The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

hundreds of birds were warbling as they disported themselves in the water. *
    The great difference, however, between the Xanas and the sirens, the Vilas, the Valkyries, the banshees and other supernatural beings of folklore is that the former, in spite of their magic voice and song and their treasures, suffer even greater disabilities than human beings, for they are prisoners of the spell cast by their parents, and they have not even the free will of the human soul: they must linger in their golden captivity until they are disenchanted by a human being who is brave enough and clever enough to break the spell. Like the Celtic banshee, they comb their hair with a golden comb and sing, but unlike the banshee they do not announce the death of a human being by their sad song. Like the leprechauns, they collect gold, and like the Irish fairies they may sometimes steal a healthy human child from the cradle and leave in its place an ugly deformed changeling, but they are only allowed one day in the year on which they may appear in all their glory, and that is midsummer morning, or the day of St. John, when the sun dances in the sky and the Xanas too, dance on the dew-covered meadows in the golden sunbeams before their fairy queen.
    On the way from Muros to Cudillero I met an old friend of many years ago, Pepin Claviños, who has a farm in the Asturian mountains near Somiedo. Pepin belongs to the strange nomadic race of Vaqueiros, or cowboys, who resemble the Cagots or Agotes in the Basque provinces and the Maragatos in the province of León. The cowboys wander with their cattle from the lowlands of the coastal regions up to the high peaks in the summer months. In the winter they leave some of their number up in the snows to guard the huts of their settlements, while they and their families descend to the coast and live in the villages. Although they have lived in these highlands since time immemorial they have always been considered a ‘race maudite’ by the Asturians, and in former days there was as much hostility shown to them as to the Cagots, Agotes or the Gypsies, and I have seen inscriptions in stone on the pavements inside the churches saying that the Vaqueiros were not allowed to stand in the main body of the church with the rest of the congregation; nor were they allowed to be buried in the same part of the cemetery. Jovellanos in his ‘Diaries’, when referring to the attitude adopted by the people and the church authorities towards these nomads, adds that in some villages the priests would not administer Holy Communion to them at the altar rails, but only at the door of the church. *
    With Pepin Claviños I played truant on the road to Cudillero, for he gave me a lift in his friend’s milk-van and brought me off to San Martín de Luiña, where we were joined by another Vaqueiro called Pachin Parredo, and soon I was ensconced in a dark chigre listening to the wild yodelling Vaqueiras which express the proud, self-centred primitiveness of this race of shepherd kings, who boast that they are descendants of the celebrated ancestral families of the country. One of the coplas they sing:

    Antes que Dios fuera Dios
    y el sol diera por los riscos
    ya los Feitos eran Feitos
    y los Garridos Garridos.

    (Before God was God
    and the sun shone over the rocks,
    the Feitos were Feitos
    and the Garridos were Garridos.)

    It is the most exciting music in Spain and the most romantic if we hear it on the outskirts of the villages perched in the mountains above San Martín de Luiña, at sundown, for the Vaqueiros yodel at one another from neighbouring peaks and their wild shouts echo and reecho in the mountains, suggesting barbaric war-cries. They also accompany their yodelling songs or vaqueiras with large-sized castanets and with a saucepan which they strike with a key. The two characteristic words braña and alzada explain the destiny of this mysterious caste of mankind, whose characters and customs are so different from those of the prevailing population that they were shunned and ill-treated. The word braña (derived from vernum, summer) means the damp summer pasture land of the upper slopes, and the word alzada expresses the annual migration (haciendo alzada) of the cowherds with their wives, children and chattels to the highland settlements. The little hamlets of the Vaqueiros on the mountain slopes reminded me of the west of Ireland, for the Vaqueiros live in primitive thatched cottages.
    It was difficult to tear myself