Travels with my Donkey

followed. The refugio entrance was round the back of the monastery, but we passed it and went up into a crest-topping garden with the turbulent river on one side and a matching bypass on the other. 'Here burro,' he said sharply, pointing first at a thistle-circled tree stump, then at me. 'You: Hostal Obelix.' He turned on his ill-chosen heels and minced squelchily away.
    Traffic slooshed by,- Shinto slowly lowered his head and shut down into idle mode. Your move, poncho boy. A baseball cap appeared above a bush, indicating that there was a footpath by the road, and the face that soon appeared beneath it suggested this was frequented by the sort of people you wouldn't want to leave alone with an unattended donkey. Not for the last time I thought of the Passion for Donkeys Timothy, blundering earless around a bloodied field. 'All for one, Shints,' I whispered, and started unpacking the tent.
    And it wasn't so bad in the end. Contorting myself into the sleeping bag, damp and sagging canvas inches from my nose, I considered my situation on both micro and macro levels. Yes, I was wet and unwashed, and footsore, and raw palmed, and enfeebled with fatigue, but I was now also stuffed and probably drunk. Furthermore, these latter conditions had been achieved — for almost nothing — in a tapas bar wallpapered with photos of, and I understand regularly patronised by, the great Miguel Indurain, five times Tour de France winner and therefore a personal hero. (The only pronunciation of Indurain I'd been previously familiar with was the one you'd regret if your first name was Singing, so I'm indebted to the splendidly moustachioed proprietor for supplying me with a surprising number of additional syllables, even though I can't quite remember what they were.)
    I contemplated the big picture as the white noise of wet traffic lulled me to sleep. Despite the bridge business, and the stairs and mobile grazing and whatever else, I shouldn't lose track of what Shinto had achieved. Only in a dream even more ridiculous than most of the ones he'd been starring in would I have predicted covering 60 kilometres in three days. So it had rained — so what? I had a hair shirt; now it was wet. What was a pilgrimage without adversity to triumph over? Bring on your hobgoblins! Show me the foul fiends! Though... though if that's one of them waving a torch about outside, at least let me get my pants on first.
     

Six

     
    H ell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre, clearly a man with little experience of solo camping. But if it was bleak and more than a little lonely for me in that tent, then what fresh terror must every bump in the night have brought upon my displaced medieval forebears, for whom demons were as real as wolves? Most, after all, had been driven here by lurid, vivid fear of a hell that was more than a quasi-philosophical adage clung to by friendless Goths, a hell defined in exact and harrowing terms.
    Hellfire, purgatory and Judgement Day were all medieval discoveries; the early Christians hadn't dwelt much on the cost of human naughtiness. But though goodwill to all mankind might have filled the churches, it was fear that kept them full. Theologians gave that fear a face. It was decided that the fires of hell were hotter than those above ground, but emitted no light; St Brigitta conversed with a female soul in torment who spoke of toads growing on her feet and snakes gnawing at her innards and breasts. Precision passed for proof: Lucifer had recruited 266,613,336 angels to the Dark Side for his rebellion, and the Vatican decreed (and still maintains) hell's capacity as 60 billion sinners (including standing).
    Of course, if you went to hell you stayed there. The pilgrims were trying to buy time off purgatory, a sort of spiritual anteroom, where searing flames apparently less uncomfortable than those of hell purified the soul. Initially, this grandly proportioned rôtisserie was to accommodate all salvageable souls in preparation for Judgement Day — a tough sell for the Church, which in the eleventh century began to promote the idea of a fast-track judgement for those demonstrating piety and devotion via pilgrimage or donation.
    These days, the Vatican's line on purgatory is more along the lines of a spiritual Betty Ford, detoxing souls for heaven. Watched over by the graven image of Miguel Indurain, I'd read that the concept of knocking a certain number of days off your time in purgatory for performing a specific good deed, as