Once I'm up in the mountains, strangely, this effect of height begins to disappear; the peaks are high and vicious, but the path is flatter, the cols between the mountain summits are broad and low. Half-way to the Port de Cize it started to hail. On my right to windward the backs of tussocks were still fuzzy brown or dull green; but on my left the hail drifted, the land was sson as white as the mist into which the summits began to dissolve. As I went higher stinging hail turned to snow, and the whiteness became clearer and deeper.
Mist floats up towards me from the valleys, each wisp quite separate, covering and uncovering in one fluid movement the ridges below. It is weirdly determined. Fresh snow crumples underfoot. I am childishly happy now in this strange white luminous day with no sun, infinite light. I draw a scallop in the snow and the word "Courage!" - I throw snowballs at the waymarks. The snow is frosted on to beech twigs so that every tree has its shadow in white ice, a double outline. Round holes in the snow lead me around a rocky corner; the crushed dad grass and mud are fleshly and warm, strange in this white and cool space above the mountains. I find a perfect hoofmould of impacted snow, the mark of the frog clear and curved like the prow of a cruiser or a romanesque acanthus. Then I see the herd; five mares, their coats crisped and coated with the wet of melted snow. Standing away, they inspect me curiously, nostrils flared, steaming the heavy smell of horse; then four of them trot up to the rocks above me, and one is left on the path behind, standing square to me, looking, head lowered slightly, truculently, till I am out of sight. They make no noise and their breath curls in tendrils too slight to see, almost. They are gods, immutable, silent.
The world narrows to the hundred yards of visible track. It is ten yards wide between forest and precipice. The map is irrelevant, can give no information to foot and eye which perceive only whiteness and the slow ascent or declension and the effort required by the terrain. Distances are immeasurable, only time, and after hours in this whiteness time also seems still, and I do not know how long I have been walking.
Finally the noticeboard at the Col, which has been turned round and which points in all the wrong directions, or none. Down steeply to Roncevaux in one long sweep, ploughing a track through drifted snow, cutting the coils of the road which joins the path, and down to the huge wings of barn or dormitory roofs of corrugated tin, thrown randomly round two spired turrets grey with approaching night. Roofs and ranges thrown together, agglomerative, grown up over the long years almost as if breathed out like mist by the monastery, and now decaying and rusting in the long years of silence and disuse. The posada is bright and expensive and an outpost of the attempt to enliven the wilderness, but only the lorries lumbering past disturb the silence. Deserted, miserable remnants of agriculture, the broken scythe and spade. The cloister is grey and heavy, its well deep and the only sound the slow seep of water in the basin. Its arches are haphazard, thrown up in a moment of distraction, hardly supporting the heavy floors above, so that it seems the cloister too is seeping downward slowly with the years. The path leads under a gate into huge deserted ranges where no lights shine and the tin roof sings in the wind desolate. There is no enclosure; no gate in the gateway; the wilderness is within as well as without. Despite the centuries of pomp, it is now a lonely place to end the day.
Well, this is Roncevaux at last. The end of the journey. On to Santiago I will not go, not now anyway. This is too good a day to waste by going on; die now, die now and be happy. The sun is out, and the hills around a re furzy brown with dead grass and bracken and beech forest; but the mountains behind crowd up to the abbey, and they are high and white and distant and yesterday is only a dream, and so it is back to the long and weary trudge past cement plants and apartment blocks and down to grey Pamplona, and back to London and the grey days of a not-yet-arrived spring.