There are moments, places and circumstances in which, through a curious unfolding of what we consider reality, a mysterious door opens through which the ghosts that fill with melancholic adrenaline the labyrinthine alleyways of that other parallel world, which in the absence of a rational scientific tessitura, some incorrigible dreamers call Illusion, penetrate with melancholic adrenaline.

Sotosalbos, is a peaceful little town, located in the Land and Community of Segovia, distant, approximately, one hundred forty kilometers from Madrid, which languishes, like the petals of a wounded rose, at the edge of that sleeping dragon, which is the National Park of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

In fact, very few would remember his name, were it not for two singular details, the relevance of which - here I, like the cynical Betrand Du Guesclin, neither put nor put king- must be judged by the kind reader who, repressing a sudden yawn of boredom, finishes reading the dream I intend to sell him: his church and its relationship with the author of the Book of Good Love, the eminent Archpriest of Hita.

The church, for anyone who wishes to be voluntarily seduced by Art, is an exceptional Romanesque temple, at the dawn of the twelfth century, which proudly resists the embites of time, which on occasion should be given justice and named master restorer, for its contribution to beautifying what man, convinced of stupidity, generally tends to disrespect and by default, to destroy.

In this same place, past the port of Malangosto, the Archpriest of Hita - as they like to remember, since there is no people in Spain who are not proud to be named, even on the news and to suffocate consciences of the last effects of the cyclogenesis - had a loving dream that, believe it, it reminded me of that other one that Hermann Hesse fully describes, in a small literary jewel, very little known, I believe, but indispensable in the backpack of anyone who feels the call of the Way: El Caminante' (1).

If to the good Archpriest, a lush cowgirl made feel the darts of love, to our battered survivor of the first of the great world wars, Hermann Hesse, a blonde produced a similar commotion in the bar of a hotel in the Alps, to the point of making him think, many years before Hollywood took possession of the idea, that Love is everywhere, as part, also, of the eroticism implicit in something so gratifying as the adventure of walking.

Yesterday, while I was meditating in Sotosalbos - without a backpack, but with a heart open to a thousand and one details - I remembered these two great classics of Universal Literature, which in their own way, were also great walkers and by default, great dreamers.

And remembering them, I could only glimpse if for similar reasons, the theosophist Mario Roso de Luna dedicated an extraordinary chapter to the subject, in his book ‘The treasure of the lakes of Somiedo' and if for that reason, besides and speaking of those mysterious beings or elemental spirits of Nature -the Xanas or Anjanas- our famous Asturian writer, Campomanes, wrote that of: ‘Woe to the one who goes in the world to one and finds a blonde in the way!'.

Notes, References and Bibliography:

(1) Hermann Hesse: ‘El caminante', Editorial Bruguera, S. A. , First Edition, Barcelona, March 1978.

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