Therapy

reasons that, like most things associated with this saint, remain obscure. One legend has it that a man rescued from drowning by St James’s intervention was dragged from the sea covered in scallop shells. More probably it was just a brilliant piece of mediaeval marketing: pilgrims returning from Santiago wanted souvenirs, and scallop shells were plentiful on the shores of Galicia. They were a nice little earner for the city, especially as the Archbishop of Santiago was empowered to excommunicate anybody who sold them to pilgrims outside it. Nowadays, though, pilgrims wear the coquille on their way to Santiago as well as on the way home.
    I was surprised by how many of them there were, even in St Jean Pied-de-Port. I had imagined Maureen as a solitary eccentric, retracing an ancient trail forgotten by the modern world. Not so. The pilgrimage has enjoyed a big revival lately, encouraged by a powerful consortium of interests: the Catholic Church, the Spanish Tourist Board and the Council of Europe, which adopted the Camino de Santiago as a European Heritage Trail a few years ago. Tens of thousands hit the road every summer, following the blue and yellow coquille signs erected by the Council of Europe. I met a German couple in a bar one evening who had walked all the way from Arles, the most southerly of the four traditional routes. They had a sort of passport issued by some society of St James which they’d had stamped at various stopping-points along the route. When they got to Santiago, they told me, they would present their passports at the Cathedral and receive their “compostelas”, certificates of completion like the pilgrims of old used to get. I wondered whether Maureen had obtained such a passport. If so, it might help me to trace her. The Germans directed me to the local passport-stamper, advising me not to arrive outside her house by car. Genuine pilgrims must walk, or cycle, or ride horseback.
    I walked up the narrow cobbled hill to the house, but I didn’t pretend to be a pilgrim. Instead I pretended (in a mixture of pidgin English, fractured French and sign-language) to be Bede Harrington, trying to trace his wife who was urgently required back at in England. A lady who was a dead ringer for Mary Whitehouse opened the door, frowning as if she was fit to kill another pilgrim knocking on her door late in the evening, but when I told my story she became interested and co-operative. To my delight she had stamped Maureen’s passport and remembered her well: “une femme très gentille ”, but suffering from badly blistered feet. I asked her where she thought Maureen might have got to by now, and she frowned and shrugged, “Ça dépend ... ” It depended, obviously, on how many kilometres Maureen could walk per day. It’s about 800 kilometres from St Jean Pied-de-Port to Santiago. A young and fit walker might average 30 kilometres a day, but Maureen would be lucky to do half as well as that. I got the map out in my hotel room and calculated that she might be anywhere between Logroño and Villafranca, a distance of 300 kilometres, and that was guessing in the dark. She might have rested somewhere for a week to let her blisters heal and be way behind schedule. She might have used public transport for part of the way, in which case she could have already arrived in Santiago — though knowing Maureen I doubted if she would bend the rules. I imagined her gritting her teeth and walking on through the pain barrier.
    The next day I crossed the Pyrenees. I put the automatic shift in “Slow” to avoid excessive gear changes on the twisty road and breezed effortlessly to the top of the Val Carlos pass, overtaking several pilgrims slogging their way up the hill bowed under their backpacks. The weather had turned fine and the scenery was spectacular: mountains green to their peaks, valleys smiling in the sunshine, caramel-coloured cows with clinking bells, flocks of mountain sheep, vultures hang-gliding at eye level. Val Carlos, my guidebook informed me, means valley of Charles or Charlemagne, and on the Spanish side of the mountain is Roncesvalles, where there was a famous battle between Charlemagne’s army and the Saracens, as recorded in the Song of Roland. Only they weren’t Saracens at all, in reality, but Basques from Pamplona, narked because Charlemagne’s boys had knocked their city about a bit. Nothing associated with the Camino is quite what it claims to be. The shrine of Santiago itself seems to