Until you come to the cathedral. Every roof is covered with pinaacles, with candlesticks of weathered brown and golden stone, with grass springing up between obelisks and balustrades and finials. The Baroque towers are a seething, bubbling mass of baroque ornament, thrusting up slender and streamlined to their filigreed pinnacles. Every ornament is multipled until its essence is lost in the mass of swirling lace. The cathedral is a fairy palace made of air, not stone, translucent, held together only by a fervid imagination. It is not built on solid ground, but on delicate slants of staircase, on diagonal slopes of ramp, on the side of the hill.
It is Baroque; it seems to be a film, a surface, rather than a building. And that is exactly what it is; a skin, a hollow membrane stretched over the romanesque church inside.
Inside this carapace of mad Iberian vegetation hides a cathedral which is typically French. The masters of the cathedral were Bernard and Robert, bearing French names; the elegant, thin-pillared nave is French, the ambulatory typically French, the whole plan of the church like that of St Sernin at Toulouse, Conques, or the destroyed St Martin of Tours and Limoges. French influence was rife in Santiago in the days when the cathedral was built. Calixtus II gave Santiago its archbishopric; he was French. Doña Urraca's husband, governing Galicia, was French - and Calixtus' brother. The mad baroque exterior is Spanish, authentic, autochthonic; the French cathedral is the creation of a ruling clique, an island of French cool and elegance in a strange , exuberant land.
You enter the cathedral and suddenly you have gone from one land to another. The nave is a long corridor of svelte high bays, of thin bays and slender pillars, lit by sloping beams from the central lantern. Its purity, its simplicity, surprise after the roughcastness of the city, the extravagance of the cathedral's skin. The simple barrel vault with its single flat ribs carries the eye to the choir, not teasing the eye with the complex interruptions of the gothic vault. From the confusion of the exterior, masses without direction, without motive, one enters this processional space where the pilgrimage ends, straight as an arrow, at the high altar.
At the end of my pilgrimage I found the beginning of it. Like Le Puy, with its dark curving entrance under the west front, through the huge arches that buttress it to the hill, Santiago allows itself to confuse the pilgrim at first until that blinding simplicity of the nave is reached. Like Le Puy, the buildings packed tight round the church hide its shape, its liturgical purpose, its single thrust from portal to altar; but within the bent and twisted streets of the city clarity lies hidden. Through the dark streets, the shadowy narthex of the world, into the certainties of faith.
Just as the names of towns on the road exert a strange fascination, so do the numbers of Santiago. Aymery's guide sets out the seven gates; ten churches; two floors, sixty-three windows, three portals, seven lesser doors of the cathedral, and its nine towers; nine altars; sixty-two canons. It is the fascination of lists; the fascination that makes collectors, the fascination of the search for that last piece to the jigsaw. And there is also a feeling of richness, that strange microcosm that is a cathedral, with the many sacristies and cloisters and canons and laybrothers and vergers' stores (perhaps only sheltering a Hoover and a box of candle ends) that you never see. The rooms at Santiago grasped by rock in the thickness of the wall between romanesque basilica and baroque skin. A sort of world within a world, a labyrinth of chapels where everything has meaning, where nothing is simple. A history far greater and more detailed than you could ever understand.
The nine towers have gone; I imagine the medieval cathedral as a jut of immense upthrust geometry like the huge German churches, towers everywhere, the hedgehog-like crossing bristling with turrets and spires. But the doors are still here, almost baroque in their encrustation of figures; centaurs, kings, apostles, demons, saints, musicians, trumpet-blowing angels, and some more terrifying surrealist visions - a roundbreasted woman holding a skull, lechers having their breasts and genitals eaten by snakes, a mermaid holding a stiff little fish like a French housewife with a baguette. God creates Adam with an almost erotic touch on his breast, over the heart; the ulse of Adam's heart as it begins for the first time to beat. Bodies like stripes of weatherstaining, simply stuck on to the wall without support, without context, as totally alone and vulnerable as the tiny man thrashing desperately in the tangling interlace that sucks him into its green world. Corbels like knobs of moulded dough. And all these held in a complex architectural framework of spiral columns, rolls of vegetation, rosettes, corbels, zigzag, mozarabic cusping, starkly plain in its design but gloriously baroque in its detail. The columns of the south door are broken up into statue-niches with barleysugar columns and slender arches; the column is no longer a column, it has been shattered into fragments; the fragments make nothing except an effect that has nothing to do with structure. The flat relief of the figures makes the human body into a field for the play of light and shade, for the lines of drapery, electric zigzag or relaxed curve.
The romanesque cathedral was a pilgrimage, a procession, but it was also a microcosm, a symbol of the world. Santiago shows the world complete on its doors; the creation, the transfiguration, the judgment - the world from beginning to end. Its nine towers were the perfect number, the nine towers of the new Jerusalem; it not only completed the world as it is, but it created the world as it will be at the last day. History swung across the cathedral like a huge pendulum; creation and the Fall at the north, representing human sinful nature; the Transfiguration at the great west door (of which fragments survive), the moment at which Christ shows to sinful man his true divine nature, at which the redemption becomes possible; and on the north, the resurrection of the dead for judgment; and so to the east, where there is no door but that of faith, which is the direction of the new Jerusalem, of the resurrection, of the kingdom that has no end.
Greatest of all the doors is the Portico de la Gloria, the door between the narthex and the nave. Here christ sits in majesty over the door; below him, on the central pillar between the two halves of the door, sits Saint James, neither the weary pilgrim nor a mounted warrior but a saint in glory, second only to his master. The figures on the arch pitch forward, Christ seems to lean forward eagerly, there is an effect of disproportion; the figures are too big, too solid, for thearchitecture, they are struggling to escape it. Their energy is too much for stone; they seem to come alive. Lions support the pillars, not erect and proud like the Lombardic lions, but crouched, squashed between the floor and the foot of the pillar, as if the church is stamping them to death with the weight of its stone.
And behind the pillar, Maestro Mateo's figure faces into the nave, like the pilgrim facing the light from the darkness of the narthex, living in hope. Mateo's wisdom - children used to come and touch his head with theirs, hoping to absorb it - is the wisdom not of a mere stonecarver, but of an iconographer; the knowledge of the divine secrets and symbols, the ability to create a meaningful theology in stone. Mateo's trade was not to build; it was to give meaning.
The cathedral is bare now, apart from the magnificent portals. It is elegant, but perhaps austere. So it is difficult to imagine its medieval glories; what we see now is only the skeleton on which the glory of the church was hung. Tapestries covered the walls, the altar frontal was of pure gold, blazoned with the same subjects as the great door; treasures filled the altars and aumbries. The priests' robes were stiff with embroidery and cloth of gold; thousands of candles filled the church with flickering, partial speckles of light. Diego Gelmírez alone gave to the church a mass of treasures: four citharas, four pontifical copes, twelve other copes, two dalmatics, four sets of liturgical furniture, a purple gospel, two silver gospels, one gold gospel, a Syon of silver, two silver coffers (with the head of St James the Less), an ivory coffer, a gilt enamelled coffer, a gold coffer, a lignum crucis, a gold cross, three silvercrosses, a gold chalice, a golden censer, three silver cruets, a retable of pure gold sculpted with the figures of Christ and the Apostles.
The only way I can approach in my mind the medieval richness of the church is to place in it, piece by piece, all the most important treasures of the middle ages; the Trivulzio candlestick in Milan cathedral, six feet high with its spreading claws, its peasants and monsters and knights hiding or entangled in the interlaces of bronze vegetation; the porphyry vase of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis with its eagles' wings of gold; the pala d;oro of St Mark's; the Syon cope with its opus anglicanum embroideries of heraldry and scripture; the tapestries of the Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny; and the golden majesté of Sainte Foy. . . In my imagination, the bare cathedral becomes filled slowly with the light and richness of the artefacts, the contours of the bare stone are hidden by tapestry and the searching rays of light from the cimborio are reflected in dazzling play on the gleaming surfaces of metal and semi-precious stone.
And the cathedral would have been full of people, too, many more than there are today; pilgrims stinking in their travelworn clothes, sleeping out their fatigue in corners, making their way through the crowd to the high altar and the statue of the Apostle, lighting candles, simply gaping at it all. And botafumeiro, the huge censer of solid silver (but the replacement you see now is only of silvergilt), would have swung dangerously an inch above the pilgrims' heads, filling a church already full of the acrid and human odours of sweat and dirt with the heady stink of incense.
But when the dying sun strikes the stone and tints it with yellow, when the bustle of feet dies to the slow murmur of prayer, then I remember the tales of the basilica full of light, the doors miraculously open to the late traveller, the underground chamber where the tomb of the Apostle is lit by candles that never flicker or die. The age of miracles is past; but small miracles of beauty still light the path.
Of course the pilgrimage is still not finished. The authentic Jacobean pilgrimage does not end until you come to Padron, where the body of the apostle was brought ashore. And the path to the west does not end till you come to Finisterre, den finstern Stern, the dark star, the final place. It is finis terrae, the ends of the earth, a little death, a place to which we all come at last, like Ulysses sailing past the pillars of Hercules out into the eternal night of the undiscovered ocean.