Travels with my Donkey

that this scheme was not so much cunning, as shit. It was miles away, and it was stoutly colossal. Upon its drizzled brow stood a battery of turbine windmills, which even at this range I could see being storm whipped into a rotational frenzy. (If, as Petronella informed us later, those sixty spinners up there were more than enough for Pamplona's 200,000 residents, then what on earth is wrong with us in Britain, umbrella-shredding gust capital of Europe?) Furthermore, consulting the explanatory index to my Confraternity guide as I tackled a second chorizo bap, I learnt that the number in brackets after each refugio denoted the number of beds it contained, and that in the case of Uterga this number was two.
    These were diverting revelations, so much so that it was well into the second hour of my requisite break before I gathered that something funny was going on in the villa behind me. A suited man in a BMW had parked in front of the villa, scuttled furtively up to the intercom and been buzzed in. He'd scuttled out again a short time later, just as a fat chap with a face like a melted candle arrived in a pick-up truck to repeat the sequence, only this time with measured nonchalance. I peered over the wall and noted that every one of the many large windows was screened with heavy black drapes.
    Shinto jerked his head up from the big dandelions and tuned his ears: had that been a giggle? It had indeed, and a moment later the few remaining doubts as to the business being carried on behind those curtains were merrily banished by the appearance through the door of no fewer than four young women, one with a Morticia Addams streak and the rest blindingly bottle blonde. Tittering like playground miscreants they tottered towards us through the grass; I rose uncertainly, not at this stage confident in the finer points of pilgrim, prostitute etiquette. They weren't interested in me, of course, but as I watched them fawn sweetly over Shinto an image of the very vilest impropriety marched unbidden into my mind and would not leave.
    'OK, thanks, thank you now,' I blustered, galvanised into action. Get him away this minute, or see that ghastly tableau brought to life in some dank and tramp-lickingly odious Internet dungeon. I pressed through the cocktail dresses and released Shinto from his tree with a twist of the fingers and a manly yank. 'Must press on.'
    They looked at me with incomprehension and a spurned sadness, and for a moment I saw four girls drawn away from this short escape to a gentler time, denied a small opportunity to restore their trampled innocence. Then one of them held something out to Shinto. It was a carrot: a buffed and shiny carrot.
    Everyone I met afterwards told their own saga of the ascent of what we called Windmill Hill, but is down in the literature and on the maps as Alto del Perdón. Canadian Evelyn, a senior air stewardess with a heart of oak in a bonsai body, had been repeatedly gusted off her feet, pressed face down in the heavy mud for long minutes as she mustered the resources to raise her giant rucksack into that bullying, deafening gale. A little Japanese man softly described how his pack had been torn open, its contents scattered over the hill like the aftermath of a plane crash. Someone said they'd seen that bloke on crutches hopping and sliding up ahead of them. God alone knows how he did it. Perhaps literally so.
    The wind, at least, was behind us. But the mud was inevitably beneath, and of an adhesive viscosity I have never previously encountered. You put your left foot in, and your left foot out, but you didn't shake it all about as it was now double the size and treble the weight. Up ahead of me I could see two French couples I'd exchanged 'buen camino's with outside the brothel (or in fact 'bon camino's — as ever, the French alone stoutly refused to cede any linguistic quarter); every few yards they were stopping to hack clay off their soles with sticks, with stones and eventually with their own weary hands. It was an image consistent with the many I'd constructed some weeks earlier while confronting the chapter in Pilgrim Stories entitled 'Pain and Fatigue'.
    Watching the French backmarker slide to her derrière with a wind-muted yelp, I thought, Let's hope this whole pilgrimage business is a bit of a slow burner, because so far it isn't perhaps quite what I would have chosen. Slatted bridges notwithstanding I was in this for the long haul, but that haul had never seemed longer.
    The