Both Rozinante and his master had fared so ill at the hands of the shepherds that they journeyed but slowly, and darkness fell without their having reached an inn, or even caught sight of one. This grieved sorely both knight and squire, for not only did all Don Quixote’s bones ache from the stoning he had undergone, but somehow or other their wallets had been also lost, and it was many hours since they had broken their fast.

In this plight they travelled, man and beast hanging their heads with fatigue, when they saw on the road, coming towards them, a great multitude of lights, bobbing up and down, as if all the stars of heaven were shifting their places. Neither Don Quixote nor Sancho felt much at their ease at this strange spectacle, and both pulled up their beasts, and waited trembling. Even Don Quixote feared he knew not what, and the hair stood up on his head, in spite of his valour, as he said to Sancho:

‘There lies before me, Sancho, a great and perilous adventure, and one in which I must bear a stout heart.’

‘It seems to be an adventure of phantoms,’ whispered Sancho fearfully, ‘which never was to my liking.’

‘Whatever phantoms they be,’ answered the knight, ‘they shall not touch a hair of your head,’ replied Don Quixote soothingly. ‘If they mocked at you in the inn, it was for reason that I could not leap the fence. But here, where the ground is open, I can lay about me as I will.’

‘And what if they bewitch you, as they did that other time?’ asked the squire. ‘How much will the open ground profit you then’?

‘Trust to me,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘for my experience is greater than yours’; and Sancho said no more.

They stood a little on one side watching the lights approaching, and soon they saw a host of men clad in white riding along the road. The squire’s teeth chattered at the sight of them, and his terror increased when he was able to make out that the moving stars were flaming torches which men in white shirts carried in their hands, and that behind them followed a litter draped in black. After the litter came six other men dressed in black and mounted on mules. And Sancho had no doubt that he saw before him shadows from the next world.

Though Don Quixote’s heart quailed for a moment at the strangeness of the vision, he soon recalled his valour. In an instant his fancy had changed the litter into a bier, and the occupant into a knight who had been done to death by foul means, and whom he was bound in honour to avenge. So he moved forward to the middle of the road, and cried in a loud voice:

‘Proud knights, whoever you may be, stand and give me account of yourselves, and tell me who it is that lies in that bier. For either you have done an ill deed to some man, or else a wrong has been done to you.’

‘Pardon me, fair sir,’ answered the foremost of the white-shirted men, ‘but we are in haste, and the inn is far. We have no time for parleying.’

This reply only confirmed Don Quixote’s worst suspicions.

‘Stop, or you are a dead man,’ cried he in tones of thunder. ‘Tell me who you are and whither you are going, or else I will fight you all’; and with that he seized the mule by the bridle. The mule, not being used to such rough treatment, reared herself up on her hind legs, so that her rider slipped off her back. At this sight one of the other men ran to his aid, calling the knight all the ill names he could think of, which so inflamed the anger of Don Quixote that he laid about him with his spear on every side. Even Rozinante seemed to have gotten a new spirit as well as............