continued climbing. Handkerchief vineyards clung to the upslope, walnut groves to the down. Without warning Annie became frighteningly high-minded and began quoting from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’. First she set the stage.
‘God, you see, makes man and then pours out for him a cupful of riches, all but contentment, which he leaves sloshing around in the bottom. Here’s the bit I can remember:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottome lay.
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessnesse …
She launched that eyebrow at me. I’d thought she hadn’t been paying attention, and now she was reducing the ambiguities of my pilgrimage – and the fount of Kingsley’s wanderlust – to ten lines. Thankfully we’d reached the final, banked curve of the climb and stood at last on the causse. A metallic-tasting wind tossed away our sweat. ‘Where is it?’
I had promised Annie a dolmen. Ahead of us stretched a bumpy blanket of pastures and wheat fields, neatly separated by dark windbreaks. Lunel lay a mile or two down the road. I pointed in that direction.
It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.
‘It’s a wonder to behold.’
‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’
‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’
At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.
And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.
‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’
I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’
Annie snorted good-naturedly as fast clouds patterned the fields with moving shadows. The little village of Lunel was entirely built of rousset – it looked like Conques’ little sister. Kind-eyed cattle the colour of dark caramel, Aubrac cattle, populated the adjacent fields. Here we turned around; the next day we would follow the same route in my car, taking twenty minutes to do what today had taken hours. We retraced our steps for about half a mile before heading off on a new track – the GR 62, a southern tributary of the Chemin de St Jacques – back toward Conques. A wrought-iron cross stood at the turning; pilgrims had come this way. There was also a signpost that put the distance to the abbey at 11 kilometres. I was aghast and immediately began to calculate.
‘Do you realize we’ve already hiked 15 kilometres? Dear God, that will make 26 altogether.’
‘Ooh, that sounds impressive.’
‘Impressive? It’s insane. That’s over 16 miles! No wonder my feet hurt.’ It now dawned on me, belatedly, why I hadn’t come up with Annie’s triangular itinerary on my own. It’s always been dangerous to let her plan hikes and parties: I lacked her fabled stamina in both realms. A farmer working sheep with a rambunctious Border collie – the lambs had tails like pipe cleaners – warned us it was a long way to Conques. ‘Downhill, though,’ he added cheerfully. Blossoms that Annie had just identified as evening-blue cornflowers were startled at our approach and flew off together, revealing themselves (we caught our breath) as butterflies. Wild thyme scented our footfalls.
It was a Rouergat paradise, but even so, once I’d worked out how far we’d walked I began to whine: my arches ached, my hips’ ball-and-socket joints felt like those of an old German Shepherd. Annie, however, marched on relentlessly. For a while the route held to the top of a high ridge, the south face of which fell away dramatically, culminating in the valley below in a perpendicular fan of woolly-wooded, peaked fissures. Patches of oxblood earth showed between gaps in the forest. Finally we began to descend. This is how the stone had come, too, atop wagons hitched to twenty-six pairs of oxen. We were following its tracks. It had been a tradition with medieval pilgrims walking to Compostela to carry stones as a penance (a variation on walking barefoot, or in chains). Sometimes monks put this practice to use, encouraging pilgrims to transport not just any old rocks, but to carry cut stones from quarries to ecclesiastical construction sites. I fingered the piece of schist in my pocket and trudged on.
Some time later Annie broke the silence by asking if I’d rather run a marathon or take heroin.
‘Right now?’
‘Yes, you have to do one or the other right now.’
‘Take heroin.’
‘Thought you’d say that.’
As we neared Conques we came upon a sign pointing toward a detour to a Point de Vue, overlooking the great concha of the Dourdou (Hannah Green translates concha as ‘valley’; others argue that it is the shell-shaped enclave on which Conques is built that lends the village its name). ‘Shall we?’ asked Annie in ready tones.
A look from me sufficed. ‘Ah, well, you get out there and find it’s only an opinion anyway.’
‘How dare you have the strength to be funny,’ I growled. Ancient apple and plum trees, woven with mistletoe, guided us back to the village: we’d been gone for seven hours. That night Annie treated me to a dinner of sea bass with chanterelles – the lacy mushrooms the French call girolles; along with groseilles (red currants), they’re a staple of summer markets – which we downed with a bottle of Gaillac, rounded off with Cognac, at the three-star Hôtel Ste Foy. It had become increasingly
