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By Root 861 0

take my bones out of here, smooth, white, and scraped bare, and those of my good donkey with them, and maybe that, at least, will let them know who we are if they’ve heard that Sancho Panza was never parted from his donkey, or his donkey from Sancho Panza. I’ll say it again: how wretched we are, for our bad luck hasn’t allowed us to die in our own land, with our own people, so that even if there wasn’t a remedy for our misfortune, there’d be no lack of people to grieve over it, and to close our eyes at the final hour of our passing! Oh, my companion and friend, how badly I’ve paid you for your good service! Forgive me, and ask Fortune, in the best way you know how, to take us out of this terrible trouble, and I promise to crown your head with laurel so you’ll look exactly like a poet laureate, and to give you double rations.”

Sancho lamented in this fashion, and his donkey listened without saying a single word in response: such was the distress and anguish in which the poor creature found himself. Finally, after an entire night spent in wretched complaints and lamentations, day broke, and in its clear, bright light Sancho saw that it was utterly impossible to get out of the pit without help, and he began to lament and cry out, to see if anyone heard him, but all his shouts were cries in the wilderness, because there was no one to hear him anywhere in the vicinity, and then he began to think of himself as dead.

The gray was lying on his back, and Sancho Panza moved him around until he had him on his feet, though he could barely stand; he took a piece of bread out of the saddlebags, which had experienced the same unfortunate fall, and gave it to his donkey, who thought it did not taste bad, and Sancho said to him, as if he could understand:

“Griefs are better with bread.”

And then Sancho discovered that on one side of the pit there was a hole big enough for a person to fit into if he stooped and bent over. Sancho Panza went over to it, crouched down, went in, and saw that on the other side it was spacious and long, and he could see this because through what could be called the roof a ray of sunlight came in and illuminated everything. He also saw that the space widened and lengthened into another large concavity; when he saw this he returned to the donkey and with a stone began to dig the earth away from the hole; in a short while he made it large enough for the donkey to pass through, which he did; and taking him by the halter, Sancho began to walk through the cave to see if he could find another way out. At times he walked in darkness, and at times without light, but at no time without fear.

“May Almighty God save me!” he murmured to himself. “What for me is a misadventure would seem like an adventure to my master, Don Quixote. He’d think these caverns and dungeons were gardens in flower and the palaces of Galiana,1 and would expect to come out of this dark, narrow place into a flowering meadow; but I’m so unlucky, so in need of advice, and so lacking in courage, that at each step I think another pit deeper than the first one is suddenly going to open beneath my feet and swallow me up. Evil is welcome if it comes alone.”

In this manner, and with these thoughts, it seemed to him he must have walked more than half a league when he saw a dim illumination that he thought was daylight, shining in somewhere and indicating an opening at the end of what seemed to him like the road to the next world.

Here Cide Hamete Benengeli leaves him and returns to Don Quixote, who, with joy and happiness, waited for the appointed time of the battle that he was to fight with the thief of the honor of Doña Rodríguez’s daughter, for he intended to right the wrong and correct the outrage so wickedly committed against her.

It so happened that he rode out one morning to practice and rehearse what he was to do during the combat he would soon be engaged in, and after spurring Rocinante into a charge or short gallop, the horse’s feet came so close to a cave that if he had not pulled hard on the reins, it would have been impossible not to fall