Lost Souls on the way to Burgos - Part 2

They say the Pyrenees are astoundingly beautiful..

...We tend to believe this and rejoice for the generosity of nature. The truth is that we spent a day in a mist so thick it could be cut with a knife. All we knew is that the path was going higher and higher, steeper and steeper and that we were on a constant acceleration, as if trying to outrun the walls of fog and get occasional glimpses of the open valleys below.  Beauty was being served to us in small pills between long stretches into the clouds, just as our minds in that first day were still crowded with the old thoughts of previous life, work concerns, petty fears, spirit of competition… Our sole motivation was indeed to close the gap between us and the next pilgrim, overtake him with no mercy and move on to next victim. There was no sweeter taste than approaching someone on the brink of exhaustion, sprinting in front looking as fresh as a rose and pronouncing the fatidic words “Buen Camino” or “see you on the road”… which in fact meant “I don’t think so”. The supremacy of the newly-baptized “duo of the Apocalipse” was unquestionable up until the moment we heard some voices steadily approaching from below. Time to lay the table for a large serving of humble pie…Time to take a sip of water to lubricate the dust we were soon going bite. Time to put hand on our wooden sticks and be ready to perish with honor under the blows of the unexpected assailers. Time to tear apart our belief of being nothing less than demigods…

Now I am not sure if any of you knows the exact sound of a sigh of relief, but you would certainly would have learned it if you happened to be somewhere in northern Spain on that foggy May day. The realization that the onslaught we were victims of was being carried on bicycles, not only restored but consolidated our self-esteem, turning us into even more arrogant pricks. The mist was now gone, the woods looked enchanted, the mountain pass was past and the terrain was now our natural habitat: rocky downhill slopes. Under such favorable conditions our simple brains are programmed to do only one thing: Run! (pronounce it ‘Ron’, the Nigerian way).  As a result of all the scrambling down, despite affording ample time for a lunch feast with local cheese, in nearly no time we reached the end point of our day: the dungeons of Roncesvalles.