Travels with my Donkey

cornfields... Ah. Here we are. 'On reaching the highest point of the plain, continue for a short distance, before beginning the sharp descent down the "Cuesta Matamulos" (the "Mulekiller Hill").' Not since that terrible business with the encyclopedia shelf have a pair of brackets been asked to bear such a burden. How many good animals had met their ends on this crumbling escarpment? Breathing loudly through my nose I let the cyclist through, and allowed Shinto a... a last meal. Then I eased him back to the path, patted his neck rather too hard and took the first auspicious downwards step.
    Well, butter my donkey's arse. You know what? We beat that cyclist. We caught him halfway down as he stopped to negotiate a gravel-filled scoop in the limestone, skipped neatly by and beat him down to the bottom and all the way to the door of the refugio in Hornillos del Camino.
    I liked any village whose name officially declared allegiance to the pilgrimage, and after that triumph I especially liked Hornillos. It was a tiny, rather neglected settlement, all rough stone and dusty wood beneath a rolling sea of cracked pantiles, but the bar was open, the refugio was new and most of my friends were in one or the other. 'Hail the conqueror of Mulekiller Hill!' called Evelyn through the fly screens, book-ended by the jolly faces of Anna and Janina, two Dutch ladies who'd cycled from Holland to St Jean, and been on foot since then. 'Yeah, well...' I sighed airily, tying Shinto up to the churchyard gate. It would have been about this time that I accepted the escarpment's nickname was of course derived from the debilitating efforts required to ascend it.
    The bar did us the full salad-to-flan-via-lomo deal, and when I was done the quietly welcoming proprietor arrived with a snifter, a small alcoholic balloon, bearing an imprudent volume of Veterano brandy. I'm not sure why I asked for this, but when the bill came I was sorry I had. I was sorry because this treblemeasured troublemaker cost but a single euro, and that meant it would be very difficult from now on to end a day without one. So difficult, in fact, as to prove impossible.
    We took our digestifs outside, and dispatched them on the church steps in a diminishing triangle of low sun. A distorted and amplified voice approached, and we turned to see an electioneer pulling up outside the bar: all this way for half a dozen votes. Two widows of great age sat on doorsteps knitting (it was startling how many of their populous ilk actually did this), oblivious to both the hectoring entreaties of the Castilian Nationalists and our presence.
    I'd often been struck by the benign indifference with which most of these places regarded pilgrims, even here where the twenty-eight of us might easily have outnumbered the villagers. In some ways the lack of interaction was a matter of timekeeping: we walked while they worked, and ate while they slept, and slept while they played. But in socio-economic terms ours was a strange symbiosis, and I suppose an ancient one. They fed us, and we brought some much-needed money into a deprived community.
    But time and again we were all struck by how rarely any locals seemed willing to offer any lucrative extras: an à-la-carte menu, a nice private room, a kid selling sun cream and lemonade on a table in the shade. There seemed to be an unwritten code of honour — it was a religious and civic duty to see a pilgrim through your town amply catered for, but no more. You gave him some hearty walking fuel but never thought about ripping him off — even if he was a middle-aged North European with the economic wherewithal to take a great long slab of holiday and spend it on some self-indulgent quest for his inner student. I suppose it's what you expect in a country where the Miss June on garage calendars is typically depicted in oils, swathed in a blue kirtle and cradling a haloed baby.
    I'd bagged a bottom bunk, beneath an ominously big-nosed Dutchman. Soon the latticed mattress springs were bowing towards me, each creak giving way to a steady, contented and in fact not disagreeable low wheeze. Outside, no doubt silhouetted against the moon, Shinto issued what was now his standard midnight reveille: five doughty, reverberating foghorn blasts fading into a weary, piteous snuffle, like some aged farmhand concluding a belaboured act of love. It was a fitting end, somehow, to what I realised eighteen hours later had been my birthday.
     

Ten

     
     
    The clouds were still