Travels with my Donkey

wisping past the moon as I buckled the saddle, frogmarched from slumber by swishes and shuffles and the slam of the big front door. When at length the sun nosed above the horizon it was the first time we'd cast long shadows up the camino, into the wheaten wilderness ahead, instead of back down it.
    There was sun and wind and photosynthesis, and the haunted song of unseen, cowering birds, but there was nothing else. No sane soul would have located a refugio out here, so it wasn't an especial turn-up to find the inverted eggcup of Arroyo de San Bol under the management of a scarily blankfaced young German. He was standing solemnly at the doorway when I arrived, lured by the promise of elevenses and a bathe in a spring that my Confraternity book credited with healing powers.
    'You English expect magic water,' he said slowly, addressing himself to the little red book in my hand. 'But it is not magic. It is only water.' His gaze moved sluggishly towards Shinto. 'Last year one monkey like this ate here a young tree.'
    'He won't do that, honestly. It says here you have coffee?'
    'Yes. But it is not magic. It is only coffee.'
    The refugio was a marvellously idiosyncratic structure, and scrutinising it I was able at least for a moment to view its caretaker's auspicious behaviour in the same light. The domed interior had been painted as a star-clustered night sky, and each of the half-dozen beds beneath was immaculately topped with a crest-adorned blanket.
    'So — how many pilgrims did you have to stay yesterday?' I enquired brightly as my host stooped silently over a camping-gas stove. No electricity here; and, as the Confraternity guide had stressed, 'NB: there are NO sanitation facilities.'
    'One.' He sounded as if he'd much rather it had been none. My coffee was ghosted on to the low table before me. What a time of it the two of them must have had together, out here in a million acres of inky nothing, either side of this table with a packet of Marie biscuits and a candle.
    'I am here all the summer,' he said, pacing behind me as I desperately urged my coffee to cool. 'Every summer.'
    For two minutes he paced as I puffed and stirred and sipped. Then he sat down on the floor beside me, cross-legged beneath the dome's apex. 'My name is Udo,' he whispered, and struck a match. He was still watching it burn at the end of an outstretched hand when I upended searing caffeine painfully down my throat, tossed a couple of euros on the table and marched briskly out into the sun.
    I was reasonably eager to put some camino between me and Udo, and for once Shinto seemed to pick up on the urgency. On we scuttled, through a silent town wedged in a hole in the plain, along a hillside Monet-spattered with poppies, to a lunch spot beneath a Gothic arch of heart-stopping scale and splendour.
    I read as we ate. Around and above us were the ruins of the monastery of San Anton, whose roofless remains somehow expressed the full scale of the medieval pilgrimage infrastructure more vividly than the restored showhouse that was Roncesvalles. Here we were, out in the definitive middle of nowhere, yet by the fourteenth century this hospice monastery had its own mill and orchard and dovecotes, and was merely one of the 369 such establishments the San Anton order controlled along Europe's pilgrim routes. A lot of hard cash had gone into the construction of this place, but also more than a few pints of the milk of human kindness.
    The order's mission was to tend the many sufferers of St Anthony's Fire, a disturbing ailment epidemic throughout medieval Europe. What we'd doubtless now call SAF was no less disfiguring than leprosy, but the physical symptoms were typically preceded by paranoid hallucinations; a double whammy that explains why many victims were expelled from their home villages. On the road, as honorary lepers, they were forced to warn others of their approach by ringing a bell or banging two boards together: theirs was a pilgrimage less about reaching heaven in the next life than getting out of hell in this one.
    It was a happy surprise to learn that the monks were able to cure many sufferers, and without even knowing why. It's now widely accepted that the symptoms of SAF (see how easily that slipped out?) are consistent with ergot poisoning caused by the long-term consumption of mouldy barley. In the twelfth century, eight out of ten consumed calories came in the form of bread, most of it at best stale. Because the monks had more money their