Travels with my Donkey

bread basket. The grain was gone, replaced as an agro-commercial staple by the odd flock of penned sheep.
    Shinto had suffered a curious and unsightly spiritual collapse just outside Castrillo, bucking and whinnying as if in premonition of imminent seismic activity, and beelined towards the first enclosed bleaters we encountered with ears forward and jaw set: a freshly humiliated bully ready to take it out on a physical inferior. He trotted right up to the fence and brayed viciously at the already panic-stricken inhabitants, dispatching a whimpering, woolly-backed wave right across to the paddock's opposite corner. 'That wasn't very nice, Shinto,' said Lilja reproachfully as he turned away in grim satisfaction. She waved a finger and he reeled back as if struck. As well as causing me to wonder what I had done wrong and what she was doing right, this reaction also led to Shinto's offside rear hoof being planted heavily on the toes of my right foot. Had my boots not been cured and tempered by four weeks of elemental extremity that would have been my last unaided step for a month. As it was I bellowed things which earned me a finger-wag all of my own.
    The humidity was fearsome. As I entered the first bleakly ravaged strip town, my daypack seemed to congeal into the waterlogged flesh below, like a hot and soggy hunchback. We'd drunk all our fluids when the others arrived with supplies an hour later. I'd warned Birna not to expect a taxi rank out here in the Visigoth wastes, so instead she'd recruited a co-driver: English Sara, propped on her stick by the roadside, utterly spent after a night of lomo -fuelled nausea. Birna had driven her on to Rabanal, our next stopover town, and once beds had been arranged and our family reunited, Sara was responsible for taking the car back there. 'Poor woman. She's really worried about driving uninsured,' said Birna, as we watched her release the handbrake and crawl off down the road, nose to the windscreen and half a bottom lip between her teeth.
    'A minor motoring infraction,' I said, airily. 'But that ...' The Toyota toiled towards a brow in what sounded like ninth gear. 'That's cheating on a pilgrimage. That's straight to purgatory.' And then I shrugged: not my rules.
    'Mummy,' announced Lilja, after a carefully timed interval, 'in the morning Daddy said the S word five times in one go.'
     
    The sky lowered and thickened as we walked into El Ganso, a final, lonely outpost of Maragatan culture and construction, an odd thatched roof amidst the formless ruins astride an unpaved street. A shepherd's crook leant against a wall. Two goats tracked us from a yard shared with a pair of rotting four-spoked cartwheels. The air stank of thunder: that humidity pressure-valve was about to burst. 'The porch of the Church of Santiago has sheltered countless pilgrims,' said the red book, and this was a tradition we found ourselves continuing throughout the hours of lunch-time, huddled up on the steps in the gathering gloom with boccadillos on our knees. It got darker still, and a fresh wind freshened, yet even as the trees thrashed around us somehow the heavens stayed stubbornly closed. After the fourth round of 'In My Grandfather's Saddlebags' we broke cover.
    Ten minutes later the first furious Thor-bolt speared into the black bills up the road, and when the gap between flash and bang was down to three seconds we stoically prepared for a soaking. I pulled my sun-hat down over my ears and handed Birna the poncho: as the first drops hit their mark she stretched it over her head and the children's and together they stumbled on ahead in file, like an over-manned pantomime animal.
    But a minute later they emerged — the rain had stopped before it had really started. We peered incredulously about the tilted landscape: streaky dark walls of precipitation to left and right, the cambered road beneath our feet edged by excitable brown torrents, but before and above an airy, white-ceilinged corridor. As we walked into Rabanal an hour later, bedraggled and shell-shocked pilgrims were shuffling out from doorways and porches: Evelyn and Petronella stood drip-drying outside the refugio, and palely reported angry bolts slamming into the earth all around them.
    'You waited for the rain to stop, yes?' chattered Petronella.
    'No,' said Kristjan, solemnly, 'God kept us dry.'
    Trooping along the uphill main street past the sodden refugees, even Valdis looked a little guilty and unsettled.
    The pilgrimage had made