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By Root 1057 0

of us looked around for it, and at the foot of a cork tree we saw a young shepherd taking his ease and idly whittling a stick with his knife. We called to him, and he looked up and then quickly scrambled to his feet, for, as we learned later, the first people he saw were the renegade and Zoraida, and since they were wearing Moorish clothing, he thought that all of Barbary was attacking, and running with extraordinary speed toward the woods that lay ahead of us, he began to shout at the top of his voice, calling:

‘Moors! Moors have landed! Moors, Moors! To arms! To arms!’

His shouts confused us, and we did not know what to do, but assuming that the shepherd’s outcry would rouse the countryside, and that the mounted troops who guarded the coast would soon come to investigate, we agreed that the renegade should remove his Turkish jacket and put on a prisoner’s coat or tunic that one of us gave to him, though doing so left him in shirtsleeves; and so, commending ourselves to God, we followed the same path the shepherd had taken, expecting the mounted troops to bear down on us at any moment. And we were not wrong, because in less than two hours, when we had come out of the undergrowth and onto a plain, we saw some fifty men on horseback coming toward us at a quick trot; as soon as we saw them we stood still and waited for them, but when they rode up and saw so many poor Christians instead of the Moors they had been searching for, they were perplexed, and one of them asked us if we, by any chance, were the reason a shepherd had sounded the alarm. I said that we were, and as I was about to tell him our story, where we came from and who we were, one of the Christians who was with us recognized the rider who had asked us the question, and without allowing me to utter another word, he said:

‘Give thanks to God, Señores, for leading us to so good a place! If I’m not mistaken, we’re in Vélez Málaga, and if the years of my captivity haven’t erased the memory of this gentleman who is questioning us, you, Señor, are my uncle, Pedro de Bustamante.’

As soon as the Christian captive said this, the rider leaped from his horse and rushed to embrace the lad, saying:

‘My dear, dear nephew, I recognize you now, and have wept for your death, as has your mother—my sister—and all your family, those who are still alive, and God has been pleased to give them life so that they can have the pleasure of seeing you: we knew you were in Algiers, and to judge by the clothes you and the rest of this company are wearing, I understand that you’ve had a miraculous escape.’

‘That’s true,’ said the young man, ‘and there will be time to tell you all about it.’

As soon as the horsemen realized that we were Christian captives, they dismounted and each of them invited us to ride his horse into the city of Vélez Málaga, which was a league and a half away. We told them where we had left the skiff, and some went back to bring it into the city; others had us mount behind them, and Zoraida rode with the Christian captive’s uncle. The entire city came out to welcome us, for they had been informed of our arrival by a guard who had ridden ahead. They were not surprised to see escaped captives, or captives who were Moors, because all the people along that coast were accustomed to seeing both, but they were astonished by Zoraida’s beauty; at that time and moment it was at its height, due to the exertion of the trip and her joy at finding herself in a Christian land, free of the fear that we would be lost; this had brought so much color to her face that unless I was deceived by my affections, I would dare say there was no more beautiful creature in the world, at least none that I had seen. We went directly to the church to thank God for the mercy He had shown us, and as soon as Zoraida entered the church, she said there were faces there that resembled that of Lela Marién. We told her these were images of Lela Marién, and the renegade did the best he could to explain what they meant, so that she could worship them as if each one really were the Lela Marién who had spoken