Chapter XXII. In which is given an account of the great adventure of the cave of Montesinos, which is in the heart of La Mancha, and which the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha brought to a happy conclusion

Great and many were the gifts the newly wedded pair made Don Quixote, bound to him by the proofs he had given in defending their cause, and they ranked his good sense as high as his valor, holding him a Cid in arms and a Cicero in eloquence. The good Sancho regaled himself for three days at the couple’s expense, and from them it was learned that the feigned wounding had not been a scheme shared with the fair Quiteria but a contrivance of Basilio’s, who hoped from it for the very outcome that had been seen; though it is true he confessed that he had let some of his friends in on his plan, so that at the needful moment they might back his intention and vouch for his deception.

“They cannot and should not be called deceptions,” said Don Quixote, “that aim at virtuous ends.”

And he said that the marriage of lovers was the most excellent of ends, observing that the greatest adversary love has is hunger and constant want, because love is all gladness, rejoicing, and contentment, and the more so when the lover is in possession of the beloved, against whom want and poverty are open and declared enemies; and that he said all this with the intention that Señor Basilio should leave off practicing the skills he knew, which, though they brought him fame, did not bring him money, and should see to acquiring wealth by lawful and industrious means, which are never lacking to the prudent and diligent.

“The honorable poor man, if a poor man can be honorable, has a jewel in having a beautiful wife, and when she is taken from him, his honor is taken and killed. The beautiful and honorable woman who has a poor husband deserves a crown of the laurels and palms of victory and triumph. Beauty by itself draws the hearts of all who look on it and know it, and royal eagles and high-flying birds stoop down to it as to a tempting lure; but if want and straitened means are joined to such beauty, then the crows, the kites, and the other birds of prey attack it too; and she who stands firm against so many assaults well deserves to be called her husband’s crown. Mark this, sensible Basilio,” added Don Quixote: “it was the opinion of some sage or other that there was only one good woman in all the world, and he counseled every man to think and believe that this one good woman was his own, and so he would live content. I am not married, nor has it entered my thoughts until now to be so; and yet I would venture to advise anyone who asked me on the way he should go about seeking the woman he wished to marry. First of all, I would advise him to look more to her good name than to her fortune, because a good woman does not win a good name only by being good, but by seeming so; for public freedoms and forwardness do much more harm to women’s honor than secret wickedness. If you bring a good woman into your house, it would be an easy thing to keep her in that goodness, and even to better her in it; but if you bring a bad one, the mending of her will cost you labor, for it is not very easy to pass from one extreme to the other. I do not say it is impossible, but I hold it to be difficult.”

Sancho heard all this, and said to himself:

“This master of mine, when I say things of pith and substance, is apt to say I could take a pulpit in my hands and go about the world preaching pretty things; and I say of him that when he starts stringing maxims together and giving advice, he can not only take a pulpit in his hands but two on every finger, and go strolling about the town squares with all his mouth could wish for. The devil take you for a knight-errant, that you know so many things! I thought in my soul that he could only know what had to do with his chivalries, but there’s nothing he doesn’t peck at and stick his spoon into.”

Sancho was muttering this somewhat, and his master half heard him and asked him:

“What are you muttering, Sancho?”

“I’m not saying anything, or muttering about anything,” answered Sancho. “I was only saying to myself that I wish I’d heard what your grace has said here before I got married, for maybe I’d be saying now: ‘The ox that’s loose licks itself well.’”

“Is your Teresa as bad as all that, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.

“She isn’t very bad,” answered Sancho, “but she isn’t very good either; at least she isn’t as good as I’d like.”

“You do wrong, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “to speak ill of your wife, who, after all, is the mother of your children.”

“We don’t owe each other anything,” answered Sancho, “for she speaks ill of me too whenever she takes a fancy to, especially when she’s jealous, and then Satan himself couldn’t put up with her.”

In the end they stayed three days with the newlyweds, where they were entertained and waited on like royalty. Don Quixote asked the skilled licentiate to give him a guide who would lead him to the cave of Montesinos, because he had a great desire to go into it and see with his own eyes whether the marvels told of it all through that region were true. The licentiate told him he would give him a cousin of his, a famous student and very fond of reading books of chivalry, who would very willingly bring him to the very mouth of the cave and show him the lagoons of Ruidera, which were likewise famous throughout La Mancha, and even throughout Spain; and he told him that he would find him pleasant company, since he was a young man who knew how to make books for the press and how to dedicate them to princes. In the end the cousin came on a she-ass in foal, whose packsaddle was covered by a gaily colored rug or sackcloth. Sancho saddled Rocinante and got the gray ready and stocked his saddlebags, which were joined by the cousin’s, no less well stocked; and, commending themselves to God and taking leave of everyone, they set out, taking the road to the famous cave of Montesinos.

On the way Don Quixote asked the cousin what were the kind and quality of his pursuits, his profession, and his studies; to which he replied that his profession was that of a humanist, and his pursuits and studies the composing of books to be given to the press, all of great profit and no less entertainment to the commonwealth; that one was entitled The Book of Liveries, where seven hundred and three liveries were painted, with their colors, mottoes, and ciphers, from which the knights of the court could pick and take whichever they wished in times of festivals and rejoicings, without going about begging them from anyone or, as they say, distilling their brains to get them to suit their desires and intentions.

“Because I give the jealous man, the disdained, the forgotten, and the absent the ones that suit them, which will fit them more justly than sinfully. I have another book too, which I am going to call Metamorphoses, or the Spanish Ovid, of a new and rare invention; for in it, imitating Ovid in burlesque fashion, I depict who the Giralda of Seville was, and the Angel of the Magdalen, who the Vecinguerra Conduit in Córdoba was, who the Bulls of Guisando, the Sierra Morena, the fountains of Leganitos and Lavapiés in Madrid, not forgetting the one of the Louse, the one of the Golden Spout, and the one of the Prioress; and all this with their allegories, metaphors, and translations, so that they delight, astonish, and instruct all at once. I have another book, which I call Supplement to Polydore Vergil, which deals with who invented things, a work of vast learning and study, because the things of great substance that Polydore left unsaid, I look into and explain in a graceful style. Vergil forgot to tell us who was the first in the world to catch a cold, and the first to take the ointments as a cure for the French disease, and I set it out to the letter and support it with more than twenty-five authorities: so that your grace may see whether I have worked well and whether such a book is bound to be useful to the whole world.”

Sancho, who had been listening very attentively to the cousin’s account, said to him:

“Tell me, sir, and may God give you good luck in the printing of your books: could you tell me, and of course you can, since you know everything, who was the first man to scratch his head? For I take it myself that it must have been our father Adam.”

“So it would be,” answered the cousin, “for there is no doubt that Adam had a head and hair; and, that being so, and he being the first man in the world, he would scratch himself now and then.”

“That’s what I think,” answered Sancho. “But tell me now: who was the first tumbler in the world?”

“Truly, brother,” answered the cousin, “I could not say offhand, until I have studied it. I will study it when I get back to where I keep my books, and I will satisfy you when we see each other again, for this is not to be the last time.”

“Well, look, sir,” replied Sancho, “don’t trouble yourself about it, for I’ve just hit on the answer to what I asked you. You should know that the first tumbler in the world was Lucifer, when they threw him or cast him out of heaven, for he came tumbling down to the depths.”

“You are right, friend,” said the cousin.

And Don Quixote said:

“That question and answer are not your own, Sancho: you have heard someone say them.”

“Hush, sir,” replied Sancho, “for on my faith, if I take to asking and answering, I won’t be done between now and tomorrow. Yes indeed, for asking foolish things and answering nonsense I don’t need to go looking for help from the neighbors.”

“You have said more than you know, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for there are some who wear themselves out learning and looking into things that, once learned and looked into, do not matter an ardite to the understanding or the memory.”

In this and other pleasant talk that day went by, and at nightfall they put up in a small village, where the cousin told Don Quixote that from there to the cave of Montesinos it was no more than two leagues, and that if he was set on going into it, he would need to provide himself with ropes, to tie himself and let himself down into its depths.

Don Quixote said that even if it reached to the abyss, he meant to see where it ended; and so they bought nearly a hundred fathoms of rope, and the next day, at two in the afternoon, they reached the cave, whose mouth is wide and spacious, but full of boxthorn and wild fig, of brambles and undergrowth so thick and tangled that they blind and hide it altogether. On seeing it, the cousin, Sancho, and Don Quixote dismounted, and the two of them at once tied Don Quixote up very tightly with the ropes; and while they were binding and girding him, Sancho said to him:

“Look what you’re doing, your grace, my master: don’t go burying yourself alive, or putting yourself where you’ll look like a flask they’ve hung down a well to cool. Yes indeed, for it’s no business or concern of your grace’s to be the searcher-out of this place, which must be worse than a dungeon.”

“Tie and be quiet,” answered Don Quixote, “for such an enterprise as this, Sancho my friend, was kept for me.”

And then the guide said:

“I beg your grace, Señor Don Quixote, to look well and inspect with a hundred eyes what there is down inside: perhaps there will be things I can put in the book of my Transformations.”

“The tambourine’s in hands that will know how to play it,” answered Sancho Panza.

This said, and the binding of Don Quixote finished—which was done not over his armor but over his quilted doublet—Don Quixote said:

“We have been careless in not providing ourselves with some small bell, to be tied beside me on this same rope, by whose sound it might be known that I was still going down and was alive; but since that is no longer possible, into the hand of God, and may He guide me.”

And then he knelt down and made a prayer to heaven in a low voice, asking God to help him and give him good success in that seemingly perilous and new adventure, and then he said in a loud voice:

“O lady of my deeds and motions, most illustrious and peerless Dulcinea del Toboso! If it be possible that the prayers and entreaties of this your fortunate lover reach your ears, by your unheard-of beauty I beg you to hear them, for they are no other than to beg you not to deny me your favor and protection now that I have such need of it. I go to fling myself headlong, to sink myself, and to plunge into the abyss that here presents itself to me, only so that the world may know that if you favor me, there is no impossibility I will not undertake and achieve.”

And, saying this, he went up to the chasm; he saw that it was not possible to let himself down or make a way in except by force of arms or by sword cuts, and so, putting his hand to his sword, he began to hack down and cut away the undergrowth that was at the mouth of the cave, at whose noise and clatter there came flying out of it an infinite number of enormous crows and jackdaws, so thick and in such a hurry that they knocked Don Quixote to the ground; and if he had been as given to omens as he was a Catholic Christian, he would have taken it for a bad sign and excused himself from shutting himself up in such a place.

He got up at last, and, seeing that no more crows came out, or other night birds, such as the bats that had likewise come out among the crows, the cousin and Sancho giving him rope, he let himself be lowered to the bottom of the dreadful cavern; and as he went in, Sancho, giving him his blessing and making a thousand crosses over him, said:

“God guide you, and the Peña de Francia, together with the Trinity of Gaeta, flower, cream, and skimmings of knights-errant! There you go, bravo of the world, heart of steel, arms of bronze! God guide you, once again, and bring you back free, sound, and with no hidden flaw to the light of this life, which you leave to bury yourself in this darkness you go looking for!”

The cousin made almost the same prayers and supplications.

Don Quixote went on calling out for rope and more rope, and they paid it out to him bit by bit; and when the shouts, which came out of the cave as through a pipe, could no longer be heard, they had already let down the hundred fathoms of rope, and they were of a mind to haul Don Quixote back up, since they could give him no more cord. For all that, they held on for some half an hour, and then started to draw the rope in again, very easily and with no weight on it at all, a sign that made them imagine Don Quixote was staying inside; and, believing so, Sancho wept bitterly and hauled away in great haste to learn the truth; but on reaching, as it seemed to them, a little over eighty fathoms, they felt a weight, at which they were overjoyed. At last, at ten fathoms, they saw Don Quixote distinctly, and Sancho shouted to him, saying:

“Welcome back, your grace, my master, for we were already thinking you were staying down there to breed.”

But Don Quixote answered not a word; and, drawing him out altogether, they saw that his eyes were shut and he had every sign of being asleep. They stretched him on the ground and untied him, and still he did not wake; but they turned him and rolled him, shook him and jolted him so much that after a good while he came to himself, stretching as if he were waking from some heavy, deep sleep; and, looking this way and that, as though astonished, he said:

“God forgive you, my friends, for you have taken me away from the sweetest and most delightful life and sight that any human being has ever seen or known. In truth, now I have come to know that all the pleasures of this life pass like a shadow and a dream, or wither like the flower of the field. O unhappy Montesinos! O sorely wounded Durandarte! O luckless Belerma! O tearful Guadiana, and you, ill-fated daughters of Ruidera, who show in your waters the waters your fair eyes wept!”

The cousin and Sancho listened to Don Quixote’s words, which he spoke as though he were drawing them out of his very bowels with immense pain. They begged him to explain to them what he was saying and to tell them what he had seen in that hell.

“Hell, you call it?” said Don Quixote. “Then do not call it so, for it does not deserve it, as you shall see presently.”

He asked them to give him something to eat, for he was extremely hungry. They spread the cousin’s sackcloth on the green grass, went to the larder of their saddlebags, and, all three sitting in good love and fellowship, they had their afternoon meal and their supper all at once. When the sackcloth was taken up, Don Quixote of La Mancha said:

“Let no one get up, and all of you, my children, give me your full attention.”