Travels with my Donkey

occurs through a spiritual awakening while making the camino, which is divided into experiential parts,' read one academic overview of New Age pilgrim motives. Stage one, from Roncesvalles to Burgos, was described as representing universal spirituality, and the final stretch, from the Cruz de Ferro, as spiritual resurrection. As a non-Catholic European (age twenty-five to forty-five), I apparently fell smack into the category the author declared most vulnerable to such beliefs. Ha ha ha! But today I wasn't laughing. Today was the start of stage two. Carrión to Astorga, symbolic death.
    Carrión was stubbornly unbustling as I walked through and out over its long bridge, no kids en route to school, no postmen, no one willing to suggest this wasn't Sunday except the usual scattering of labourers listlessly half-building something on the outskirts. Shinto seemed more placid, but I was taking no chances: the cebada sack was untied as we passed a stagnant construction site, and with Shinto watching in gormless, impotent protest — his Stan Laurel look — I heaved it into a skip.
    In the newspaper forecast Iberia was plastered with yellow circles, and as well as being cloudless the early morning was ominously still: I stripped down to my T-shirt at 8.30, two hours earlier than the norm. A couple of big roundabouts, the farewell petrol station, and then, right before us, the landscape laid down and died. We'd set out across a lot of giant green tablecloths in the last few days, but this was the first that had been ironed: ahead the track rulered its way through a treeless, 2-D world of heat and supine agriculture. 'IMPORTANT,' said the Confraternity, and for once I'd paid heed. 'Before leaving Carrión buy some food and plenty of water. Between Carrión and Sahagún (43 kilometres) is an arid plain.'
    An hour, two hours. We were getting nowhere. By 11.30 Shinto was already beginning to paw at the orange dust and rub his bottom lip through it, a symptom of fatigued delirium that didn't usually kick in till around 4.00. At 12.00 we passed a broken fountain; at 12.15 a tree. I lunched early, rigging up an abysmal parasol with my poncho and two tent poles. Hunched at the pathside in this tiny rhombus of shade I repelled the relentless earth- and airborne assaults on my bulletproof boccadillo, the most notable led by a droning, clumsy blue-black bugger the size of a prune. Out in the bean field Shinto was being horribly bullied by horse-flies, and armed with that reflective strip of marker post — still an invaluable humane goad when the sun was in the right position — I raisined four against his loins. Oddly, he seemed to understand why I kept hitting him. Or perhaps he was just too sun-fucked to bite me more than once.
    It was worse after lunch, a donk-day afternoon. 'There are no minutes or hours,' I rasped, remembering what someone had written somewhere about something. 'There is no time. There is only space.' The geometry was merciless, and rather than look along the road to nowhere I dropped my gaze to the dusted gravel. This was beyond any earthly concept of solitude: I felt like the Voyager space probe. We both dragged our feet and occasionally stumbled; I allowed my head to flop and loll in ragged sympathy. At one point, and I'm hoping my motor insurers don't hear about this, I jerked my neck up and realised I was ten feet off the path: I had actually fallen asleep whilst walking.
    Soon after this scare I looked behind and saw an approaching figure on the rear horizon; over the coming hour it evolved into a human, then a pilgrim, then a male. 'Heard about you,' he mumbled through his black beard, a full-on Beirut hostage job, when at last he drew level. 'Sam and Tonto, right?'
    Joe was the youngest pilgrim I'd yet encountered, though his eyes betrayed the remoteness of someone who'd seen slightly too much of the world. 'Started out from home in New Mexico,' he said, scanning what may have been a familiar landscape. I'd had enough of the horizon, so I rubbed sun block into my ear tips as Joe took stock of the full desperation of our surroundings. 'Must be Roman, this stretch.' I nodded. Somewhere out in the fields were the finest remains along the camino, the mosaic floors of great villas doing battle with the sun and the odd errant tractor.
    Joe wiped his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt, then, after an obstructed sniff, loudly voided his nostrils into a bare hand. He appraised the discharge dispassionately,