Travels with my Donkey

headed back out into the tepid, dark streets. Evelyn was doing what a lot of walkers did in the cities, and had booked herself into a rejuvenatingly well-appointed hotel on the other side of the river. Like a true pilgrim she stole from the filthy rich to give to the filthy: it took her two weeks to disperse the cosmetic booty looted from that en-suite toiletry cavern. For the rest of us it was a stroll back to the refugio, past the old riverside mansions, a stroll that became a jog when one of the Canadians looked at her watch.
    The hospitalero took no prisoners, other than the ninety-six of us. At 10.00 on the nose he clicked off the light and slammed the door shut: in the morning we'd find almost a dozen haggard, bleary stop-outs who'd turned up a little late and been obliged to bed down on the picnic tables. I found myself recalling the fourteenth-century Burgos assistant abbot who, infuriated by perpetual overcrowding in his monastery's pilgrim wing, poisoned the soup and so granted one hundred guests a short cut to paradise.
    Mutiny was inevitable, and almost instantly a pilgrim clicked the light back on to a round of defiant cheers. But an outside force would destroy this hard-won solidarity, and the rebellion had long since been superseded by darkness and slumber when it attacked.
    In the bottom bunk nearest to the window, I bore the brunt. An extraordinary noise blared in through the earplugs and seemed to come out of my eye sockets, blasted open by a decibel grenade. Groans and lethargic confusion, ninety-six unhappy mumbles. Then another huge if somehow quavering retort, hard by my head. Every window was open in a wooden bunk-house still torpidly haunted by the day's accumulated heat, and if I looked out of mine I would see an enthusiastic but helplessly drunken novice huffing into a didgeridoo. Before I could do that something butted through the net curtain. 'It's you he wants!' I very nearly shrieked, preparing to fling myself door-side of the little Spaniard top-to-toe in the conjoining bunk. I didn't, though, because the something was Shinto. Or at least the tips of his flared and trumpeting nostrils.
    A minute later, the most hated man in Burgos stood outside the fire-escape door in his pants. 'What are you why is it how time?' I said, slurring out the gaps between words as I blundered sockless through predictable donkey awfulness. In the urban moonlight I could see those nose holes dilate and quiver, as sure an indicator of loud and imminent drama as a wobbling infant lip. But when this came it came in fearful harmony, the desperate, toneless orchestra of dreadnoughts lost in fog. I saw a mobile shadow at the other end of the corral. It was another donkey; a bigger, darker donkey, a donkey that even in this light I could see bore a chilling resemblance to our fiendish pursuer. 'Shite,' I probably said. At least he was tied up, though
    I wasn't at all happy about the let-me-at-him strain being applied to the rope.
    'Out in the woods, Shints,' I said, fumbling at the knot, or rather the macramé football it had been ever since his Belorado break-out. But then I stood up. The woods; the gitanos. I'd dismissed the warnings, but how to explain the sudden appearance of old El Ned here? There was a thick-skinned, long-eared Romany if ever I saw one, a graduate from the school of hard donks. There was only one thing to do: leave absolutely everything exactly as it was, then get up at 4.30 a.m. and hit the road before my under-slept pilgrim peers could mete out any properly coordinated punishment. It wasn't a bad plan, and I managed half of it.
     
    'Is your donkay?'
    There was a man at my bed, but he didn't sound as though he was about to smother me. I opened my eyes: once more, almost everyone had left. The man had kind but terribly furnaced features, the face of an amiable wino. 'I have also a donkay outside. If you come to the garden we can be talking.'
    Twenty minutes later we were, across one of the pub-garden trestle tables out the front. Another ass-hauling pilgrim! This was an auspicious encounter: Donkey Livingstone, I presume?
    Jean was from Belgium, and in the early stages of an extraordinary undertaking: from his home near Brussels he would lead Pilou to Santiago, then to Rome, and finally to Jerusalem. The pilgrim hat-trick — I was dumbfounded, and utterly humbled; in that moment I confess to coveting my neighbour's ass. 'Yes,' he coughed, rolling up what even at 7.30 was evidently not his