Travels with my Donkey

vocal assistance I somehow persuaded Shinto to clatter across a bridge that seemed the very encapsulation of his phobia: a long and steeply pitched arch of wooden slats. I assumed he was off his head on a fearless baguette high, but a couple of days later I read in the Liber Sancti Jacobi that this very crossing was notorious for brigands pulling the old poisoned-river horse-flaying scam: 'We watered our mounts in the stream, and had no sooner done so than two of them died; these the Navarrese bandits skinned on the spot.'
    We fairly trotted into Estella, laboriously reining Shinto in to stop for a jolly chat with the little and large Dutch couple, rebuttoning each other's epaulettes outside a church containing St Andrew's shoulder blade. The town is known for its ecclesiastical structures, and all adhered to the regional stereotype: Romanesque and closed. 'I went to a wedding in Holland once,' Julie said after we'd left the Netherlanders to their mutual grooming. 'At the reception they played this video showing off the new matrimonial home, and in the bathroom there's the bride and groom, having it off on the toilet.'
    Julie was staying on, waiting for at least one church to open, but Shinto was on a roll, a bread roll, and the two of us headed off through the uphill outskirts alone. Though not for long, as a couple of clicks further on the camino passed a monastery, and attached to this monastery was a bodega, and outside the bodega was a little stainless-steel tap, and when you turned that tap red wine came out of it. Free red wine, La Fuente del Vino; the pilgrim's wine fountain. 'Wow!' said the normally restrained Confraternity guide.
    On the one hand it was only 11.30 a.m., but on the other, the wine was free. It was already very hot, but the wine was free. Ahead lay a steady 7-kilometre climb (free wine), with another 13 beyond that to the next refugio (wine: free). Oh, well. I only had two cupfuls. There. An hour later I washed down my boccadillo with the half-litre I'd hosed into a water bottle.
    Setting forth into the after-lunch world was a weirdly dislocating experience, a little like coming out of the cinema into bright sunshine. To take wine on a hot morning is to get messed up on drugs; I had changed my brain at the wrong time of day.
    Yesterday's mud was already cracking the path into ochred hexagons like the receding foreshore of Lake Chad, and in the wine haze beyond it farmers tended distant vines or bounced towards the horizon on big tractors. A sun-burnished hermitage on a hilltop, the hidebound skeleton of a dog, a peculiar Moorish well. But no pilgrims, and soon no nobody.
    It was between the hours of 3 and 7 p.m. that I first properly contemplated the full scale of what I had undertaken: trying to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who didn't really want to. Shinto rarely went well after lunch, and when the vista ahead opened into a windless, gently sloped enormity of russet earth, he lowered his gaze and his pace until I was barely shuffling along. Geographically accurate as it was to describe Los Arcos, my destination, as the next town up the road, angling my glassy gaze at the fearsome void ahead this statement seemed a graduate of the same school of geographical accuracy as Krakatoa — East of Brentford. The heat was cowing, and I was low on water. In all my drinking years I don't think I've ever progressed quite so seamlessly from fuddled vitality to skull-slurried crapulence.
    Shinto bore the brunt, of course. He was now stopping for long minutes, and with the little hand nudging 5.00 and Los Arcos still nowhere in sight, I'm afraid I lost my rag. What was this animal's problem? He'd drunk his fill at that Moorish fountain and gorged lavishly on thigh-high greenery at lunch. Come on! Move! Eeeeeuuuwwww! I clapped, I swore, I yanked the rope. I drummed and then clobbered the drinking bowl, the dull, mustardy one that Hanno had selected in preference to the hell-red example I'd taken off the hypermarket shelf. 'A bowl not in a strong colour, or he see it behind and he panic. Panic is the enemy.'
    Wrong. Panic was my enemy, but his master. I wanted him to panic. If the only way to get this animal moving at all was to nurture a low level of constant fear, then the only way to get him moving fast was to ramp that up to blind, mortal terror. Forget a strong colour — I wanted a bowl decorated with flames, skulls, images of slavering wolves with fetlocks