The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Santiago Matamoros we saw riding his fierce warhorse at Logroño, or the other ‘sauvage’ at Calzado de los Molinos, trampling upon the heads of Moors,” said the young man excitedly.
    “Kindliness, nobility and elegance,” I said, “are the attributes of the Great Wayfarer who at last has reached Ins haven of rest in the New Jerusalem.”
    “Surely the stick the Apostle leans on is not the usual pilgrim staff,” said the young Frenchman.
    “Here,” I said, “Santiago has become the interceder and ‘Guide of Souls’ the tau-staff is no pilgrim staff, but a magic wand like that which according to the ‘Great Passion’ in the Book of St. James, he gave to the magician Hermogenes to protect him against the demons who had been his disciples before his conversion.”
    “Now I understand,” said the old Frenchman, “why you are so eager to make your musical offering. Why, this whole portico echoes with music. This is indeed music frozen into stone. Even our Lord in all His majesty softens His expression as he listens to the chanting angels, and St. James leaning on his magic wand seems to be waiting for the heavenly orchestra of the twenty-four Ancients of the Apocalypse to begin.”
    The four and twenty Ancients, ‘having everyone of them harps and golden vials full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints’, are seated across the archivolt of the great central arch about to begin their heavenly symphony. Two by two they converse quietly and some of them prelude abstractedly or tune their instruments in the traditional manner of orchestral players who are waiting for the conductor to rap his desk. Most of the instruments are like the citólas which we meet in the Canticles of Alfonso the Wise and the Galician minstrels, the citóla trotera or vagabond instrument of the Archpriest of Hita. Another traditional instrument here is the sinfonia or zanfoña, or hurdy-gurdy, which is being played by two of the Ancients. One turns the handle and the other plays the instrument, which in the Middle Ages was used by the juglares to accompany epic poetry, and today I have occasionally heard it played by blind men in the highlands of Asturias and Galicia. In addition to the harp there is another ancient Oriental instrument called the salterio or psaltery of trapezoidal shape, evidently the ancestor of the zither. The twenty-four Ancients wear a kind of ducal diadem of gold and are dressed in white tunics embroidered with gold and they are seated on a long sofa winch runs the entire perimeter of the semi-circle.
    The astonishing vividness and animation of the Divine Orchestra is reflected in the thirty-eight tiny figures of the elect clothed in white, all wearing their crowns (two of them are in the process of being crowned by the angels), which show every variety of gentleness, and we feel that their eyes are not fixed on the earth but upon the heavenly city, and though carved in granite, such is the miraculous lightness of touch of the artist, that they all seem about to soar with the whole dream fabric of the portal into the empyrean, borne aloft by the choiring angels and the divine orchestra.
    At each end of the tympanum stand two angels each of whom presents to the Saviour a small figure: that on the left represents the Jewish people, that on the right the Gentiles. And next to the two angels on each side of the tympanum are two other angels who guide small children towards the centre with tender solicitude, according to the words of St. Paul, who said: ‘Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.’ *
    The symbolical figures on the archivolts of the left arch represent great law-givers such as Moses, Samuel, David and numbers of figures, half-hidden amidst the exuberant foliage, show by their excited gestures and animation that they are eagerly expectant of their salvation. Those on the right arch lead us away from the House of God towards those ‘who are dead in trespasses and sins’, whom St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians calk ‘the children of wrath’. On two of the archivolts on that side we see four hideous devils. The first is in a kneeling posture and has horse’s hoofs, and from his mouth hang two figures whose hands are caught between his teeth: the second has thrown two lean figures on his shoulder and holds a third between his teeth while with his hand he grasps a fourth by the hair. Around his waist hangs a monstrous