Travels with my Donkey

No cars, even. A little quiet? Those stout and rough-hewn doors had for centuries watched the world go by, but now the world had gone. Walking back round the church I felt like the night-watchman in a model village. The contrived architectural perfection made it all the more creepy: here was a set from The Prisoner, only with El Cid instead of Patrick McGoohan. When my phone rang I almost reabsorbed my spleen.
    'What are you doing?' said Birna. I wheeled about and there they all were, laughing at me from a window set in a battlement of ancient stone.
    We were the only guests in our hotel; very probably in town, said the young wife in charge. She spoke some English, and I left her talking to Birna and Kristjan while her husband led the rest of us to Shinto's night field. En route we encountered a bridge fashioned from not quite enough slabs of old stone: I looked at the hoof-wide gaps and shook my head wanly at our leader, then looked round to see Lilja doing her donkey-whisperer thing and coaxing him painlessly across. It was terrible to think she'd be going home in four days.
    Birna had found further evidence of life on earth, and when I returned it was sitting around her in our heavily geraniumed guest-house courtyard. As well as the Lancastrian woman I'd met a couple of days earlier outside Mansilla, there was a German woman and an American: all pilgrims, but none staying in Castrillo. 'We're at a refugio a mile down the road,' explained my countrywoman. 'They reckoned this place was worth a look, but it's dead creepy, i'n't it?'
    'Only twenty year-round residents,' said Birna, primed by the proprietress. 'Five hundred in the summer — most of these places are mothballed holiday homes.' The German smiled wistfully at the first statistic. 'I like this here. The refugios are so full and loud and... oweful.' She bristled in distaste and explained how her mission to 'look deep in the soul' had been wrecked by that all-consuming rush for beds and the inane natter of a thousand sock-washers.
    The American, a grey and dapper Steve Martin, nodded. 'I'm just trying to go home.' He sounded weary and defeated.
    'Sort of finding yourself, you mean,' offered the Lancastrian, helpfully.
    He looked at her askance. 'No. I just want to get home, to Boston, to my apartment. This is all just so squalid. You're brushing your teeth and...' As he shivered he caught my eye, and I knew what we were both seeing: a pair of gingery Bavarian bollocks in the soap dish.
    With the children fed and bathed and nailed to their beds we dined in the empty and extremely wooden guest-house restaurant, our culinary whims catered for by a cook bused in to cater for us and us alone. Birna felt we ought to reward this level of service by ordering almost everything on the menu, but when I peeped through the hatch into the kitchen I saw the cook light up a cig while idly probing her earhole, so instead we shared a single regional speciality. 'Now is your soap,' announced the proprietress a little sourly, banging a huge tureen of lentilled bone-broth down on the table.
    As we forked jellied flesh out of sheep knuckles and wished we were drunk, Birna told me what she'd learnt about the region's culture and history, with particular emphasis on the shy and ethnically obscure Maragatos. The racial origins of this mountain people west of Astorga are an utter mystery: possibly Goths who fought with the Moors in the eighth century; possibly Berbers, or Astures, or Visigoths, or Phoenicians. I was pleasantly interested to learn that many had until recently earned their living as muleteers, and soap-chokingly so to hear that the Maragatan male 'invented' sympathetic pregnancy. (He takes to his bed while sending the encumbered wife out to work, thereby nobly drawing the attention of evil spirits away from the woman while she is at her most vulnerable.)
    It was difficult to understand then how a tribe of Visigoths could be holed up here, genetically undisturbed, for a millennium, but the next day it was easy. Lilja and I retrieved Shinto and were soon steadily ascending an exposed and spartan scrubland, treeless, thinly heathered and studded with skeletons of dead gorse. It was hot and wiltingly muggy, though the battered and cowering vegetation suggested a default forecast of flaying wind. Nuggets of quartz sparkled under the alien micro-pineapples of a wild lavender bush: it was another world up here. After 200 kilometres I'd finally scrambled up out of Spain's