Travels with my Donkey

of the pilgrimage it wasn't. San Juan had built a small bridge just before it; there was a church worth five words. But in the bill just beyond, the massif currently being pelted with thunderbolts and which at some point I'd have to cross, there was a cave. And in that cave, during the summer of 1994, archaeologists found some human bones. They were old, and there were lots of them. So many, in fact, that in five years the team had amassed what amounts to over 90 per cent of all the pre-Neanderthal remains unearthed in this continent. The youngest was 127,000 years old. But the oldest — by some considerable distance the remains of Europe's most senior citizen — was a million.
    A million. With a confounded grin I slowly shook my head, like a tourist loud-shirt told that in fact all of those candlesticks were older than Texas. There was so much history round here — big, hairy-chested, million-year history. Almost every town had Roman origins: you'd lean against the outside wall of a bar sipping a Coke, and notice that the block near your shoulder was marble, and then that it was chiselled with the second half of a Latin inscription. A lot of places were Iron Age or older. And now this. It was the sort of discovery that suggested there was something about the camino that went back beyond Christianity, back beyond even the Celts who walked on to Finisterre.
    The rain cleared reluctantly, and so did the café. Everyone else was aiming for Burgos, 20 clicks distant, but after the previous day's alarums that was way beyond our capabilities: following a long, damp trudge over the massif we opted to stop short, overnighting at an unlovely ring-road motel.
     
    With Shints lashed to an old fridge in a grassless yard round the back an early start was obligatory, and with a laundered blue sky above and the tyre factories behind, our final approach to Burgos proved an agreeable one. Ahead lay the camino's second major city, and by general accord its loveliest. 'Staggering', said the guides, and 'extraordinary', and 'wearers of shorts may be refused admission'.
    Burgos was the last outpost of cosmopolitan urbanity before the camino headed off across the meseta alta, 200 lonely kilometres of prairie unabundantly studded with modest settlements. The meseta farmers brought grain and wool to Burgos, whose merchants were travelling as far as London by the end of the thirteenth century. Burgos was rich, and the holy tourists made it richer: with thirty-two hospices in the fifteenth century, no city accommodated more pilgrims. The first mahogany brought back from the New World was used for the doors of the largest hospice, the Hospital del Rey. Nearly all of the silver Columbus returned with was fashioned into a huge cart that once a year would accommodate the consecrated host in a parade through the streets. It still does. On the Thursday that follows the eighth Sunday after Easter.
    The showrooms and superstores gave way to real shops, and as they did the streets began to bustle: it was a crisp Saturday morning, and Burgos was in skittish, uptown mood. And of course I had a donkey, which heralded the now traditional scenes — fathers hoisting offspring aloft for a beaming overview, ladies of great age blocking the pavement to pat and pet and often to deliver moist-eyed recollections of their rural youth. The defining moment came when a young John Travolta swaggered across the main drag, sneering choice arrogances into his mobile: he saw Shinto, stopped right in the bus lane and some blustering anecdote trailed off into a tiny, dumbfounded 'Burro?' Shinto took it all with an air of practised celebrity — he didn't want to show it, but he loved this stuff. He loved it so much that he tried to walk into two supermarkets.
    Boulevard into avenue into street into alley: the camino was routed, as ever, through the old town's most cramped and antiquated thoroughfares, but here in Burgos these were home not to stained tramps and vermin but the purveyors of unforgivably priced evening wear. The windows were all full of fancy hats and Bang & Olufsen — after more than two weeks of shabby privation I was rather overawed. I stopped by a souvenir shop for a reassuring fix of puerile tat and instead saw it stocked with fully featured suits of reproduction armour.
    This was the first time since Roncesvalles that I'd encountered tourists who weren't pilgrims, and Shinto's photographic appeal swelled accordingly, particularly when the yellow