Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [215]
Having finished this, I still had another task to attend to, which was most important to me: I had to inform Zoraida of the progress we had made so that she would remain observant and alert and not be taken by surprise if we attacked before she thought it possible for the Christian boat to have returned. And so I resolved to go to the estate to see if I could talk to her, and on the pretext of gathering greens, one day before my departure I went there, and the first person I met was her father, who spoke to me in the language used between captives and Moors throughout Barbary, and even in Constantinople; it is not Moorish or Castilian, not the language of any nation, but a mixture of all tongues, and with it we can understand one another; it was in this language that he asked me what I wanted in his garden and whose slave I was. I replied that I belonged to Arnaúte Mamí1 (I said this because I knew very well that the man was his great friend) and that I was looking for greens to prepare a salad. Then he asked me if I was for ransom and how much my master was asking for me. As we were exchanging these questions and answers, the beautiful Zoraida, who had not seen me for some time, came out of the house, and since Moorish women, as I have said, are in no way reluctant or shy about showing themselves to Christians, she did not hesitate to approach the spot where her father was talking to me; in fact, as soon as her father saw that she was walking toward us, rather slowly, he called to her and asked her to approach.
I cannot begin to describe for you the great beauty and grace, or the elegance of the rich attire, revealed to me by my beloved Zoraida. I will say only that more pearls hung from her lovely neck, ears, and tresses than she had hairs on her head. Around her ankles, which were bare, in accordance with Moorish custom, she wore two carcajes (the Moorish name for bracelets and bangles for the feet) of purest gold, studded with so many diamonds that, as she told me later, her father had valued them at ten thousand doblas,2 and the ones on her wrists were worth the same amount. She wore a large quantity of very fine pearls, because the greatest pride and joy of Moorish women is to adorn themselves with rich pearls, both large and small, and so the Moors have more pearls than any other nation; Zoraida’s father was said to own many of the best pearls in Algiers and to have more than two hundred thousand Spanish escudos, and she who is now mistress of my heart was mistress of all this. If she looks beautiful now, after her many tribulations, imagine how lovely she was then, dressed in all her finery. Because it is well-known that the beauty of some women has its days and its seasons and decreases or increases according to what happens to them, and it is natural for the soul’s passions to heighten or diminish that beauty, although they most commonly destroy it. But at that moment she appeared so richly attired and so exceedingly beautiful that she seemed the loveliest woman I had ever seen; furthermore, considering all that I owed her, it seemed to me that I had before me a heavenly goddess come down to earth to be my joy and salvation.
As soon as she approached us, her father told her in their language that I was a slave of his friend Arnaúte Mamí and had come to pick a salad. She began to speak, and in that mixture of languages I have already mentioned she asked me if I was a gentleman and why I had not been ransomed. I replied that I had been ransomed, and for