The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

lash and through a yawning hole in his belly he voids his guts. A third monster has claws instead of feet and from his neck bang four figures as from a gibbet. The monster with feet of a human being has two figures hanging from his mouth and holds in his hands two men, one of whom is swigging a wine-skin and the other guzzling a Galician pasty.
    “It is the Divina Commedia in stone,” murmured the young Frenchman.
    But the spirit of Master Matthew was different and he did not, as Dante did a hundred years later, stress the idea of the Final Judgment. The harmonies that the artist evokes here with those beautiful angels carrying the instruments of the Passion resemble the ethereal tones of Palestrina’s music full of divine melancholy reflected in their white robes that seem woven of floating clouds, and the faces of the Evangelists and the noble Prophets of the Old Testaments haunt us.
    All the human race past, present and future, appear in this Gate of Glory, which is both a divine drama and a symphony sculpted in granite, and the artist portrays sub specie aeternitatis the history of the Middle Ages, and coming after the Byzantine basilicas and before the Gothic cathedrals his portico embodies the passionate aspirations towards unity of mediaeval Christendom, when men dreamed of heavenly bliss, when the blest would sing to the accompaniment of the Divine Orchestra of the Apocalypse the words of St. John: Vidi Civitatem Sanctam Jerusalem novam discendentem de caelo a Deo.
    With the help of my two French friends we gave our little concert of homage to the Apostle and his orchestra of Ancients. First of all I played as invocation the Hymn of Pilgrims to Santiago from the Codex Calixtinus and according to the readings of Canon Tafall, who said it was genuinely Galician in feeling:

    Re-gi pe-ren-nis glo-ri-ae sifc can-ti-cum lae-ti - ti - ae, qui tri-um-phumVïc-to-ri - ae Ja-co-bo de* dit ho-die
    The old Frenchman declaimed the Latin words with great gusto and at the end his son said to me: “Why don’t you now play the lovely old song of the thirteenth-century troubadour from Vigo, Martin Codax, which you played for us at Carcassonne?”

    Then, as a personal offering, I played the ancient Irish lament composed on the death of Owen Roe O’Neill in 1649, which I had been g iven by my old friend the patriarchal Francis O’Neill of Chicago:
    Quite a crowd of country people had gathered on the steps of the cathedral and no sooner did I finish playing than one of the young peasant girls started to sing in a high-pitched voice the plaintive alald of the church bells of Bastabales:

    As she finished her song I saw a band of youths approaching, led by a Galician piper, and in a moment the plaza resounded with the rousing rhythms of the Muineira. The young girl who had sung then came back into the porch and laid her right hand at the base of the Tree of Jesse and put her five fingers into the five hollows worn away by pilgrims through the centuries, and said the traditional five Ave Marías for her wish. Her novio, followed by two students, went to the back of the sculptured portico and knocked his head against the kneeling figure of el Santo dos Cloques (the saint of the bumps), who is no other than our artist, Master Matthew, who kneels in prayer with his back to his portico and gazes at the distant high altar. Students have always believed that by bumping their heads against the head of the ancient master they can acquire some of his genius, or at least the power of passing their examinations. The statue, which is supposed to be a self-portrait, shows a pleasant-faced, youthful man with curly hair. He was the Master of Works in Compostella before he began the Gloria in 1168, and he had built Puente Cesures, the noble bridge near Padron.
    Now that the centre choir has been removed, the spaciousness of the great cathedral is much more impressive than the basilica of San Sernin at Toulouse, and in spite of its size it is the most homely of all cathedrals except that of Seville. The aisles are crowded with every variety of worshipper: market-women with baskets and buckets, beatas in black with black mantillas and large prayer books, women with squealing babies, peasants with clattering sabots, noisy schoolchildren, crocodiles of tourists and pilgrims following murmuring sacristans from altar to altar. Here and there, acolytes carrying little glowing censers dart through the crowd, groups of foreign visitors kneeling