Travels with my Donkey

stretch barefoot, bellowing hymns as the cathedral fuzzed out of focus through a veil of overwhelmed tears. Pilgrims fell to their knees on the hilltop; an eighteenth-century Italian reported those around him kissing the earth a thousand times.
     
    Today Santiago is a city of 95,000, and the literature warned that urban sprawl and an ill-sited copse had combined to obscure the bell towers and so denude Monte de Gozo of its visually dramatic symbolism. By now a link in a strung-out chain of toiling walkers, we topped the hill and found ourselves on the lip of a huge and hazy hollow, filled with rush-hour traffic and vertically conspicuous commercial structures. 'Well, there it is,' said Simon, and I sucked in a long, steadying draught of hot air. Then a taxi rounded us with a derisive toot, lurched to a halt by a gate down the road and deposited a fat hot man and his rucksack.
    The last time I'd seen those buttocks, they'd sat untrousered upon a tissue-less latrine, and if this had the effect of portent-management, then so did the complex that opened up beyond that gate. Bungalow bunkers as long as streets, dozens and dozens striped up a hefty swathe of hillside, the empty concrete boulevards between them pierced by the vegetation of neglect. At the conclusion of every forlorn vista, lichen-streaked statuary corroded into the undergrowth.
    We clopped between two of these pilgrim prison blocks, both clearly empty, and presently found ourselves in a desolate plaza bordered by facing parades of self-service canteens and largely moribund retail units. Unsychronised wisps of Celtic pipery echoed from Tannoy stalks. Here was the dominant legacy of Galicia's efforts to commemorate and facilitate the 1993 Holy Year, when the Pope visited Santiago, yet it had all the soulful ambience of a holiday camp for low-ranking party officials in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. 'This is awful,' I said, hands on hips in front of a whitewash-windowed ex-launderette.
    My two companions were wanly scanning the urban horizon in underwhelmed concurrence when the biped froze. 'There,' said Simon, simply, quietly, half-raising a finger to a gap in the trees atop a block-studded middle-distance hillock. I narrowed my eyes, scanned the relevant area of smogged horizon, and saw it. Them. Rising gingerly through the sunlit urban fuzz, the tapering baroque rockets of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
    Well, I can't tell you how that helped. One of the few active enterprises around us was a souvenir shop, and suddenly its glib offerings seemed not an insult to our achievement but a celebration. For days now the images of Santiago Peregrino, St James as a pilgrim to his own tomb, had been gathering in profusion: a statue in a church, a sticker on a bumper, and now in this window a keyring, a corkscrew, an ashtray. Scrutinising them I felt a pulse of fraternal affection for this mild apostle of gourd and staff, a perfect study in mournful, pious sincerity: 'It's just so tragic,' he always seemed to sigh. 'If only I could even begin to find the words to explain what a great, great guy I am.'
    And those blue tiles glazed with yellow arrows or stylised scallop shells: we'd been following those for forty days, and I wanted people to know that we had. I'd have one each of those for my garden wall, though not yet. Not just yet. The converging lines on the scallop shell were said to represent the converging pilgrim routes to Santiago, and we weren't quite at that auspicious confluence. I didn't get one for the same reason that I hadn't yet worn my scallop shell, the one Nicky had given me before I'd left. You acquired your shell in Santiago as an indication to medieval contemporaries that you'd been and gone and done it, a medal of achievement, not intent.
    Reanimated we went down to check in at hut twenty-one, my fêted jackass entered beneath us in the register by a happy young hospitalero as Shinto Moore, travelling on foot, aged eleven ('Is minima here for peregrino ten years old,' he explained with a tickled wink.) Shinto was led as instructed into an adjacent strip of meadow by the laundry lines, and watching him settle down to his Last Supper we went off for ours. There was only the one option, and this involved celebrating the imminent remission of my sins by pushing a tray along a stainless-steel counter, watching as a succession of blank-faced women filled it with small plates of shrink-wrapped food. It was abysmal, so abysmal as to be