Travels with my Donkey

over. She'd come to praise St Jim, and he'd buried her. How can that have felt?
    I got stuck in a pilgrim jam behind a dust truck in the first village of the day, and through the dripping curtain of my poncho hood saw the weather forecast showing on a ceiling-mounted telly in an adjacent bar. I stopped to watch: some typically smug tit with a tie the width of his neck was jabbing a thumb at the lightning symbols with a cheesy that's-life shrug. Whatever you're planning tomorrow, his look said, best replan it. Easy for you to say, Señor Cockhole. Your spoilt golf is our Somme hell. But you know what? He was badly, badly wrong. At the risk of alienating any big-weather fans, I might as well tell you now that it barely rained again.
    The next settlement was Cirauqui, a perennially strong performer at international vowel festivals and the Basque for 'nest of vipers'. At its lofty conclusion the panorama opened out into a verdant arena of mist-browed eminences: here were the first olive trees I'd encountered, and the first vineyards. And also, arrowing down before me, the first original section of Roman road, a 2,000-year-old stretch of epically conceived crazy paving, neatly capped at the valley bottom by the first of the camino's dozen Roman bridges.
    The Way of St James follows the Via Traiana almost all the way to Santiago, a logistical convenience without which the pilgrimage would never have prospered. Two of Rome's greatest emperors — Hadrian and Trajan, after whom the road was named — were born in Spain, and the colonial infrastructure was assembled with an eye on posterity unusually well focused even by Roman standards. Prissily bordered with cypress saplings, this strip of road might have been subject to a rather cack-handed recent makeover, but there was nothing repro about the bridge, bloody but unbowed after two millennia and more of unhelpful weather, and 1,000 years of relentless pilgrim pounding. Even by the most conservative estimates, 10 million medieval Europeans walked over it. And 60,000 a year still do.
    The valley did what valleys usually do, and I was soon engaged in another slithery haul up the other side. That first mud mountain had really thinned the pack out, but it was still busier than I was accustomed to. I could see why people grouped together: walking went better with talking, and where conditions and gradient permitted I'd enjoyed enlightening conversations that ran the gamut of contemporary pilgrim motivations. A couple of Viennese medievalists, a quietly charming Chicagoan whose wife had recently passed away, a shiny-eyed young Spaniard in thrall to the goddess Nike. Last year he'd made Santiago in twenty-six days, and this year it would be fewer (this, necessarily, was the briefest discussion).
    But at the same time I learnt that despite the comforts of convoy travel — and with the perpetual risk of violent robbery and wolf attack, the medieval pilgrim never walked alone unless he had to — it quickly became a little overbearing. Particularly when your many fellow travellers are largely culled from a socio-cultural stock with unusually robust views on animal welfare; for it was unavoidably the case that the pilgrim/ass combo, embued with such happy, rustic charm on the flat and in the sun, seemed today the bitter distillate of spite, cruelty and despicable human indolence. 'Oh, le pauvre!' was a regularly encountered backhand reproach. A rearward transatlantic cry asked why I couldn't carry my own stuff. But mostly there were just looks: brow-pleating empathy for him,-hard, sour, pinch-faced contempt for me.
    At the valley's churned summit a pair of small ladies turned to fix us with imploring intensity. As we drew level, the elder — the much elder — emphasised the point by unattaching her large pack and holding it out to me in straining arms, like a Balkan beggar with a drugged baby. Yeah, yeah, I nodded wearily as I walked on by, you've carried that great big thing up here and I haven't, so you'll go to heaven and I'll spend eternity helping Satan dribble donkey piss on the shrivelled gums of the damned.
    I was having lunch under the porch of an empty farmhouse when they passed. The old one was grasping her colleague's arm and limping; her rolled-up trouser leg revealed a thick swaddling of elasticated support plaster. And behind them toiled a bearded young man, his own pack on his back and one of theirs in each hand. Shortly after I set off, the camino crossed a stream