Travels with my Donkey

being whiplashed back as the body beneath plummeted off down the other side of the Pyrenees. In minutes the incongruous corrugated-iron tin roofs of Roncesvalles were bouncing up and down in my unsteady field of vision, wobblingly soundtracked by a peal from the bells that had for nearly 1,000 years guided fog-bound pilgrims down to sanctuary. The road was suddenly dense with parked cars and amblers — I hadn't bargained on weekending tourists — and somehow, via the equine equivalent of a handbrake stop turn, I brought Shinto to heel with a desperate, shark-fisherman's yank back on the rope. 'Burro!' piped a child's voice.
    We'd dropped Petronella on the descent and when she arrived Shinto and I were fighting our way through the compact zooms of the day-trip paparazzi. Some gasped, some gawped; many more just pointed, their faces split with mirth. In the land of Don Quixote and souvenir raffia quadrupeds I had not anticipated such incredulity. 'It's like he is a celebrity,' said Petronella. Yes, I thought: a fat, nude celebrity.
    But Roncesvalles is above such things, and when the tourists started to filter away — it was already gone 6.00 — I found myself beguiled by its age-worn, ecclesiastical majesty. No denying the magnificence of the setting: all that towering churchness counterpointed by those spring-greened lawns called to mind the illustration of Salisbury Cathedral in one of my Ladybird books, a childhood image so rousingly iconic that I had once (but only once) aspired to the priesthood. From the twelfth century this was the camino proper's grandly proportioned front door, offering a physically and spiritually nourishing send-off to pioneering pilgrims, and soon to the millions who followed in their wake. These, remember, were people who'd typically never left the village they'd been born in; walking towards Spain they'd often have stood, grubby jaws sagging, before religious structures of a scale and grandeur almost beyond imagination, structures that radiated divine importance, and now they were staying in one. After a month or more of grimly soiled flop-houses, this was a five-star for free: along with bed and board, they threw in a foot wash and a beard trim. There were doctors and cobblers at Roncesvalles, and rare and succulent fruits served by damsels of fabled virtue and beauty.
    None of these facilities came cheap, but as is often the case with internationally sponsored political propaganda, money was no object. Wealthy benefactors queued up to subsidise and donate: as well as underpinning a bulwark against the Moors, this was all sin-deductible. And to foster the cult of Roland — improbably statured martyr to the anti-Moor cause, and so a kind of warm-up act for St Jim — the chapels were full of inspirational relics: his mace and battle horn, along with bits of over thirty saints and the almost obligatory thorn from Jesus's crucifixion crown.
    No biblical rationale underpinned the grisly veneration of bleached bones, a practice so distressingly pagan that even the Romans were repulsed, yet it's difficult to understate the role of religious relics in abetting the rise of Christianity. Saints leapfrogged purgatory, and up in heaven they had the ear of God; merely by standing near even their tiniest mortal remainder therefore placed one in direct touch with the divine. This starkly profound leap of faith helped establish many more cities than Santiago: you wouldn't have found Cologne's regional development committee in mourning the day after St Ursula was massacred there along with her 11,000 virgins.
    At the second council of Nicaea in 787, the nascent Christian authorities decreed that a church could not be consecrated without its own relic in the crypt. The rapid spread of their religion thereafter encouraged the unsightly dismemberment of existing relics, and the imaginative discovery of new ones. Soon there were two heads of John the Baptist — one as a youth, coughed the authorities, and the other straight off Salome's plate — and the parts to five complete Mary Magdalenes. St James had a body double in Jerusalem, and an octopus-load of limbs bestrewn around Europe.
    The gold standard, of course, was anything associated with Jesus himself: fragments of the True Cross were almost ten a groat, and a lot more than 30 pieces of silver turned up in episcopal hands. Regrettably, the existence of anything more valuably corporeal was thwarted by the awkward fact of the Saviour's bodily