Travels with my Donkey

previous decade there he'd returned to his mother's house in Zubiri. He was really big on Tony Blair, and he was also really big, so rather than distance myself from the whole Iraq business — as I would be required to on an almost daily basis in the weeks ahead — I'd found it easier to nod a lot, particularly once he'd insisted on toasting the special relationship with a complimentary jug of rosé. 'Lotta terrorists round here. The Basque guys — ETA, you know?'
    I knew. The preponderance of Zs in the town names was one indication, and the graffiti on the bus shelters was another. On my wet way out to Shinto's field I remembered that ETA regularly blew up foreign tourists. And on my wet way back, with a sorrily fur-flattened ass at my side, I remembered that terrorists, in the West Bank at least, had been known to employ donkeys in suicide-bomb attacks.
    As Charlemagne and Roland found out — their mistake was to sack Pamplona — it never pays to rile a Basque. Aimery Picaud, you may recall, was careful to exclude them from that treatise on regional bestiality, and imbued his account of their murderous criminality with a degree of awed respect. For the Basques were a race apart, a people so definitively hard that they were feared as mercenaries throughout the ancient world. When the medieval Church began to promote marine flesh as an ardour-cooling anti-aphrodisiac, fearless, reckless Basques trawled oceans as far afield as Iceland and Newfoundland, and were known as the only Mediterranean people blessed with the psycho-physical wherewithal to catch whales. Halfway through his globe-girdling voyage in 1522, Magellan interacted with island natives in the manner later made famous by Captain Cook; it was a Basque sailor, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who finally docked back in Spain. They were the first Europeans to import tobacco, and so also to dangle its smouldering, paper-rolled product from the lower lip in a menacing fashion.
    If you had cannibals to intimidate or a walrus to punch, you asked a Basque,- otherwise, you left them well alone. They liked it that way. How else to explain a language that famously predates the Indo-European family from which most normal tongues are descended, a language whose fossilised complexity foiled even Satan's attempts to master it? Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conqueror of Peru, reported that his Basque sailors were able to communicate with the Incas; an official form of written Basque was only agreed in 1960, and the first Basque dictionary was compiled by an Icelandic farmer. Anyway, I feel oddly keen to stress just what a splendid language it is, and the unique excellence of those who speak it.
    It was a mixed morning, but not that mixed. Good: the two black-scarfed ladies who tottered happily out of a bakery to pat and pet and in fact be multiply photographed standing alongside Shinto. Bad: watching their faces as he then hosed the pavement with hot piss. Noting that this was worryingly cloudy. Forgetting to get my credencial stamped at the motel. Investing long minutes persuading a fearsome Sybil Fawlty behind the desk of one of the hotels who'd turned me away the night before to do it instead. Checking Shinto's feet and seeing his patch of seedy toe spongily degenerated into something unknown but certainly worse. Discovering, at the ragged height of a clattering downpour, that my £32 poncho was really just two groundsheets formerly held together with poppers.
    Zubiri was completely de-pilgrimmed by the time I left at 9.00, and beyond it the camino's sticky undulations were decorated with the streaked imprints of boots struggling for purchase. Shinto engaged four-leg drive and tackled the hills stalwartly, though I can't say he enjoyed the thorny branches weighed down by rain to donkey eye level. Tendrils of mountain mist underpinned a sky of hard, cold lead: if we were wet now, we'd soon get wetter.
    The path skirted a titanic and beguilingly hideous factory, identified in my rain-crinkled literature as a magnesite plant (and also, somehow pertinently, as the former site of a leper hospital). From within its smut-streaked corrugations issued the disjointed shouts and clunks of man and machine doing whatever it is you do to produce this mystery compound, before enormous trucks drove it away to do whatever it is you do with it when you have.
    Just beyond it was a very long staircase cut downwards into the hill, no doubt a welcome relief for the many pilgrims who had been