Travels with my Donkey

than the shortfall in intelligence and dexterity that enables us to rule the world, is their capacity to forgive and forget. (Realistically, it's probably just forget.) Less than half a minute later he was browsing blithely through the weeds, with only that discharge to remind me and the harrowed Dutchwomen of his recent passage through a blinded, nightmare realm of choking awfulness.
    I checked in and hauled my stuff up another three flights of unlit stairs, then returned to ask the rather surly girl at the desk, or rather bar, if she could suggest a suitable overnight grazing area. 'Tengo un burro,' I heard myself say once more, 'I have a donkey.' Her expression clouded, and after repetition did not clear. Following my third attempt she nodded, though with a lack of conviction that was justified when her hand stretched under the counter and emerged with a box of huge cigars. This was Galicia, I reminded myself, where they had their own language, and so it was mime time again, a small treat for the three aged locals hunched over small glasses of luminous alcohol at a table behind. 'Ah, un burro!' she said, before immediately morphing her happy enlightenment into a giant, sulky so-what.
    Her face was promptly replaced by her back, and as she sauntered away down the bar I felt my pilgrim soul sullied by a grim lust for immediate revenge. But discretion proved the better part of valour, and it was only once she'd slopped us out a four-course pilgrim menu in a record thirty-five minutes — gruesome in most ways though at least devoid of tit-for-tat scabs and phlegm — that I crept outside and tied Shinto up at the distant end of her back yard. Just by the vegetable patch.
     
    I'd been looking forward to the next day since the first big climb out of Villafranca. From Alto de Poio to Triacastela the camino dropped 700 metres in 12 kilometres: during that debilitating scramble at the end of the previous afternoon I had pictured Shinto trotting gleefully downhill at mane-fluttering velocity, building up an easy momentum that by rational calculation would set us up for the easiest 24-click day to date.
    Conditions looked good, too, with our long, hard shadows spanning the quiet 8 a.m. tarmac and just a bracing hint of Alpine dew in the delicately herbal air. I walked briefly alongside a tiny Englishwoman on her second pilgrimage: 'As a C of E heathen I wasn't having their blasted compostela,' she announced scathingly, the first time in an age that I'd heard organised religion mentioned with any sense of pertinence.
    It was as she walked off ahead down the open road, apologising at her need to press on, that I first accepted we weren't quite hitting our targets. My legs ached to bound down that invitingly sinuous descent with elastic, whistle-accompanied strides, but instead we were steadily slipping to a stiff-limbed, cortège shuffle. All that painfully acquired altitude was proving just as painful to offload. And the choral prod didn't work, not even when wielded with iron-throated abandon, not even when sharpened with the lyrical adulteration of Madonna's 'Like A Brayer', or 'Burn Donkey Burn' ('Shinto Inferno'), or 'Just Get A Sodding Move On' ('You Shiftless Wazzock') (trad). Shinto didn't even bother counterfeiting hunger or the usual crap-sniffing displacements: this was pure, stubborn inertia, and all those ruminations in praise of his finely calculated indolence were slowly returning to taunt me.
    By the time the path left the road at Biduedo, I was hauling him along with glowering, manic resolve, the rope over my shoulder for extra leverage. Pilgrims squeezed past in pairs and trios, their bright and voluble expressions withering into baffled concern as they took in my toiling, hunchbacked stance. Sweat embittered with the essence of pure frustration sequinned my brow and coursed into the eyeholes below, smearing out a gorse-thicketed hillscape: I'd hoped to be in Triacastela for lunch, and at 12.00 we weren't yet halfway.
    When the descent tilted recklessly into a dappled corridor of ash and holly I went round the back and pushed, a hot hand on each recalcitrant, grizzled buttock. The path recrossed the N6, and as I laboured him over the dotted white line Shinto dug in for a last stand. A rare vehicle was gunning down towards us in low gear, maybe three bends up; that nearest corner was blind, and as I'd been severally reminded nothing dispatched more pilgrims to premature paradise than road traffic. I leant