A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS ENDS

William Dalrymple attains

the goal of his journey on foot — Compostela

Santiago THE monks were in their fields, planting cabbages with the air of old Edwardian gentlemen playing croquet.

There were 15 of them: plump, elderly men in matching blue overalls and wide- brimmed straw hats, and as they raked the earth and carefully placed the cabbages in neat lines, the abbot shouted encourage- ment from his seat on the side of the field; you knew he was the abbot because he was wearing a heavy pectoral cross and bright green wellington boots. When the cab- bages were in place the abbot squatted down on his hams to make sure the line was straight, as if sizing up the angles before sending his ball flying firmly through a hoop.

Fr Domingo, the guest master, detached himself from the clerical chain-gang and came to meet me at the side of the field, `Peregrino?' he asked.

`Si.'

`Follow me,' he said, and together we headed towards the monastery gates, I with my staff, he with his rake.

After three weeks on the road, the pilgrimage had achieved a certain rhythm. Every morning I would leave the shelter of the walls of a monastery and pass out into the hazards of the world: not the bandits, wolves and plagues faced by the mediaeval pilgrim perhaps, but the no less tiring uncertainties of rain, wind, blisters and strained ankles. By evening I would be back in the charge of another guest master, 20 miles on along the road, conducted by another hooded figure through a flagstone cloister garth to the bare shelter of another pilgrims' dormitory. The following morn- ing there would be mass, breakfast, and the open gate in the monastery wall.

Each monastery had a different quality to recommend it. One might distil an unusual liqueur, some rich brew flavoured with wild herbs and derived from a mediaeval recipe carefully guarded in the monastic library. Another might make strong goat's cheese, or pottery, or have cloisters carved with tangling Romanesque vine scrolls. At Estella the porch was emblazoned with a magnificent line of martyrs gripping their instruments of tor- ture; with their severe expressions and hanging-judge eyes, they looked as intoler- ant and autocratic and Spanish as a line of Guardia Civil. At Roncesvalles, it was the guest-house that I loved: the creaking wooden stairs leading up to the pilgrims' rooms, and the blazing fire which we built there, large enough to roast an ox.

Samos, with its troops of cabbage- farming monks, was perhaps the most ostentatious of all the monasteries I stayed in: as grand as a palace and as huge as barracks. It was a baroque extravagance, all volutes and broken pediments lined with Corinthian pilasters and reached by a great double staircase. Inside, the cloisters enclosed an area the size of a field, planted with palm trees and dominated by a stone fountain supported by a family of thrashing, reptilian behemoths. There were goldfish in the pond and, nearby, a plaque to the blessed memory of Gener- alissimo Franco. In the church a monolithic statue of Alfonso of Castile towered over the body of a decapitated Moor; the head, only recently severed, gushed scarlet gore over the pedestal.

The atmosphere was anything but prayerful, yet Vespers, the most beautiful of all monastic liturgies, managed to trans- form even this monstrous edifice into something profound and moving. A bell was ringing; incense wafted down from the coro. The tread of monastic footsteps echoed from dome to semi-dome and around the apse. The monks, in habits now, passed up the disle, black breviaries in their hands. There was a spin of cassock, and a creak of misericords: De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine,

Domine exaudi vocem meam .

The music, a Gregorian chant, was contemporary with the founding of the abbey and dated from the early sixth century; the same music had been sung on the same site while Picts still painted their bodies and Irish kings still ruled from Tara, while St Cuthbert was immured in his hermitage on Fame and Bede was writing on a rickety desk in Jarrow:

Exaudi nos, Domine, Miserere mei, Deus, miserere mei . . .

The lights were turned out, the thuribles extinguished, and the Great Silence began.

I WAS in Galicia now, back amongst Celts, back amongst the rainclouds, back in a country where the rocks blossomed with strange grey lichens.

The change from the vineyards and olive groves of Castile had been very sudden. In the morning at Villafranca I had still been Ai the heat and foot-hard mud-bake of the 'plains. But at Herrerias I had turned left off the road, and immediately crossed some invisible barrier. Suddenly the dust turned to mud, and soft mosses began to creep up the dry stone walls, overloading the boughs of the trees, and hanging heavily off the branches. There were drip- ping hawthorns, and muddy detours through thickets of yellow broom. Hens pecked about in dense, damp grass.

The people changed too: the narrow Castilians gave way to thick-set farmers in knitted cardigans and flat caps; in the bars they ate in silence, cutting up their chops on wooden plates with knives that looked as if they had just escaped from some abbattoir. They drank wine from tumblers, and the air was heavy with wood smoke, cigarettes and the charcoal stink of grilling meat.

The women also seemed to thicken out: as I passed through muddy farmyards I would be watched by silent, broad- bosomed matrons in aprons. They would be carrying meal out for the hens, shepherding their chicken in for supper, or sternly calling their dogs to back away from the pilgrim. Sometimes they would tie their hair up with a kerchief. I would meet them carrying fodder for the cows, their faces lost under great mountains of hay. Their farmyards were full of familiar smells: it could have been North Yorkshire, or South Wales.

On many long-distance walks the plea- sure is one of discovery: the thought that you might be the first to see a certain view, to discover a certain ruin. On the Pilgrims' Road, the pleasure was exactly the reverse: it was always good to think of the footsore hordes that had passed the same way over the centuries, traders and artists, minstrels and scholars, jugglers and lepers, priests and pardoners. What did John of Gaunt think of that view? Did Francis of Assisi like this farmyard? Was he chased out of it by the ancestor of the same enormous wolf-dog?

At the height of the Middle Ages there would have been many British pilgrims among the travellers. The early patronage of Queen Matilda forged a close link between the English court and the San- tiago curios, and as a reward for her interest the Queen was honoured with a gift of one of St James's hands. This she presented to Reading Abbey where it joined a host of other relics which included bits of Aaron's rod, one of St Luke's teeth and, most revered of all, the foreskin of Our Lord.

Reading promoted the pilgrimage like a mediaeval Spanish Tourist Board, and Santiago soon became for Englishmen then what Malaga is for them today. They were men like Andrew Boorde who proclaimed that the pilgrimage was the 'greatest jour- ney that any Englishman mae goe', but who died in Fleet Street prison accused of living with three women simultaneously. Those who could would travel in style. They would bring their own musicians with them and travel the road serenaded by viols, tabors and harps, interspersing visits to shrines with visits to tournaments, trying out Galician shellfish or sampling the fine wines of the Rioja.

The English lower classes, then as now, travelled in groups, drank too much, and made a lot of noise. One shocked observer wrote:

They will ordain beforehand to have with them both men and women [including those sorts of women] who sing wanton songs; and some other pilgrims will have with them bagpipes; so that every town they come through, what with the noise of their singing and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their bells, and with the barking of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the King came their way, with all his clarions and many other minstrels.

That evening, as a strong gale was blowing up the mountainside, I reached Cabreiro, the Spanish Glastonbury, long believed to have been the site of the Grail Castle, and a near neighbour of Chateau Merveil, the fortress of Klingsor the Nec- romancer. As heavy rain lashed down, I sought the shelter of its church, the very embodiment of Chapel Perilous, small and dark, with granite walls and a slate roof. For an hour I stood shivering in the porch, waiting for the rain to stop, watching the water dripping off the eaves into a puddle beneath the corner quoins.

Later, reading in bed while the rain pattered on the window, I discovered that the chapel had been the site of a famous miracle. One day during the Consecration, a doubting priest had been confounded when the altar wine had actually turned into real blood. I wondered whether the stories of the Grail had thus emerged from confusion of the words San Greal (the Holy Grail) and the Sang Real (the True Blood) — or whether it was the area's Celtic past that had led to it becoming linked with the Grail myths. Long before it ever became adopted by Christianity as the chalice used at the Last Supper — a development that only took place in the 12th century — the Grail had had a long history in Celtic myth as the Horn of Plenty, the emblem of Ceridwell the sow goddess, and sought after, long before Arthur, by Gwynn ap Nudd, King of the Faeries and Lord of Glastonbury.

The Grail has always been a mesmeric subject, breeding wild speculation and unanswered questions, and that night I went to sleep dreaming of Bors and Perceval sailing in Solomon's magic bark for the land of Sarras — or so, at any rate, I seem to have written in my logbook the following morning.

IN MEDIAEVAL times, the pilgrim to Rome came down from the heights of Tuscany to be rewarded with a view of the city's magnificent walls looping over the seven hills. The approach to Jerusalem was an equally suitable climax to so long a journey: the last wonderful stretch of road from Emmaus threading up through the pine trees and oleanders.

In comparison, the first view of Santiago was always unremarkable; even the Ro- mans seemed to have been unimpressed, for the river you cross is named Lavacolla, derived from the Latin 'arse-wipe'. Yet to arrive at any destination which you have longed for has its rewards. I was in a fairly bad way. I was unshaven and none of my clothes had been washed for a week. I stank. More seriously, a blister on the ball of my right foot had gone bad and I had a pronounced Quasimodo limp. Just to ar- rive, cease walking, seemed enough. The outskirts of Santiago seemed strangely deserted. It was only when I neared the towering cliff-face of the Cathedral that the crowds thickened, and then they did so dramatically. Suddenly police cars were everywhere, and so were policemen, keeping the crowds back with metal crowd-gates and machine guns. I asked a passerby what was happening. The King, Juan Carlos, was about to arrive in Santiago. Where was he staying? In the Hostal Los Reyes Catolicos: the same hotel for which I had a reservation.

I was within seconds of perfectly mis- timing my entry to the hotel. Having fought my way through the police cordon waving my reservation slip, I limped up to the door of the Parador seconds before the King arrived. Smooth functionaries in gold brocade had time to secrete the embarras- sing spectre in a corner and hide his stinking rucksack. There was a fanfare of trumpets and the King entered the hotel, originally built by his predecessor Ferdi- nand for the shelter of pilgrims: on this occasion, understandably enough, they were rather less welcome.

It was mid-afternoon before I had ex- hausted the novelties of my hotel room: baths, linen sheets, a laundry service, even a bidet in which, in the absence of any more suitable use, I soaked my aching feet. Washed, shaved and scented, with a fresh change of clothes, I headed out into the square to finish my journey.

The hotel was still surrounded by limousines and their attendant hoardes of chauffeurs, policemen, and photographers from Hola! But the area in front of the great Cathedral was now empty but for a small group of pilgrims like myself.

Inside, the Cathedral was pitch-dark. Rolling Romanesque arches thundered to- wards the shrine — a huge baroque con- struction which filled the space normally occupied by the coro. It was an extraordin- ary object, a forest of wooden pinnacles and stalactites, dominating the nave like some hugely enlarged Swiss cuckoo clock, the image of the saint filling the little cavity normally reserved for the bird. Yet in the night-blackness of the nave, the shrine took on a strange quality of gilded magnifi- cence. We pilgrims queued up beside a staircase, waiting to be admitted into the space behind the statue, as excited as a group of children waiting for a ride on a fairground big dipper.

Everyone clutched their staffs, burly young men hobbling forwards like old women. One by one we climbed the stairs up into the darkness, and there threw our arms around the statue, hugging it close. What should have been a hugely embarras- sing exercise, was, in the circumstances and the company, oddly moving. The statue was cold, hard and solid, yet it felt quite natural to squeeze it as enthusiasti- cally as if it was your girlfriend, and it responded to the cuddle with a satisfactory rattling noise.

Then the stairs led down again, down, down; deep down into the crypt, to a dim, bare, round-arched, flagstoned space fur- nished with a single kneeler. Here I knelt before a grille and looked forward. A few feet away through a narrow passage a small chamber was lit with dazzling brilliance. There, encased in solid silver, sat the reliquary which contained the bones of St James.

Logically, I knew it was a fairly slim chance – though far from impossible that the bones were those of the fisherman that Jesus first called beside the Sea of Galilee, James the son of Zebedee and Salome. But irrespective of their identity, I felt that the bones had been imbued with sanctity and importance through the pain of the tens of millions of pilgrims through- out the ages who had travelled thousands of miles to pray at the kneeler at which I now knelt.

So, despite having long dropped the habit, I did pray there, and the prayers came with a suprising ease. I prayed for the people who had helped me on the journey, the priest who had blessed my stick, and the inn-keeper who had refused payment, the monks who had given me food and the cobbler who had mended my torn shoes. And then I did what I suppose I had come to do: I prayed for Olivia and for the success of my marriage, now barely a week away.

Then I got up, climbed the steps, and walked back, under the great incense- darkened vaults of the nave, under the triple portal and the old rose window.

Outside, it had begun to rain.