The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

road. They enquired from their escort in whose honour so great a multitude of Christians crossed the Pyrenees. “He who deserves such reverence,” answered the escort, “is St. James, whose body is revered as patron and protector by Gaul and England, the Latin and the German land and all Christian parts.”
    Today the Aragonese, the Basques and the Navarrese are as fine a race as one could find anywhere in the world and there are two modern literary masterpieces which describe the psychology of those mountaineers of the Spanish and French Pyrenees: Zalacaín el Aventurero by Pio Baroja and Ramuntcho by Pierre Loti. Martin Zalacaín is the incarnation of the Basque mountaineer: he is the pendant to the roguish and picaresque old smuggling vagabond Tellagorri.
    In Loti’s novel there is less action and more nostalgie in the mountain dwellers oppressed, as the author says, by the weight of their mountains—‘comme si l’ombre des siècles passés allait sortir de la terre, et sur ce vaste soulèvement qui s’appelle Pyréneés on sentait planer quelque chose qui était peut-être l’âme frémissante de cette race, dont les débris se sont là conservés et à laquelle Ramuntcho appartenait par sa mère.’
    There has always been continual connection between the valleys on the North and the South of the Pyrenees, agriculturally and linguistically. In the mountain villages, in addition to the hardy peasants who scale mountains, avoid avalanches and who can as easily fight wolves as engage in guerrilla warfare, I met a number of nomadic individuals on my journeys along the road to Santiago. Many of them were shepherds wandering with their flocks from winter to summer quarters, muleteers from the valley of Hecho, who are the traditional carriers of wood in arches during the winter or of grass in their bargas in the summer. Richard Ford in his handbook, published in 1845, writes lyrically of the guerrilleros of these mountain valleys, who were so formidable to ancient Rome or France when marshalled by a Sertorius or a Mina, and he adds that the hatred of the Frenchman, which the Duke of Wellington said formed part of a Spaniard’s nature, seems to increase in intensity in proportion to vicinity, and however despots may assert in the gilded galleries of Versailles that “il n’y a plus de Pyrenees”, this party-wall of Alps, this barrier of snow and hurricane, does and will exist forever.
    As a result of my wanderings, at intervals, during the past thirty years in the Aragonese and Basque mountains I stoutly maintain that Ford’s statements are no longer true. No matter how hostile the two governments, the French and the Spanish, may be to one another, no matter whether the jingo Press on both sides of the frontier hurl insults at one another there are intimate bonds of interest existing between the two neighbouring peoples which are proof against any state propaganda or compulsion.
    Don Anselmo and his smuggling French Basque confederates are a living proof that the smuggling instinct is innate in those two mountain races. Smuggling is not a vice but a clan or tribal virtue, and just as it is lawful and praiseworthy, according to clan standards, to rob the next clan which is that of an enemy, so should the state be robbed, which is the enemy of all the clans. I never understood the clan spirit so thoroughly as when I spent some time in the company of two old Aragonese friends of mine, Don Veremundo, poet, folklorist and chief character in Hecho, and Don Sixto, a cobbler from Anso. Each of these two neighbouring towns nestles in its own valley completely shut off from the other by the intervening mountain, and has preserved and actually stylized its local culture. To visit those two out-of-the-way towns was to be spirited back again into the Middle Ages, for the houses are built in the patriarchal style that was current in the ancient days of Alfonso I, ‘the Battler’, and Queen Urraca, with the chimney in the middle of the kitchen, around three sides of which the family sit on little stools and sing and tell stories. The chimney is, in some cases, as broad as the house and towers above it. A street with those long chimneys of grotesque shape resembles one of the villages in Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The houses seem to cling together like old friends for warmth and comfort and they have reason to do so, for this is a harsh climate with rain, sleet, snow and perpetual storms.
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