Portrait Of Arrés

In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes/I bargained for salvation and they gave me a lethal dose BOB DYLAN Shelter From The Storm

Not far beyond the cairns, and beyond Puente la Reina de Jaca, and further west along the Aragón valley ...

... I came to the little hilltop village of Arrés ...

... with its ruined castle, restored church, barrel-tiled roofs and distinctive Aragonese chimneys ...

I got no salvation in the church, for it was locked as usual; so I gambled that the bar was open, but it was not ...





Instead the view made up for everything ...

Cairns

This is the stone/drenched with rain/that points the way. Haiku by TANEDA SANTOKA

Wikipedia defines a cairn as "an artificial pile of stones, often in a conical form". Cairns can have a variety of uses and purposes.

They may mark a significant site, such as the summit of a mountain; or commemorate an event, such as a battle; or they may memorialize the dead (some UK Bronze Age cairns were found to contain small, square stone-built ossuaries or cists).

They may indicate a path - especially across stony, barren or featureless terrain.

They are created by Buddhists for use in religious rites; by Native Americans for cultural and sacred reasons, and for astronomical purposes; and by sculptors like Andy Goldsworthy as environmental art.

They may be formed quite simply and practically by farmers who want to clear their fields of stones (I've seen them in Wasdale in the English Lake District).

Cairns are just one of many different types of petroform. A petroform is a man-made arrangement of rocks or stones in the open air - it may be a stone circle, a dolmen or a menhir for example. The subject of petroforms and petroglyphs (carvings on rock) is a fascinating one - and one I hope to explore some time in a later post.

Between Santa Cilia and Puente la Reina (there are 2 Puente la Reinas on the Camino - this 1st one, Puente la Reina de Jaca, lies 5 km west of Santa Cilia) I passed hundreds of cairns along a path above the river Aragón (see photos) - constructed and added to over the years by pilgrims and other walkers and travellers. I felt compelled to add a few stones myself.

To what purpose? To give some concrete evidence of one's passing? To freeze in time a transient moment of one's particular Camino journey - and of one's life journey in general? To celebrate the beauty of the natural world and acknowlege its sacred nature? To express oneself by creating a primal piece of art as the early cave painters did in Lascaux and Altamira all those 10s of centuries ago? To remember and honour a significant person or event in one's life - similar to lighting a candle in a church? To build a primitive temple to the divine - a kind of spiritual vortex made of stone? I leave you to ponder...

A Hard Road

There is almost an expectation that a pilgrimage needs to contain a challenging physical ingredient in order for it to be a pilgrimage at all. It is as if the physicality of the experience is part of the defining experience of a pilgrimage. Without the hardship, a journey, even if undertaken for spiritual motives, comes much closer to a holiday or outing. So, in a strange way, the pilgrim rejoices in the dangers, difficulties and hardships. The toil of the journey enables the pilgrim to identify with the sufferings of Christ.

There seems also to be a strange relationship between the spiritual and the physical. To challenge the physical dimension, by denying the usual tendency to indulge the needs and desires of the body, can allow the spiritual space in which to grow. Clearly there is not an inevitable connection between hardship and spiritual growth but the growth of the spirit can come in such a way. Christians sometimes refer to this connection as the mortification of the flesh.

The same kind of idea lies behind the concept of penance. At one level it would seem ridiculous for the creator of the universe to require a truly repentent person to undergo physical hardship. Yet the spiritual does not always operate at the purely cerebral level. The experience of physical hardship and even pain can be therapeutic from a psychological and spiritual perspective. Many of those who go on pilgrimage embrace the hardships as a legitimate part of the experience and not merely as an inconvenience. Thus for some, the physical encounter is at least in part a matter of penance. For many it is a stimulus towards spiritual growth.

From Sacred Places, Pilgrim Paths: An Anthology Of Pilgrimage by MARTIN ROBINSON.

I mixed with loose women in Reno/ In Vegas I hit the casino/I lied and I cheated/But now my sins are deleted/I've absolved them all on the Camino!

The photo shows my Créanciale, or Credancial, or pilgrim passport.

Santa Cilia

At the entrance to the village Saint James was there to greet me ...



Here's the church of San Salvador. It was locked as usual ...





The baker's (panaderia) was shut too ...



Many of the houses had pretty balconies ...

And yes, you've guessed it, I saw more steles marking the final resting place of several pilgrims ...

My own resting place for the night was the village albergue - which was the best albergue on the whole of the Via Aragonés. There was a warm welcome from the hospitalera. There was a washing machine. There was a tumble dryer. There was even a TV. I checked out the kitchen cupboards and found asparagus soup and rice - and this formed the basis of my meal for the evening.

Hardly Leonard Cohen

It is extremely funny
How smiling is infectious
Yet you cannot be infected by a smile;
And it's really most bizarre
That you said you were listening
When you weren't really listening all the while;

And it's very, very odd
The Cox's Orange is an apple
And Bombay Duck a weird kind of fish;
And it's strange that girls from Herts
Are almost never tarts
While Essex girls are always Dawn or Trish;

And it's funny how we taste
A corked wine in a restaurant
And say "That's fine!" even though it's crap;
And it's strange how we embark
Upon marriage in the dark
When for other trips we take a torch and map;

Etc!

Every now and then I'm afflicted with a touch of Light Versitis - as long-standing readers of this blog will know. (If you really want more, try this and this.) I've been playing around with the above form (I know - embarrassing, isn't it!) but quickly ran out of ideas. I wonder if anyone wants to swallow their intellectual pride and take up from where I left off ..?

Take This Waltz

Many songs seem a little bald, a little lacking in something, if you read them just as lyrics on the page. The words tend to cry out for the familiar voice and musical accompaniment. I think there are some notable exceptions - the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Noel Coward for instance. And I would also add the lyrics of Leonard Cohen. As I reread my way through Cohen's Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, I'm struck by how amorphous the dividing line is between his songs and his poems. You can find this song on his very fine album I'm Your Man:

Take This Waltz
(After Lorca)

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There's a tree where the doves go to die.
There's a piece that was torn from the morning,
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost -
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.
In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love's never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
in a cry filled with footsteps and sand -
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz,
with its very own breath
of brandy and death,
dragging its tail in the sea.

There's a concert hall in Vienna
where your mouth had a thousand reviews.
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking,
they've been sentenced to death by the blues.
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz, it's been dying for years.

There's an attic where children are playing,
Where I've got to lie down with you soon,
in a dream of Hungarian lanterns,
in the mist of some sweet afternoon.
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow,
all your sheep and your lilies of snow -
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist -
o my love, o my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it's yours now. It's all that there is.

These lyrics bear all the hallmarks of a typical Cohen song: the romanticism, the eroticism, the surrealism, the melancholia. But I've chosen the words to this particular song above all because I do believe they stand up in their own right on the page, without the voice and the music - athough, of course, at the same time this song in particular is begging for a waltz time musical treatment. Which is exactly what it gets on the record.

San Juan De La Peña

Early on the morning of Thursday 16 October I left Jaca slightly unwillingly and headed west towards Santa Cilia. (The night before the bars in Jaca - there must have been 30 or 40 of them - had taken part in a tapas promotion - all competing to create the most memorable tapas. You could vote for which one you liked the best. Each bar charged exactly the same price - which was €2.40 for a tapa and a glass of quality red wine. Not bad! I lost count of how many I'd had by the end of the evening ...)

After a few km I was faced with a choice of routes - either to carry straight on to Santa Cilia along an easy, level path, or to turn south into the mountains on a long and strenuous semi-circular detour which took in the monastery of San Juan de la Peña. Crazily I went for the difficult option. At first I didn't regret it as the views were terrific ...

But after a few hours I did begin to wonder if I'd done the right thing. The steep, rocky, woodland paths seemed to snake on upwards for ever. It was a hazy, sultry day, and I quickly became very tired. But there was no turning back now. Eventually, after descending into a shallow valley and losing most of the height I'd gained so far, I arrived at the small settlement of Atarés ...

After which it was yet more uphill for several hours. I was now climbing dry, stony gullies in a wilder, more open landscape. By the time I'd reached a small mountain road at the top of a remote pass I felt completely exhausted. Another long hour later and I was walking by the new, inhabited Baroque monastery of San Juan de la Peña. The old Mozarabic and Romanesque monastery had been abandoned centuries ago after several fires. I stumbled my way along a very quiet road which curved down into a deep-cut gorge and led to the old monastery, which was wedged, almost unbelievably, beneath a huge, overhanging rock ...

It was still a good distance from here back to the main route from which I'd deviated that morning. So, on hearing a car approaching behind me, I stuck out my thumb. The car stopped. And its very friendly Belgian occupants took me all the way down this dramatic valley, through the village of Santa Cruz de los Serós with its 2 fine Romanesque churches, and deposited me by the side of the N240 - which I followed for the remaining few km to Santa Cilia. It had been a tiring but wonderful day.

Jaca

Just before Jaca I passed the hermitage of San Cristóbal ...

Jaca was an important pilgrim halt on the medieval Camino and capital of Aragón in the 11th century - before capital status was transferred to Huesca and then to Zaragoza. This is the clock tower ...

And this the cathedral of San Pedro ...

It actually dates from as early as 814 but has been changed and added to over the centuries - so that it's now a complete mixture of styles rather than being purely Romanesque. Like most Spanish churches and cathedrals it was quite dark inside, though the spectacular ribbed ceiling was illuminated ...

Something kept drawing me back into this cathedral but I'm not sure what it was. However I really liked the fact that people (local people not just sightseers) were popping in for a quick prayer at all times during the day. It felt vitally used and frequented and was not just simply another tourist attraction or architectural anachronism. At 8 pm I sat in a back pew and listened to choir practice. Someone had put some sacred lyrics to that heart-tugging melody in Dvorák's New World Symphony (2nd movement) and the choir sang them over and over. It was moving to hear these echoing voices harmonizing in the semi-darkness ...

This is the pentagon-shaped citadel in Jaca. I was surprised to see deer roaming round the grassy moat (in the photo you can make out a stag in the foreground shadow) ...

I liked Jaca so much I spent 2 nights there; also I was in much need of some rest and recuperation. I stayed in the Hotel Pradas, which offered a very favourable rate to pilgrims ...

Crossing The Border

The next morning Steven rose at the crack of dawn and was eager to get moving. He left in the pouring rain at 8 o'clock - and I never saw him again! I, however, was relishing the unusually comfortable mattress in the gîte - and wanted to rest my feet a little longer too, as they'd been giving me hell the previous afternoon. It wasn't till 10 am that I hit the trail. But at least the rain had stopped by then - and it remained fine for the rest of the day.

There was a choice of ways to the Col du Somport and the border with Spain - one on woodland paths and one via the road. I took the easy option - along the road - and was very glad I did, for the views were much less restricted on this route. I was also pleased that the traffic was fairly light. After 16 km of ascent (except for the last 6 km most of it fairly gradual it must be said) I reached the col - at 1632 m the highest point of the whole journey.

Somport is a small ski resort, but it was too early for serious snow (in fact the weather was very mild indeed) and the place was utterly deserted. I crossed the frontier at 3 pm. I didn't stop but immediately made my way down a steep and stony path on the other side. I was in Spain! The scenery changed quite dramatically. It was wilder and more arid. There were more conifers and spiky, sun-loving plants.

I was following the valley of the Rio Aragón and would continue to shadow this river for nearly a week ...

That day I'd walked 27 km and had enjoyed every minute of it. I spent the night at Canfranc-Estación. I had no choice but to stay in some rip-off holiday accommodation as the pilgrim albergue was shut. The next day I headed down river once again - towards Jaca, 24 km distant. Castellio de Jaca was one of the prettiest villages I passed through ...





These cute chimney stacks which I photographed in Castiello are typical of the Aragón region ...

I remained close to the Aragón river at all times, and the river bed gradually widened as I walked further south ...

Borce

By late afternoon we'd reached Borce, a typical Pyrenean village of grey stone houses with grey slate roofs. On a dull, wet day these villages, hemmed in by the high mountains, can be rather depressing, claustrophobic places ...

We spent the night in the recently restored pilgrim refuge, the Hôpital Saint-Jacques, which also contained a tiny chapel and heritage museum. Inside was this glass sculpture ...

... and these faded 19th century frescos ...



Borce has a spectacular location on a hillside overlooking the Aspe valley ...

Nature In The Raw

Steven and I headed from Sarrance up the ever-narrowing cleft of the Aspe valley - which was dominated by dark, misty mountain peaks. Sometimes we clung to narrow, sloping paths high above the river gorge. You had to be careful as the fallen leaves at our feet concealed all sorts of potential pitfalls - such as rocks or slippery mud. My Leki trekking poles were a great boon. Here I am trying to look focused and nonchalant at the same time...

And here I am again examining a Big Drop (note the white-on-red GR blaze or balise on the protective stone wall)...

We came upon the scant remains of a squirrel - the tuft of a tail and some bloody entrails. Evidently a hawk or some other predator had been scouting the path just before us. Steven gleefully tucked the furry tuft into his hat band...

Quite soon after that we encountered another dead animal - this time there was slightly more of it left. And this one, as you can see, was attached to a house...

We passed through several villages and hamlets...

... and by derelict water mills and a shed full of sheep in stalls waiting to be milked (Pyrenean ewe's cheese, or brebis, is indisputably one of the best French cheeses - I know, because I ate some, and it's formidable). In Bedous we took a break in a bar, drank coffee with cognac, and chatted to the English owner (he'd got completely brassed off with the English Midlands and now owned 2 properties in the Pyrenees). We entered and left the village of Eygun...



... as the showers became more and more frequent...



... though these cows did not seem to mind the rain:



A huge red and brown fork-tailed kite landed on the branch of a tree in front of us. A tiny, bright green and yellow warbler (I fondly hoped it was an icterine - but it could easily have been a chiffchaff) fussed and preened on a nearby bush. Above the high cliffs to the west, 26 griffon vultures soared effortlessly on the thermals. And, not long before Borce, our resting place for the night, we spotted the seated figure of a green man cut out of the hillside's ferny vegetation: