Travels with my Donkey

continued up the margin of a glorious overview of blue-misted, fat-treed valleyhood. Then the farm-fresh Alpine air carried across a thin suggestion of bagpipes and in a moment there we were by O Cebreiro's church, looking across at 'a tiny village of nine houses and another step back in time' or 'a camera-necked mass of coach-bound Austrian rent-a-pilgrims', depending whether you trusted the Confraternity guide or your own eyes.
    It was a surprise more than a pity to find this fabled, almost mystical hamlet host to at least half a dozen inns and lodges of over-elaborately authentic construction. An eccentric priest had once serenaded his cattle with Bach blasting out of a huge PA speaker secreted in the church tower, but now the piped music of O Cebreiro is of the fluting, droning variety, and its audience the tourists wooed by taverners and the vendors of ethnic ceramics. Like the pallozas, Galicia's music — they call bagpipes gaita — is another link with the Celts who settled here in the fifth and sixth centuries after being harried from Britain by the Piets and Saxons. As indeed was Donald, waving happily through the window of what didn't look like his first bar of the day.
    I left Shinto to his publicity commitments in the churchyard and wandered in through the porch, happy at least that a village that had prospered from the old pilgrimage was doing so once again. And happy, like my medieval forebears, to have made it to this auspicious beginning-of-the-end, to an eminence imbued with such symbolism that it has attracted legends like Brits to brandy.
    None more so than those witnessed in this church, for the chalice that lay somewhere at its dim, grey-washed fundament has been touted as the Holy Grail from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. During a communion at some inevitably unknown date in the fourteenth century, the fêted receptacle cemented its claim with some hard-core transubstantiation: as the priest made with the wine and wafers they morphed into real blood and hunks of raw flesh. Even the statue of the Virgin leant over for a better look: 'What you done to my boy?' she should by rights have shrieked hysterically, but because this was medieval Spain she didn't. (Later, King Ferdinand and his Queen Isabella demanded to have the relics removed to a more impressive location, but — splendidly — the mule hired to handle the transport refused to budge, and they stayed put.)
    I was shuffling along up the aisle towards these enchanted icons behind a hushed and dutiful tourist procession when a considerable commotion broke out to our rear. Shouts, laughs, and a stroboscopic frenzy of camera flash; I pushed through a few shell-suited bodies and outflanked a few more, and then, peering over the heads of the most diligent paparazzi, found my eyes blankly met by Shinto's. He had walked straight in through the tall, green church doors and now stood by the rearmost pew in mild perplexity, blinking as another delighted compact-zoomer snapped an album highlight. Inveigling myself to his side, I caught the rope and led Shinto outside through a corridor of Germanic enchantment, as proud and embarrassed as a father helping his infant tap-dancing prodigy down from a restaurant table. It was a moment of mane-ruffling incorrigibility, as oddly stirring in its way as that excretory trespass atop the Cruz de Ferro.
    A delighted codger trotted forth from his grocery with an armful of old bread and a bulging carrier bag of grain; as Shinto ate from his hand and posed fetchingly for the redoubtable Austrians, the Dutch girl wandered ethereally up the roughly paved street behind a restless, zigzagging Sativa. In passing she whispered the conclusion that the portentous climb to O Cebreiro had offered her: 'The camino is about temptation and sadness.' I nodded as sagely as I felt able, then, watching the grocer ease another baton into Shinto's crumb-haired food-hole, felt myself succumb to O Cebreiro's mood of contemplative stocktaking.
    Probing the dynamics of our relationship, I arrived at an arresting conclusion: Shinto's ingrained sloth was nothing more than the by-product of genius. Laziness is a luxury few animals have known and fewer still learnt to enjoy. That dog for one certainly hadn't — all that wasted energy, all that blind obedience. In the wild, of course, sloth usually meant death; for a domesticated animal the trade-off was a little more complicated. A beast of burden had to do his job or face being