such things and always tries to find a positive explanation of the supernatural, says that the story arose in the first instance from the wailing cry of the foxes and vixens who have their lairs in the caves which are studded along this coast. The cry of the fox, he says, resembles the banshee wailing of the Xanas.
    The Xanas have attracted the notice of Spanish folklorists. Menéndez Pidal believes that the supernatural beings of Asturian folklore have their origins in German myths, and compares the Xanas to the Valkyries of the Edda, but this is contradicted by Giner de Arivau, who says that whereas the Valkyries, the daughters of Odin, are sent by their father to pick up dead warriors on the field of battle and carry them on their steeds to Walhalla, where they are given mead to drink which will bestow upon them eternal life, the Xanas, on the contrary, live apart from the world under their spell of enchantment and take no part in battle or in wars, nor is it known if they have any influence in the world beyond the grave. * They resemble rather the Greek nymphs and naiads who try as sirens did with Odysseus, to lure human beings into pools and drag them down to the bottom, where they have their palaces. My old friend, Constantino Cabal, whose book gives the most systematic account of these elusive fairy creatures, stresses the irresistible appeal of their voices which attract human beings towards their caves and grottoes in beaches and rivers, and Cabal describes a conversation he had in 1919 with an old woman of ninety-two from the village of Balmori who told him that she had heard songs coming from the fountains and caves of the Xanas, which sounded as though