Travels with my Donkey

past the edge-of-town campsites, by an Englishman on a bike.
    'That's where I stayed last night,' said Rob by way of greeting as he wobbled alongside, nodding at a field of canvas and caravans. I'd been scraping the marker post behind me through the hard-shoulder gravel, a durable auditory donkey prod, but now raised it as a conversational courtesy. 'It's the same place that Charlemagne's army camped before a big showdown with the Moors.' It was as if he'd been talking to himself ever since we'd left him. 'That yours then?' Belatedly, but with minimal curiosity, he took stock of Shinto's existence.
    'It is,' I said. By not asking the usual questions, Rob oddly inspired me for once to consider the answers. Most pressingly, what to do with this great big animal if — or as was beginning to seem possible — when we made it to Santiago.
    'Right. Anyway, the night before the battle they stuck their lances in the ground, and in the morning they'd all sprouted branches. A miracle!' He raised both palms from the bars and briefly clasped them together in a display of mortal gratitude. 'Though not a very good one. By the end of the day 40,000 Christians lay dead. That forest is supposedly...' He'd been gradually moving ahead, as even the most lethargic pedestrian did when alongside Shinto, but carried on his soliloquy regardless. 'Mozarabic' was the last word I picked up; I called out his name in a querying tone but he didn't look back. As he moved away I noticed that amongst his modest panniered possessions there was no sign of a tent.
    The divide between town and country was marked by a huge motorway and a confusing but critical pilgrim junction. I was very keen to avoid the more authentic path to the right, which as well as being longer, incorporated a 22-kilometre stretch that my red book described thus: 'No shelter, no shade, no water, no food, nothing.' Two jolly Dutchwomen took the wrong fork, and when I saw them days later they were jolly no longer; someone said they hadn't spoken to each other since. So too did a grey-haired little German woman who always wore gloves. She didn't come out the other side. The word was she'd done her knee in. I hope that's all it was.
    It was hardly a carnival parade the way I went. A chiding side wind whipped across the meseta, carrying low cloud and the drone of toiling goods traffic from the distantly parallel autopista-, the few villages were moribund and largely derelict, adobe walls eroded by the elements into termite mounds. (Mains water arrived here in the mid-seventies, and phone lines ten years later.) Everything suddenly seemed rather sinister. Why was a man digging a trench in that copse, and why did he look at me like that when our eyes met? I don't know what that armless, toga-wrapped shop dummy propped up in the next field did for the crows, but it scared the piss out of me. And just outside the second village there was half a freshly savaged fox in the path. What could do that to a fox? I got one answer when I read a bit of Dominic Laffi, hunched over my boccadillo in the lee of a squat water tower: 'Past Sahagún we came across a dead pilgrim. Two wolves had begun to eat his body, so we chased them off.'
    The long, lonely gaps between settlements had been sporadically endowed with young trees and concrete-benched picnic areas, but the former were shrivelled saplings old before their time, and the moss-stained latter were being steadily reclaimed by nature — inevitably so considering their stubbornly ill-thought locations, clustered just after a town where most pilgrims would have had breakfast, and just before the one they'd be having supper at. This was El Burgo Ranero, and improvidently harried down its main drag by two unhelmeted nine-year-olds on trials bikes, I got there just in time to bag the second-last place on the downstairs floor.
    The refugio was an adobe structure of recent construction, and after the modest physical rigours of a short stage its inhabitants were in skittish mood. The wash house was thick with whistling launderers; someone had opened a bottle of wine and at 5.30 it was being passed round. On the inside of the loo door was a cautionary line drawing of two male stick-pilgrims in the act of urination, one standing up and partially obscured by a large red cross, the other happily seated and crowned with a green tick. At some point in the late afternoon this image was effectively adulterated to depict the sedentary fellow energetically soiling