Travels with my Donkey

was headed 'READ CAREFULLY'. I did so.
    'This shelter don't receive no subvention... show your respect for the other people... obey the shelterkeepers indications...' And then, right at the bottom, a horrifying caveat. 'The Pilgrim Identity Card can be taken away from you by using it wrong.'
    In a second I saw it: my camino hung in the balance. The truth was too hard to explain, and even then a little compromising. There was nothing else to be done. I went up to that box and folded another 5 euros into it. 'You better remember this, Jimbo,' I hissed after her breezy departure.
    Because this was Spain, there was a small bar attached to the monastery, and while everyone else was spooning down Father Alonso's holy starter I nipped in there for the usual wine-partnered fry-up. I was just finishing when they all piled in, eighty people fighting over two dozen chairs. The solitary waiter was a young man with the build and voice of a sultan's eunuch, and when I went to pay I found this poor, put-upon fellow hunched sweatily down behind the bar counter, pretending to look for something.
    In failing light I wandered over to the church door. It was closed, but there was a barred window in it through which I squinted in vain search for San Juan's alabaster tomb. His earthly representative had just bled me dry, but after the events of the day I still felt I owed him one.
    A follower of our friend St Sunday of the Causeway, Juan had pledged to devote himself to pilgrim welfare after surviving a shipwreck on the return from his own holy excursion to Jerusalem. It's him we have to thank for hacking out a path over the Montes de Oca, and of course for the hospice which was to blossom into this monastery. I thought how rejoicingly relieved I'd been to come down from that moor and find this place, and how that feeling would have been intensified in the days of robbers and rather more wolves.
    Hunkered up as I was in my sleeping bag with a torch, head under a table, full moon outside the window, it wasn't that surprising to read of the perfumed clouds of white bees emerging from San Juan's tomb, of the Irish couple who'd knelt before it with an offering of apples and looked up to find their dead daughter munching on one, of a congregation gathered round the alabaster hearing a cripple's nerves and bones stretch and straighten and heal. Nor was I unduly taken aback when I clicked the torch off, straddled my bagged feet awkwardly round a defunct wood-burning stove, and heard the nocturnal orchestra tune up with the watery wobble of a fat man's larynx.
     
    Every morning now I'd wonder if Shinto would simply refuse to move, and it almost happened the next day. The Ben Hur donkey-derby encounter had evidently exacted its toll, and as the Dutch children filed lankily past — yes, somehow I'd beaten them out of the breakfast blocks — he began to drag his hoofs. And his perennially cautious approach to constricted passages was gone: blundering complacently through a narrow gate beside a cattle-grid he ripped a great hole in one of the panniers. It was almost a relief when the great massif ahead was abruptly darkened by pewtered clouds as we entered the village of Atapuerca, encouraging me to sit out the encroaching storm at a café with Shinto tied to a drainpipe under the eaves.
    It was busy in there, and as the thunder came down the hill it got busier. Conspicuous among the existing clientele was one of the Dutch girls, her face horribly bloodied, slumped bonelessly before a cooling cup of hot chocolate and her own shattered spectacles. A teacher pushed through the circle of concerned classmates with a roll of Elastoplast; engaging one of his colleagues I heard how the weight of a backpack could transform the slightest stumble into a headlong poleaxing. 'This also happened to an Italian girl yesterday,' he said. 'It is a serious danger. But for you...' I followed his gaze out of the window and over to Shinto's sheltered, panniered loins. 'For you this will not be a problem.'
    The wind that had been gently teasing the election banner strung across the street was now savagely assaulting it. Pilgrims started to run in, blowing rain drips off their noses, and the lone young barmaid struggled to keep the cappuccinos coming as her infant son patrolled the premises on all fours. I took a heavily milked café con leche to the corner, assessed the sky through a window, then got the books out.
    Atapuerca seemed in no way remarkable, and in terms