Chapter XXIII. Of what happened to the famous Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena, which was one of the strangest adventures told in this true history

Seeing himself so badly mauled, Don Quixote said to his squire:

“I have always heard it said, Sancho, that to do good to boors is to pour water into the sea. If I had believed what you told me, I would have spared myself this grief; but it is done now: patience, and let us learn our lesson from here on.”

“Your grace will learn your lesson the way I’m a Turk,” answered Sancho, “but, since you say that if you had believed me this harm would have been spared, believe me now and you’ll spare yourself a worse one; for I’d have you know that there’s no use trying chivalries on the Holy Brotherhood, for it doesn’t care two maravedís for all the knights-errant there are; and I’ll tell you, I can already seem to hear their arrows whizzing past my ears.”

“You are a coward by nature, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “but, so that you shall not say I am stubborn and never do what you advise me, this once I will take your advice and get out of reach of the fury you so dread; but it must be on one condition: that never, in life or in death, shall you tell anyone that I withdrew and drew away from this danger out of fear, but only to humor your pleas; for if you say anything else, you will lie in it, and from now till then, and from then till now, I give you the lie, and say that you lie and will lie every time you think it or say it. And do not answer me back, for at the mere thought that I am drawing away and withdrawing from any danger, especially this one, which seems to carry some faint shadow of a shade of fear, I am ready to stay, and to wait here alone, not only for the Holy Brotherhood you speak of and fear, but for the brothers of Israel’s twelve tribes, and the seven Maccabee brothers, and Castor and Pollux too, and even all the brothers and brotherhoods there are in the world.”

“Sir,” answered Sancho, “retreating isn’t running away, nor is waiting good sense, when the danger outweighs the hope, and it’s for wise men to keep themselves today for tomorrow and not risk everything on one day. And I’d have you know that, boorish and a peasant though I am, I still have some notion of what they call good government; so don’t repent of having taken my advice, but get up on Rocinante, if you can, or if not I’ll help you, and follow me, for my noodle tells me we have more need now of our feet than of our hands.”

Don Quixote mounted without answering him another word, and, with Sancho on his ass leading the way, they went into a part of the Sierra Morena that lay close by, Sancho intending to cross it from end to end and come out at El Viso or Almodóvar del Campo, and hide for some days in those rough places so as not to be found if the Brotherhood came looking for them. What encouraged him in this was having seen that the provisions carried on his ass had come out of the fray with the galley slaves safe and free, which he judged a miracle, considering what the galley slaves had carried off and searched for.

As soon as Don Quixote entered those mountains his heart rejoiced, for those places seemed to him well suited to the adventures he was seeking. There came back into his memory the marvelous happenings that had befallen knights-errant in such solitudes and wildernesses. He went along thinking of these things, so rapt and carried away by them that he remembered nothing else. Nor did Sancho have any other care—once it seemed to him that he was traveling through safe country—than to satisfy his stomach with what was left over from the clerical spoils; and so he rode along behind his master, sitting sidesaddle on his donkey, taking things out of a sack and packing them into his paunch; and while he went along in that way he would not have given an ardite to find any other adventure.

At this point he raised his eyes and saw that his master had stopped and was trying with the point of his long lance to lift some bundle or other that lay on the ground, at which he hurried up to help him if need be; and when he got there it was just as Don Quixote was lifting with the point of his long lance a saddle cushion and a valise fastened to it, half rotten, or wholly rotten, and falling apart; but it weighed so much that Sancho had to dismount to take it, and his master ordered him to see what was in the valise.

Sancho did so with great speed, and, although the valise was shut with a chain and its padlock, through the torn and rotted parts of it he saw what was inside, which was four shirts of fine holland and other linen things no less elegant than clean, and in a handkerchief he found a good little heap of gold escudos; and as soon as he saw them he said:

“Blessed be all of heaven, that has sent us an adventure that’s of some profit!”

And, searching further, he found a little notebook, richly bound. Don Quixote asked him for this, and ordered him to keep the money and take it for himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the favor, and, stripping the valise of its linen, he put it in the provisions sack. Seeing all this, Don Quixote said:

“It seems to me, Sancho, and it cannot possibly be anything else, that some wayfarer gone astray of his way must have been crossing this sierra, and miscreants must have set on him and killed him, and brought him to bury him in this so hidden spot.” “That can’t be,” answered Sancho, “because if they’d been robbers they wouldn’t have left this money here.”

“You speak the truth,” said Don Quixote, “and so I cannot guess or work out what this can be; but wait: we shall see whether there is anything written in this little notebook by which we can track down and come to know what we want to know.”

He opened it, and the first thing he found written in it, as in a rough draft though in a very good hand, was a sonnet, which, reading it aloud so that Sancho could hear it too, he found went in this way:

Either Love has no knowledge of my case,
or has a surplus of cruelty, or my pain
is out of measure with the cause that dooms
me to the harshest kind of torment known.
But if Love is a god, it must be granted
that he knows everything, and reason holds
a god cannot be cruel. Who, then, ordains
the fearful grief that I adore and feel?
To say that it is you, Fili, were wrong;
such evil cannot lodge in so much good,
nor does this ruin fall on me from heaven.
Soon I must die, and that is surest of all;
for when an ill’s true cause cannot be known,
to hit upon the cure’s a miracle.

“From that ditty,” said Sancho, “there’s nothing to be learned, unless it’s that by that thread there, that hilo, we come to the ball of the whole business.”

“What hilo is there here?” said Don Quixote.

“It seems to me,” said Sancho, “that your grace said hilo there.”

“I said nothing but Fili,” answered Don Quixote, “and that, no doubt, is the name of the lady of whom the author of this sonnet complains; and on my faith he must be a fair poet, or I know little of the art.”

“Then,” said Sancho, “your grace knows about ditties too?” “And more than you think,” answered Don Quixote, “and you shall see it when you carry a letter, written in verse from top to bottom, to my lady Dulcinea del Toboso. For I would have you know, Sancho, that all or most of the knights-errant of ages past were great troubadours and great musicians; for these two skills, or graces, to put it better, go with being a lover errant. True it is that the couplets of the knights of the past have more spirit than polish.”

“Read some more, your grace,” said Sancho, “for you’ll soon find something to satisfy us.”

Don Quixote turned the page and said:

“This is prose, and it looks like a letter.”

“A letter missive, sir?” asked Sancho.

“From the beginning it seems to be nothing but a love letter,” answered Don Quixote. “Then read it aloud, your grace,” said Sancho, “for I’m very fond of these love things.”

“With pleasure,” said Don Quixote.

And, reading it aloud, as Sancho had begged him to, he found it went in this way:

Your false promise and my certain misfortune carry me off to a place from which the news of my death will reach your ears before the words of my complaints. You cast me off, O ungrateful one, for a man who has more, not for one who is worth more than I; but if virtue were a treasure held in esteem, I would not envy the good fortune of others or weep over my own misfortune. What your beauty raised up your deeds have thrown down: by it I took you for an angel, and by them I know you are a woman. Stay in peace, you who have caused my war, and may heaven grant that your husband’s deceits stay forever hidden, so that you may not repent of what you did and I may not take a vengeance I do not desire. When he had finished reading the letter, Don Quixote said:

“From this, even less than from the verses, can anything more be gathered than that the one who wrote it is some scorned lover.”

And, leafing through almost the whole of the little book, he found other verses and letters, some of which he could read and others not; but what they all contained were complaints, laments, misgivings, delights and disappointments, favors and disdains, some celebrated and others wept over.

While Don Quixote went through the book, Sancho went through the valise, without leaving a corner in it or in the cushion that he did not search, scrutinize, and inquire into, or a seam that he did not rip open, or a tuft of wool that he did not tease apart, so that nothing should be left behind for lack of diligence or care: such a craving had the escudos he had found awakened in him, which came to more than a hundred. And although he found no more than what he had found, he counted as well spent the flights in the blanket, the vomiting of the brew, the benedictions of the stakes, the muleteer’s punches, the loss of the saddlebags, the theft of his coat, and all the hunger, thirst, and weariness he had gone through in his good master’s service, for it seemed to him he was more than very well paid by the favor he had received in being handed the find.

The Knight of the Sorry Figure was left with a great desire to know who the owner of the valise might be, conjecturing, from the sonnet and the letter, from the money in gold and from such good shirts, that he must be some lover of high standing whom the disdain and ill treatment of his lady must have brought to some desperate end. But since in that uninhabitable and rugged place there appeared no one from whom he could inform himself, he took no further care than to go on, without following any road but the one Rocinante wanted, which was the one he could make his way along, always imagining that in those thickets some strange adventure could not fail to turn up.

Going along, then, with this thought, he saw a man leaping from crag to crag and from bush to bush with strange nimbleness along the top of a little hill that rose before his eyes. It seemed to him that the man was naked, his beard black and thick, his hair long and matted, his feet bare and his legs with nothing on them; his thighs were covered by a pair of breeches, of tawny velvet as it seemed, but so torn to pieces that his flesh showed through in many places. His head was bare, and, though he went past with the nimbleness that has been told, the Knight of the Sorry Figure saw and noted all these details; and, though he tried, he could not follow him, because it was not given to Rocinante’s weakness to travel those rough places, all the more as he was by nature short-stepping and phlegmatic. Don Quixote at once imagined that this was the owner of the cushion and the valise, and resolved within himself to look for him, even if he should have to go a year through those mountains until he found him; and so he ordered Sancho to get off his ass and cut across by one side of the mountain, and he himself would go by the other, and it might be that by this diligence they would come upon that man who had vanished so hastily from before their eyes.

“I won’t be able to do that,” answered Sancho, “because, as soon as I leave your grace, fear is on me at once, and attacks me with a thousand kinds of starts and visions. And let what I say serve you as a warning, so that from now on I don’t stir a finger’s breadth from your presence.”

“So it shall be,” said he of the Sorry Figure, “and I am very glad that you wish to make use of my spirit, which shall not fail you even though the spirit fail your body. And come along after me now, little by little, or as best you can, and make lanterns of your eyes; we will go around this small ridge: perhaps we shall come upon that man we saw, who, beyond any doubt, is none other than the owner of our find.”

To which Sancho answered:

“It would be much better not to look for him, because if we find him and he happens to be the owner of the money, it’s plain that I’ll have to give it back; and so it would be better, without making this useless effort, for me to keep it in good faith until, by some other way less curious and diligent, its true owner turned up; and maybe it would be at a time when I’d spent it, and then the king would let me off.” “You are mistaken in that, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “for, since we have fallen into suspicion of who the owner is, almost before our eyes, we are bound to look for him and give the escudos back; and, even if we did not look for him, the strong suspicion we have that he is the owner already puts us as much in the wrong as if he were. So, Sancho, my friend, let the search not grieve you, for the grief it will take from me if I find him.”

And so he spurred Rocinante, and Sancho followed him with his customary donkey; and, having gone around part of the mountain, they found in a stream, fallen, dead, and half eaten by dogs and pecked by crows, a mule saddled and bridled; all of which confirmed them still more in their suspicion that the man who was fleeing was the owner of the mule and of the cushion.

While they were looking at it, they heard a whistle like a shepherd’s keeping his flock, and suddenly, on their left hand, a good number of goats appeared, and behind them, on top of the mountain, appeared the goatherd who kept them, who was an old man. Don Quixote shouted to him and begged him to come down to where they were. He shouted back asking who had brought them to that place, where hardly a foot ever trod unless it was a goat’s or a wolf’s or some other wild beast’s that roamed there. Sancho answered him that he should come down, and they would give him a full account of everything. The goatherd came down, and on reaching the place where Don Quixote was, he said:

“I’ll wager you’re looking at the hired mule lying dead in that hollow. Well, on my faith, it’s been in that spot six months now. Tell me: have you come across its owner around here?”

“We have come across no one,” answered Don Quixote, “except a cushion and a little valise that we found not far from this place.”

“I found it too,” answered the goatherd, “but I never would pick it up or go near it, for fear of some mishap and of being charged with it as stolen; for the devil is crafty, and right under a man’s feet up springs something for him to trip on and fall, without knowing how or how not.”

“That’s just what I say,” answered Sancho, “for I found it too, and I wouldn’t go within a stone’s throw of it; there I left it and there it stays, just as it was, for I want no dog with a bell on.”

“Tell me, good man,” said Don Quixote, “do you know who the owner of these things may be?”

“What I’m able to tell you,” said the goatherd, “is that it must be close on six months, a little more or less, since there came to a shepherds’ fold, which must be some three leagues from this place, a young man of fine figure and bearing, riding that same mule that lies dead there, and with the same cushion and valise that you say you found and didn’t touch. He asked us which part of this sierra was the roughest and most hidden; we told him it was this one where we are now; and that’s the truth, for if you go half a league farther in, maybe you won’t find your way out; and I marvel at how you were able to get here, for there’s no road or path that leads to this place. I say, then, that when the young man heard our answer, he turned his reins and headed for the spot we showed him, and left us all pleased with his fine figure, and wondering at his question and at the haste with which we saw him ride off and turn toward the sierra; and from then on we never saw him again, until some days later he came out onto the road in front of one of our shepherds, and, without saying anything to him, went up to him and gave him a lot of punches and kicks, and then went to the she-ass with our supplies and took all the bread and cheese she was carrying; and, this done, with strange swiftness, he went back into hiding in the sierra. When some of us goatherds learned of this, we went looking for him for nearly two days through the thickest part of this sierra, at the end of which we found him tucked into the hollow of a big, sturdy cork oak. He came out to us very meekly, his clothes already torn, and his face disfigured and burned by the sun, so much that we hardly knew him, except that his clothes, torn as they were, from what we knew of them, gave us to understand that he was the one we were looking for. He greeted us courteously, and in few and very good words told us not to marvel at seeing him go about in that way, because he had to do so to fulfill a certain penance that had been laid on him for his many sins. We begged him to tell us who he was, but we could never get it out of him. We also asked him, when he needed food, which he couldn’t do without, to tell us where we would find him, because we would bring it to him with great love and care; and, if this wasn’t to his liking either, at least to come out and ask for it, and not take it from the shepherds. He thanked us for our offer, asked pardon for the assaults he had made, and offered from then on to ask for it for the love of God, without giving trouble to anybody. As for where he made his dwelling, he said he had none but the one chance offered him wherever night overtook him; and he ended his talk with such tender weeping that we who had listened to him would have had to be made of stone not to keep him company in it, thinking of him as we had seen him the first time and as we saw him then. For, as I have said, he was a very fine and graceful young man, and by his courteous and well-ordered words he showed himself to be wellborn and a very courtly person; for, though we who were listening to him were rustics, his gentility was so great that it was enough to make itself known even to rusticity itself. And, when he was in the best part of his talk, he stopped and fell silent; he fixed his eyes on the ground for a good while, during which we all stood still and in suspense, waiting to see where that trance would end, with no small pity at the sight of it; for from what he did, opening his eyes, staring fixed at the ground without moving an eyelash for a long while, and at other times closing them, pressing his lips together and arching his brows, we easily knew that some fit of madness had come over him. But he soon gave us to understand that what we thought was true, for he got up from the ground, where he had thrown himself, in a great fury, and fell upon the first man he found beside him with such boldness and rage that, if we hadn’t pulled him off, he would have killed him with his fists and his teeth; and all this he did saying: ‘Ah, faithless Fernando! Here, here you shall pay me for the wrong you did me: these hands shall tear out your heart, where all wickednesses together lodge and have their lair, above all fraud and deceit!’ And to these he added other words, all of which went to speak ill of that Fernando and brand him a traitor and faithless. We pulled him off, then, with no little trouble, and he, without saying another word, left us and ran off into hiding among these rockroses and thickets, so that he made it impossible for us to follow him. From this we guessed that the madness came on him at times, and that someone called Fernando must have done him some wicked turn, as heavy as the state it had brought him to showed it to be. All of which has been confirmed since then by the times, and they have been many, that he has come out onto the road, sometimes to ask the shepherds to give him some of what they carry to eat and other times to take it from them by force; for when he is in the fit of madness, even though the shepherds offer it to him freely, he won’t accept it, but takes it with his fists; and when he is in his right mind, he asks for it for the love of God, courteously and politely, and gives many thanks for it, and not without tears. And in truth I tell you, gentlemen,” the goatherd went on, “that yesterday I and four lads, two of them my servants and two my friends, made up our minds to look for him until we find him, and, once we have found him, whether by force or by consent, we are to take him to the town of Almodóvar, which is eight leagues from here, and there we will have him cured, if his trouble has a cure, or we will find out who he is when he is in his right mind, and whether he has relatives to whom we can give news of his misfortune. This, gentlemen, is what I can tell you of what you asked me; and understand that the owner of the things you found is the same man you saw go by as swift as he was naked”—for Don Quixote had already told him how he had seen that man go leaping over the sierra.

Don Quixote was left amazed at what he had heard from the goatherd, and with a greater desire to know who the unhappy madman was; and he resolved within himself what he had already been thinking: to look for him all over the mountain, without leaving a corner or a cave in it unsearched, until he found him. But fortune managed it better than he thought or hoped, because at that very moment there appeared, through a gully in a sierra that opened onto where they stood, the young man he was looking for, who came along talking to himself of things that could not have been understood close at hand, let alone from afar. His dress was as has been described, except that, as he came near, Don Quixote saw that a tattered leather jerkin he wore was scented with ambergris; from which he finally understood that a person who wore such clothes could not be of the lowest rank.

When the young man reached them he greeted them in a harsh, cracked voice, but with great courtesy. Don Quixote returned his greetings with no less civility, and, dismounting from Rocinante, with fine bearing and grace he went to embrace him and held him a good while tight in his arms, as though he had known him for years and years. The other, whom we may call the Ragged One of the Ill Figure—as Don Quixote was he of the Sorry—after letting himself be embraced, held him off a little, and, with his hands on Don Quixote’s shoulders, stood looking at him, as if he wished to see whether he knew him; no less amazed, perhaps, to see Don Quixote’s figure, build, and armor than Don Quixote was to see him. In short, the first to speak after the embrace was the Ragged One, and he said what will be told further on.