Travels with my Donkey

went up, or down, or did anything even vaguely three-dimensional, you wouldn't find me complaining.
    It would just be Lilja and me with Shinto that morning, and after a slap-up breakfast — or rather the meagre juice-and-croissant pat-up that is the best you'll ever get in Spain — we blinked out into the over-zealous sun. At the end of the road Hospital de Órbigo died around us, and the camino veered back to the N120. Before it got there, however, there was a bridge over an irrigation culvert, a sheet of galvanised metal which sang like a saw when I planted a boot on it. This sensory experience had a predictable effect on Shinto, and with a sag of the shoulders I turned round.
    'What are you doing?' asked Lilja.
    'We're going back to find another way,' I said, lightly massaging a tender spot on my right temple. My brain seemed suddenly full of curdled brandy, and at this stage of the day I had no wish to expose my daughter to scenes incorporating adult language and strong graphic horror.
    As I'd seen so many others do, she grimaced sceptically at first donkey, then bridge. 'But it's really small.' I nodded vacantly, then set about wheeling Shinto round. 'Have you tried holding out some of his favourite stuff from the other side?'
    'I've tried everything.'
    She twisted out a frond of alfalfa from the pathside. 'Can I try again?'
    I suppressed a sigh. 'Quickly, then.'
    Lilja looked at Shinto in mock reproach, one hand on hip and the other proffering the vegetable lure. Then she leant forward, and whispered, 'Now, Shinty, it's only a little bridge.' His ears shot up and without hesitation or deviation he clanged straight over.
    Five clicks up the road we met the back-up crew, clambering out of a taxi on to the hot earth with water, bread and bad news: every hotel in Astorga was full, and Birna had been obliged to book an unseen out-of-town alternative by phone. We'd started late, and now faced an additional 6 kilometres in heat that at 11 a.m. was already almost absurd.
    Astorga showed itself as we picnicked atop the most considerable hill in recent memory. It wasn't difficult to see why the Romans had established the town they named Asturica Augusta where they had: a sudden blip in the flat foreground, crying out for a fortress. Beyond, somewhere in that distantly brooding bank of peaks, were some of the empire's richest gold mines, and Asturica stood guard over the road that brought the ingots back to Rome.
    When the pilgrims began to arrive, this was an obvious place to recuperate before the vertical rigours ahead; boosted by the additional influx of holy walkers on the Vía de la Plata, the north-south pilgrim route that merged here with mine, Astorga was home to twenty-one hospices — only Burgos boasted more. Where once stood the fort now soared the cathedral tower, still guiding and beckoning pilgrims, still the dominant man-made structure in a generous swathe of landscape. Rewinding through the last month — the last 500 kilometres, thank you very much — I couldn't recall a town, even a city, where any building had stood taller than the tallest church.
    The children stopped to roll boulders down a gully, a pastime hypocrisy forbade me to discourage, and filthied themselves further after imaginatively combining a fountain with three sunhatsful of field. The heat was making everyone clumsy:
    Birna tripped up as she returned a farmer's wave, I refreshed myself with a swig of vinaigrette, and every ten minutes a bleat of alarm warned me that Shinto had once again tried to roll in the dust, forgetting Valdis was up on his back. For maybe two hours we weren't on holiday, shuffling silently through the acrid backyard of some sinister industrial complex, watching in drained and lip-blistered impotence as Shinto stooped to sniff the rails whilst we crossed the main line to Madrid.
    Between Astorga's peripheral allotments, a splat of tended green in the clods and rubble, and then up the merciless, spiralled ascent to the old town. Birna had parked the car in a torpid, ochre square; there was a ticket on the windscreen but neither of us could summon the energy for an inquest. Lilja had earlier insisted she'd walk on with me, but as Birna soporifically marshalled the others towards the car's smelted interior she shuffled along behind, mumbling incoherently like Little Nell in her final moments. No need now for a saddle; I unstrapped it from Shinto's hot back and somehow wedged it and the fetid blanket on the parcel