Silence is like a blank score that you have to write, conscientiously, with the music of the Spirit.

Nothing is more accurate for the lucky walker who, regardless of the means chosen for his journey, faces with expectation this difficult and tough tenth stage described by Aymerich Pycaud in his Codex Calistinus.

Stage that, roughly speaking, and without getting into those depths where one of the most authentic Anima Bergidum lives, as it is Compludo, is described as the path that goes from Rabanal del Camino -people founded by the Templars, Magister Alkaest dixit- a Villafranca (del Bierzo), at the mouth of the Valcarce River, past the port of Mount Irago.

The detour towards Compludo is reached in the vicinity of those 1145 meters of altitude on which the ancestral village of El Acebo, once left behind by its limited urban boundaries, and the mythical fountain of the Druid, known by all the inhabitants, has settled. pilgrims going to Ponferrada and there, perhaps for sympathetic dissimulation, call de la Trucha.O de la Truite, on parle français.

The crossing, broken golden silence, broken that silence that is gold by the occasional barking of some lapdog, continues in a decreasing tone, configuring complicated innuendos as the path becomes, comparatively speaking, in that non plus ultra in which both The superstitious medieval sailors feared to fall, because they thought that the known world ended there.

Similarly, for the traveler who enters the complexities of a place like Compludo and its surroundings for the first time, the sensation is not different.

Perhaps it is accentuated even more, if possible, with that atypical silence, barely broken by the whispering waters of the Miera and Miruelos streams, in their melancholy passage, until merging, approximately half a kilometer further on, in the place where that impressive medieval relic, which is his smithy.

And yet, to reach it, it is necessary to go deep into the open, mythological and autochthonous part of the forest that surrounds it.

Just the flow of the stream is a fearful whisper, a sweet lullaby that numbs old trees, whose roots cling to a millennial land, with its own flavor. There are no signs in sight, as in other places, but it is immediately known that this forest is pure Bierzo.

An enchanted forest, where it is difficult not to have sensations of ambiguous complexity. They look, and somehow, they sense that they also see you; who watch you with interest, from the silence of some trunks that writhe with wise old age; some trunks covered with a curious green beard, which gives them the innocent and at the same time savage aspect that the medieval stonemasons represented with great frequency in the capitals of the churches. There is an absence of birds, however, which is still disconcerting.

Before arriving at the smithy, it is difficult not to notice it and wonder if the San Genadio heater continues being a kind of insurmountable barrier that they are not allowed to trespass.

Silence is Gold, of course, but they miss those harmonic trills that, after all, give happiness and vitality to a forest.

The blacksmith's shop is a strange building, massive and imposing, that squanders that gallant eternal force that gives it the stone.

The night has been freezing, and her breath, astral as the embrace of the Lady of the Scythe, is not only seen in the layer of frost that blocks the earth's pores, but also in the impressive icicles that, as long as beards, they swing of arcs of means point, through which the gears of their medieval forge are noticed.

There is also a small waterfall, the milky whiteness of whose waters resemble liters of milk emptying from an overturned pitcher.

Back on the road, it is difficult not to be accompanied by the relevant feeling of having been in a unique place.

Perhaps for that reason, that happy smoke that escapes through the chimneys of homes that begin to awaken, or those first rays of the sun illuminating the highest pyramids of the mountains, or that plate that reminds San Fructuoso and the place where he decided to found his monastery, at the behest of King Chindasvinto and his wife, left, in the end, to have a substantial interest.

Deep in the Valley of Silence, still beats a heart as old as the world. A sacred heart called Forest.

In short: Gaia reigns.

NOTICE: Originally posted on my blog MEMORIES OF A PILGRIM. Both the text and the photographs that accompany it are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://jc347.blogspot.com/2012/02/compludo-un-hito-medieval-en-lo-mas.html