Travels with my Donkey

Rabanal, and now it was remaking it. Most of the guidebooks talked of another village in melancholic decline, but the tall and wide-eaved houses stood in proud fettle, and gathered beneath the mighty church like chicks under a hen were a couple of mini-marts and three or four guest houses, all catering for pilgrims. The revival would appear to have been spearheaded by the Confraternity, responsible for the restoration and management of a 900-year-old refugio.
    In the four days of my domestic exclusion, I can't pretend to have passed too many refugios with a thwarted sigh of envy. But I was sorry to miss out on the one in Rabanal, with its library, its British staff, its 10.45 curfew. I was especially sorry when I dragged the luggage up the third flight of stairs and into one of our adjacent windowless garrets: 84 euros the pair, no telly, no windows, a bath the size of a tea chest. And some bloody donkey doing its deafening worst in the yard out back.
    Still, our guest house could justly claim an active nightlife, and setting forking into plates of fried stuff we found ourselves involved, often passively, in a dozen competing conversations. The most emphatic of these was maintained by a bibulous party of Irish pilgrims, a score of them walking to Santiago in week-long annual stages. Their leader, a well-fed man with a well-fed voice, recounted with Chaucerian relish his recent encounter outside a church near León. He'd been in conversation with an aged local, and whilst listening to this fellow's sage and mystical ruminations on the pilgrimage noticed a white glow forming around his head. 'I thought, my God, this is it: this is a miracle, a haloed messenger sent to me.' Forkfuls of mashed chips hovered by the children's open mouths. 'Then I put my glasses on and saw it was stork shit.' As the laughter died a steady Gregorian chant moaned out from the church opposite.
     
    'An old witch was supposed to live there, surrounded by no one but dogs.' I'd been intrigued by Foncebadón ever since reading Shirley MacLaine's account of her confrontation with a monstrous pack of wild canines in the camino's most notorious ghost town, an encounter she had only been able to survive 'by being proactive with love imagery'. Once it had become clear that I could defend myself against dog attack just as effectively 'by being next to a donkey', intrigue was upgraded to enthusiasm.
    Pilgrims who had read that tale and others — Paulo Coelho's protagonist was fearfully savaged by Foncebadón's hounds of hell — came tooled up with pepper sprays and ultrasonic 'Dog Dazers', but the hostility was not purely bestial. The shattered remains of this 2,000-year-old village stood just below the highest point along the camino, on a mountainside of such meteorological capriciousness that as late as the eighteenth century the pass would not have opened until 1 June, otherwise known as the day after tomorrow. Even in high summer, the previous generation of Rabanal hospitaleros had felt obliged to escort pilgrims up to the village.
    No less pertinently, Birna recalled our friend Nicky speak of black-magic rites held amongst the cattle stabled in Foncebadón's crumbling church. As she thumbed through the literature after the children were asleep her misgivings piled up; she recounted the highlights as I squatted in that ludicrous bath. 'In the seventies there were only four people left, and they still had a team of oxen with fox skins over their faces to keep the flies out. And ten years later it was just an old woman with her son, and she had to campaign to stop them taking the church bells away when the tower started to fall down. That was the only way they could raise the alarm.'
    'Who would hear them?' I called out. 'We're 6 kilometres away here and this is the nearest town.'
    'Just imagine if you did, though,' Birna replied, her voice brittle with foreboding. 'Imagine hearing the bells ring and knowing that something terrible had happened, and that you'd have to...'
    'What you're saying,' I abridged, accurately, 'is that I'm walking up there alone tomorrow.'
    It had rained in the night: the air was fresher, but Shinto was slightly damp and, without the children around, lethargically reluctant. He was giving me the Mad Mr Ed gurn after less than half an hour of uphill hairpins, and when I paused to peer over the guard rail at the indistinct culvert that had once carried gold-panning water to 60,000 slaves working a nearby Roman mine, he spat on