Travels with my Donkey

erected to protect pilgrims from bandits perennially attracted to lonely uplands. A bickering party of French couples fussed wetly past, oblivious to our conspicuous presence, and were followed soon after by a fresh-faced girl in tentative control of a small, plump and ostentatiously excitable mongrel. 'Sativa!' she called, as Shinto found the small gaps between his hoofs threaded with a loud, brown blur.
    'Isn't that something to do with cannabis?' I whispered, as her charge yapped about in Shinto's measured, even gaze.
    A slow, freckled smile tightened the wet bandanna across her forehead. 'Excellent power of dedudication.' She was Dutch, of course. And so the four of us walked on together up the puddled tarmac, tousled and steaming like rejects from the Ark.
    The Dutchwoman was not like other pilgrims I had met. She conspicuously spurned all conversational banality, withholding her name and any detail of her domestic life, refusing even to comment on the weather on a day when there'd been little else. When I asked how she found places for Sativa to sleep, knowing that dogs were banned from refugios, she gave me a curious, disappointed look and said, 'Well, that is where the real magic begins.'
    'It is?' I said, looking up ahead, where my target village of Ruitelan was taking form beneath two distantly vertiginous spans of a gorge-vaulting motorway viaduct.
    'I have slept in a cave,' she said. And after a long, pregnant minute the wet hillsides were suddenly shaken with manic, motiveless laughter.
     
    'The Mary Poppins of refugios,' someone had written in the Ruitelan refugio guest book, 'practically perfect in every way'. It shouldn't have been, with the nagging, worrisome drone of airborne motorway traffic and an outdoor ambience still reflecting the long, cowering decades when all those flying lorries had been down here, barrelling fearsomely between these grimy, shell-shocked homes. That it was is the legacy of the splendid but tiny hospitaleros, Luis and Carlos, who when our tri-species party arrived were respectively signing in pilgrims with faultless serenity and belting out show tunes over a hot stove.
    At wee Luis's bidding I led Shinto back down the road, tethering him in the tossed-salad undergrowth behind an election-postered substation, then returned to be shown up to the attic dorm. Raw concrete underfoot, and overhead a roof polka-dotted with pinholes of light, but with a bunk-bed to myself and the dim air faintly coloured with rising incense and music, I felt slumber's caress pulling me under. Later I'd go down to enjoy a jovial and toothsome four-course dinner, served up by the rheumy, theatrical Carlos as eighteen of us sat pinioned, ear to shoulder, elbow to throat, in the tiny dining room. Later still I'd join Donald in the rather spartan bar over the road, watching reporters clamber about a train wreck as we tackled our huge Veteranos. But that afternoon, after 18 wet clicks on half a dozen wet biscuits, I would be one of those God-awful, tutting 5 p.m. dozers.
     

Thirteen

     
    P lanting his filthy, calloused feet atop the blasted brow of O Cebreiro, the pilgrim of yore might for the first time have pondered what the professor who translated the Liber Sancti Jacobi called 'the ultimate reality of belonging to the great nation of marchers to Santiago'. He stood in the last province, on the last mountain: the end was nigh, or nearly nigh.
    This was an epic day, and the Ruitelan boys knew how to set the tone. At 6.30 a.m. a ratcheting orchestral cataclysm filled the house, the 2001 theme turned up to distortion level. As the kettledrums tom-tommed up the stairwell in mighty exultation, I looked around the attic: it wouldn't have been funny had that rustling, ponchoed pilgrimator not stomped over to turn the lights on half an hour earlier, but because he had, and we were all therefore awake, it was.
    Stoked by a Carlos breakfast spectacular I hit the road with sturdy enthusiasm. A hawser-limbed Belgian woman in the neighbouring bunk had carelessly mentioned covering 51 kilometres by nightfall: fuelled with a brimming reserve of hatred she was hoping to beat her ex-husband's record of fifteen days, St Jean to St Jim. 'Maybe next year I go for the world best,' she smiled, scarily. 'In 1981 a Frenchman of forty makes Santiago in eight days.') Something about the morning made me want to match her, click for click, and had that something included an audibly approaching search-and-destroy party of