The latest dispatch from David:

Tomorrow we will have been walking for fourteen days, covering over three hundred kilometers. I´ve only had time to think about the present moment. I presume that in the middle ages the very real presence of death on the Camino from disease, natural calamities and brigands lifted one´s mind now and then from blisters, heat, cold, and mud.

The best, the very best day on the trip so far happened a few days ago. We left Belorado at eight and began climbing a muddy trail under a low, grey, rain-heavy sky. At Villa Franca Montes de Oca we stopped for ham sandwiches and coffee at a little bar - a giant white dog playing with its puppy outside - and then started to climb a road that was in turns muddy and sandy, but always quite steep. It began to rain, a hard, cold rain with plenty of wind behind it. I was soon drenched from my boots to my shorts -the rest was adequately protected, for a while at least, and then the rain began to seep in everywhere. The world became very small, very wet. At a lull in the rain I stepped over to the side of the road and prepared to urinate, at which point three all-terrain vehicles with mud-spattered men driving and mud-spattered women on the back roared out of the storm and passed in review as I stood there with my mouth open and my hands fumbling with my rain gear.

I didn´t realize that the rain had stopped until I heard a cuckoo. The sky lightened, the air grew warmer, and we began our descent. We saw red-tiled roofs and a church tower. The sun came out, and below us lay a landscape whose colors had been washed clean by the storm. Every color seemed unbelievably fresh--the green of the fields, the blue of the sky, even the mud of the road. I felt like I was being given a reward for having endured such a storm.

And so we came to the tiny hamlet of San Juan De Ortega (pop. 22), named after the 12th century saint who´s buried in the church, which he founded. He was made a saint for his work on behalf of pilgrims going to Santiago. He founded hospices and hospitals for them along the Camino, and built bridges and roads.

We ate supper in a small restaurant, delicious morcilla de Burgos (blood sausage) and salad and asparagus, and drank a bottle of the local red. After that, at eight o´clock, we decided to attend a mass for the former priest of the church, who died last year, and was famous for his help for pilgrims on the Camino, and for the free garlic soup which he offered to all pilgrims who came to the church.

The church is one of the most beautiful examples of twelfth-century architecture that I´ve seen, open, full of light, yet powerful in its allusions to the military architecture of its day. I´m not Catholic, but I was glad to be at that mass in that church, cold as it was inside, commemorating such a man, and at one point, as I stood watching the service unfold, a thought drifted through my mind, curiously light, not startling or life-changing, but a certainty: I´ve been here before.