Travels with my Donkey

Alsatian-led storm troopers I might have. For it was a splendid day to be a pilgrim abroad: after long weeks of thick, unventilated heat and a short day of savage precipitation, the laundered air was sweet and bracing, the prospects verdant and rollingly fecund. Dewdrops winked in the sun, sleek livestock graciously browsed lustrous pastures. I felt like a happy hobbit coming home.
    We passed through a couple of scrubbed and healthy villages, all as conspicuously alive with productive morning activity as so many of their camino predecessors had been dead and decrepit. Even the pets were glossed and sturdy: this was a realm of fat cats and early birds. A farmer's wife with a basket of eggs strode past us and into the last house of the last hamlet, and thereafter, first with gentle stealth and then callous indifference, the path began to climb.
    Round a shaded curve we found ourselves faced by a steepling rise of wet slabs, stacked up like a natural staircase, and as Shinto faltered out came what I now thought of as the choral prod. Chivvied stridently along by Level 42 — what was even that name doing in my head, never mind four choruses? — he slipped and stumbled upwards through a tunnel of boughs still heavy with yesterday's rain. I wondered at the merry larks they must have had climbing this in that scalp-flaying downpour, and queuing breathlessly behind three Frenchmen at one of the world's more incongruously sited Coke machines I found out.
    'It's Tim and Shinto, right?'
    My jaunty, packless interrogator was coming the wrong way, heading down the mountain. He knew me, but despite an unforgettable pupil-juggling squint I didn't know him. The price of conspicuous celebrity: it happened at least twice a day. Alan was a Canadian pastor, I learnt in his introductory sentence, and he'd come up to O Cebreiro the day before. 'Just came back to find out what it was like down here,' he said, addressing himself simultaneously to Santiago and Roncesvalles. 'Didn't see much in the rain.' A tight little smile — at the storm's ferocious apogee he'd been forced to wedge himself in a sheltered tree stump, watching as the path became a shin-deep torrent. The Frenchmen departed in a chorus of carbonated clicks and hisses; I flicked in my euro and a can dropped with a muffled, dungeon thump.
    'Everyone asks why I'm doing this,' Alan suddenly proclaimed, even though to my certain knowledge I at least had not. His tone suggested a rather jarring upgrade from banter to sermon; in preference to the awkward lottery of eye contact I fussed minutely with the opening tab. 'And you know what, Tim?' I hazarded a quick glance at the bridge of his nose. 'I have no idea any more.'
    'Not a... a Catholic, then.'
    He took a deep, stagey breath of mountain air and angled his head back towards the unseen summit, like a television historian preparing to announce, 'And it was here, on a crisp June morning not unlike this...' There was certainly nothing in his demeanour to suggest that he was about to say what he did, which, in tones of breezy liberation, was this: 'I don't believe in heaven or hell, Tim, or that Jesus died for our sins. Boy, did Christianity fuck up 2,000 years back.'
    Perhaps I coaxed out a laugh, but if I did it was as small and timid as an orphaned vole. What demonic work was this that sledgehammered the cornerstones of a curate's faith, that placed such vile heresies on holy lips, and that did all this on the sacred Way of St James? Before I could crystallise a coherent inquest into this evangelical meltdown, he clapped his hands on his haunches in rousing reassurance and made to continue downwards. 'Hey,' he said, checking himself and holding aloft a self-interrogative finger. 'I'm walking backwards, right?' A wet-lipped, leering smile made the bottom half of his face as alarming as the top. 'Maybe that means I can do a little more sin, huh?' He essayed a curious little half-jig and those Picasso eyes danced with asymmetric mischief. 'Maybe I could... push over that Coke machine!'
    'Maybe you could,' I agreed in measured tones, taking a small step into the muddy space that separated pastor from appliance, 'but please don't actually do that.' For a vivid moment that strange face was alive with unhinged brinkmanship; then with a superfluous roll of the eyes and a get-outta-here hand-swish, he walked off in search of his lost faith.
    We passed a couple of pallozas, circular, shaggily thatched Asterix homes of Celtic design, and