Chapter LXVIII. Of the bristly adventure that befell Don Quixote

The night was rather dark, though the moon was in the sky, but not in a part where she could be seen: for at times the lady Diana goes off for a stroll to the antipodes and leaves the hills black and the valleys dark. Don Quixote paid his debt to nature by sleeping his first sleep, without giving way to a second; quite the reverse of Sancho, who never had a second, because his sleep lasted him from night until morning, which showed his good constitution and his few cares. Don Quixote’s cares kept him so wakeful that he woke Sancho and said to him:

“I marvel, Sancho, at the easiness of your nature: I imagine you are made of marble, or of hard bronze, with no room in you for any feeling or emotion. I keep watch while you sleep, I weep while you sing, I faint from fasting while you are sluggish and short of breath from sheer surfeit. It is the part of good servants to share the sorrows of their masters and to feel what they feel, if only for the look of it. Look at the calm of this night, the solitude we are in, which invites us to slip some waking in among our sleep. Get up, on your life, and go off some distance from here, and with good heart and grateful spirit give yourself three or four hundred lashes on account toward those for Dulcinea’s disenchantment; and this I ask of you as a favor, for I do not wish to come to grips with you, as I did the other time, because I know your arms are heavy. After you have given them to yourself, we shall spend the rest of the night singing, I my absence and you your constancy, beginning from now the pastoral calling we are to follow in our village.”

“Sir,” answered Sancho, “I’m no friar, to rise halfway through my sleep and take the discipline to myself, and I don’t see either how anybody can pass from the extreme of the pain of the lashes to the extreme of music. Let your grace let me sleep and not press me about whipping myself; for you’ll make me swear an oath never to touch a hair of my smock, let alone a hair of my flesh.”

“O hardened soul! O pitiless squire! O bread ill bestowed and favors ill considered, those I have done you and mean to do you! Through me you have seen yourself a governor, and through me you see yourself with near hopes of being a count, or holding some other equivalent title, and their fulfillment will not be delayed longer than it takes for this year to go by; for I, post tenebras spero lucem (after the darkness, I hope for light).”

“I don’t understand that,” replied Sancho; “I only understand that while I’m asleep I have neither fear nor hope, neither trouble nor glory; and blessings on whoever invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thoughts, the food that takes away hunger, the water that puts thirst to flight, the fire that heats the cold, the cold that tempers the heat, and, in short, the common coin that buys all things, the scale and weight that makes the shepherd equal to the king and the simple man to the wise. Only one thing is bad about sleep, from what I’ve heard said, and it’s that it looks like death, since between a man asleep and a man dead there’s very little difference.”

“Never have I heard you speak so elegantly, Sancho, as now,” said Don Quixote, “by which I come to see the truth of the proverb you sometimes say: ‘Not who you’re born with, but who you graze with.’”

“Ah, confound it, sir, our master!” replied Sancho. “I’m not the one stringing proverbs now, for they drop out of your grace’s mouth two by two too, better than out of mine; only there must be this difference between mine and yours: that your grace’s come in season and mine out of season; but, in effect, they’re all proverbs.”

They were at this when they heard a muffled din and a harsh noise that spread through all those valleys. Don Quixote got to his feet and put his hand to his sword, and Sancho huddled under the gray, putting the bundle of armor and his donkey’s packsaddle on either side of him, as trembling with fear as Don Quixote was stirred up. Moment by moment the noise kept growing and coming near the two fearful ones; at least to the one, for the other’s valor is well known.

The case, then, is that some men were taking more than six hundred hogs to sell at a fair, and they were traveling with them at that hour, and so great was the noise they made, and the grunting and the snorting, that it deafened the ears of Don Quixote and Sancho, so that they did not make out what it could be. The far-spread, grunting herd came on in a rush, and, with no respect for the authority of Don Quixote or for that of Sancho, they passed over the top of the two, demolishing Sancho’s trenches and knocking down not only Don Quixote but Rocinante into the bargain. The rush, the grunting, the speed with which the unclean animals came, threw into confusion and onto the ground the packsaddle, the armor, the gray, Rocinante, Sancho, and Don Quixote.

Sancho got up as best he could and asked his master for the sword, telling him that he wanted to kill half a dozen of those gentlemen and ill-mannered hogs, for he had already recognized them for what they were. Don Quixote said to him:

“Let them be, my friend, for this affront is the penalty for my sin, and it is a just punishment from heaven that jackals should eat a vanquished knight-errant, and wasps sting him, and hogs trample him.”

“It must be a punishment from heaven too,” answered Sancho, “that the squires of vanquished knights get stung by flies and eaten by lice and set upon by hunger. If we squires were sons of the knights we serve, or close kin of theirs, it wouldn’t be much if the penalty for their faults caught up with us to the fourth generation; but what business have the Panzas with the Quixotes? Well, now: let’s settle down again and sleep what little is left of the night, and God will bring the day, and we shall thrive.”

“You sleep, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “for you were born to sleep; for I, who was born to keep watch, in the time left from now until day will give rein to my thoughts and vent them in a little madrigal that, without your knowing it, I composed in my head last night.”

“It seems to me,” answered Sancho, “that thoughts that leave room for making verses can’t be many. Let your grace versify as much as you please, and I’ll sleep as much as I can.”

And then, taking as much of the ground as he liked, he curled up and slept soundly, with no sureties, or debts, or pain of any kind to disturb him. Don Quixote, leaning against the trunk of a beech or a cork oak—for Cide Hamete Benengeli does not specify what tree it was—sang in this manner to the sound of his own sighs:

“Love, when I think upon
the harm you deal me, terrible and strong,
I hurry off to death,
believing so to end my boundless pain;
but when I reach the pass
that is a harbor in this sea of torment,
I feel such joy within
that life grows strong, and I do not go through.
So living is my death,
for death returns and gives me life again.
O state unheard of yet,
that deals with me in death and life this way!”

Each of these lines he accompanied with many sighs and not a few tears, like one whose heart was pierced through with the pain of his defeat and the absence of Dulcinea.

At this the day came on, the sun struck Sancho in the eyes with its rays, and he woke and stretched himself, shaking and stretching his lazy limbs; he looked at the havoc the hogs had made of his larder, and cursed the herd and even further than that. At last the two of them went back to the road they had begun, and as the afternoon was waning they saw some ten men on horseback and four or five on foot coming toward them. Don Quixote’s heart leaped, and Sancho’s took fright, because the people coming up to them carried lances and leather shields and came very much in warlike array. Don Quixote turned to Sancho and said to him:

“If I could, Sancho, exercise my arms, and if my promise had not tied my hands, I would count this mass coming down on us as cakes and fancy bread; but it may be something other than what we fear.”

At this the horsemen came up, and, raising their lances, without speaking a word, surrounded Don Quixote and set them to his back and breast, threatening him with death. One of those on foot, putting a finger to his lips as a sign for him to be silent, seized Rocinante’s bridle and led him off the road; and the rest of those on foot, driving Sancho and the gray along ahead of them, all keeping a marvelous silence, followed the steps of the one who was leading Don Quixote, who two or three times tried to ask where they were taking him or what they wanted; but he had scarcely begun to move his lips when they made to close them for him with the iron points of the lances; and the same thing happened to Sancho, because he had scarcely shown signs of speaking when one of those on foot pricked him with a goad, and the gray, neither more nor less, as if he wished to speak. Night closed in, they quickened their pace, the fear of the two prisoners grew, and all the more when they heard them saying to them from time to time:

“Get along, troglodytes!”

“Silence, barbarians!”

“Pay up, anthropophagi!”

“Don’t complain, you Scythians, nor open your eyes, you murderous Polyphemuses, you flesh-eating lions!”

And other names like these, which tormented the ears of the wretched master and man. Sancho kept saying to himself as he went:

“Us, turtledoves? Us, barbers, or Saint Anthony’s pigs? Us, little bitches, that people tell ‘sit, sit’? I don’t like these names one bit: this threshing floor has an ill wind blowing on it; all the harm comes on us at once, like the sticks on a dog, and I only hope what this most misadventurous adventure threatens stops at sticks!”

Don Quixote went along spellbound, unable, for all the reasoning he did, to make out what those names full of abuse they were calling them might mean, from which he could only conclude that he should expect no good and fear much harm. At this, about an hour into the night, they reached a castle, which Don Quixote knew well to be the duke’s, where they had been not long before.

“God save us!” he said, as soon as he recognized the place. “And what can this be? To be sure, in this house all is courtesy and good manners; but for the vanquished, good turns to bad and bad to worse.”

They went into the main courtyard of the castle and saw it arrayed and set out in such a way that their wonder grew and their fear doubled, as will be seen in the following chapter.