What I saw in the Cave of Montesinos

Every knight who has read his books knows the Cave of Montesinos, near the lakes of Ruidera, where the great Montesinos is said to have lived since the days of Charlemagne. I had long wished to see it. After Camacho's wedding, the bridegroom Basilio found us a guide: a cousin of a fencing master, a learned young man who writes books for the printers. He was then at work on a volume called The Metamorphoses of Spain.

In the last village before the cave we bought a hundred fathoms of rope. Sancho asked what I meant to do with it. I said I meant to go down. He asked whether I had thought of coming up.

01 The descent

The mouth of the cave is wide but so choked with brambles, fig trees and wild thorn that you cannot see into it. They tied the rope round my waist, over my doublet. I drew my sword and began to cut away the undergrowth at the entrance, and at once a great cloud of crows and jackdaws came flying out of the dark, so many and so fast that they knocked me flat on my back.

I knelt and asked heaven's help, and Dulcinea's, and said that I was going down to see with my own eyes whether the tales of this place were true. Then they let me down. Sancho crossed me so many times I feared for his wrist, and called after me that he would wait as long as it took, provided it did not take past supper.

They paid out the rope fathom after fathom, and I called up to them as long as I could, and then I could not. They told me afterwards that when the rope was all paid out they waited half an hour and then hauled, and that for a long while it came up so easily that they feared I had been left behind. At about eighty fathoms they felt my weight, and at last they drew me out, and found me fast asleep.

They woke me with some difficulty. I opened my eyes and looked round at them like a man returning from a far country, which is precisely what I was. I told them that they had taken me from the most delightful life and the most beautiful sight any man ever saw. Then I ate, and told them everything.

02 The crystal palace

Some twelve or fourteen fathoms down there is a hollow in the right-hand wall, big enough to take a cart and its mules, lit by a little light that filters in through cracks from above. I stopped there to rest, coiled the rope that was still being let down, and sat thinking how I might go further without anyone to hold it. While I was thinking, a deep sleep came over me; and when I woke, I found myself in the middle of the loveliest meadow nature ever made or the human imagination could invent.

Before me rose a royal palace whose walls seemed to be built of clear crystal. The great doors opened and out came a venerable old man in a long hooded cloak of purple serge that trailed on the ground. Across his chest he wore a scholar's sash of green satin, and on his head a black Milanese cap; his beard was white and reached below his waist; he held a rosary whose beads were bigger than walnuts, and the tenth ones as big as ostrich eggs. He embraced me and told me that he was Montesinos, and that the enchanted dwellers of this place had been waiting a long time for me to come and bring news of them to the world.

He led me into the palace, into a hall that was cool as a church, and there on a marble tomb lay a knight of flesh and bone, not carved, with his right hand, which was large, sinewy and covered in hair, laid over his heart. This was Durandarte, flower of the knights of his age, who died at Roncesvalles. Montesinos told me that, at Durandarte's dying request, he had cut the heart out of his friend's breast with a little dagger and carried it to his lady Belerma; and that, having to travel some distance, he had salted it so that it would arrive in a fit state to be presented. It was Merlin, the great enchanter of France, who had shut them all up here. And as he said this, Durandarte cried out in a loud voice from the tomb, reminding Montesinos of the promise he had made; then, when Montesinos said he had kept it, the dead knight sighed, turned on his side, and said that he must be patient and shuffle the cards.

Patience, and shuffle the cards: the best advice I have ever heard from a dead man.

Then through the crystal walls I saw a procession of damsels in mourning, two by two, with white turbans in the Turkish fashion, and behind them a lady also in black, with a turban so large it reached the ground. She carried in her hands a fine linen cloth, and in the cloth a dried, mummified heart. Montesinos told me this was Belerma, who passes four days a week in that procession lamenting her knight. He said that if she was not as beautiful as fame reported, it was the fault of her grief and the hard nights she had passed, and not of any defect in her. I said that no lady should be compared with Dulcinea in any case.

He told me also that Durandarte's squire Guadiana had been turned into the river of that name, which flows underground for many leagues out of sorrow before it consents to show itself to the sun, and that the dueña Ruidera and her seven daughters and two nieces had been made into the lakes that bear her name.

03 Dulcinea in the meadow

Now comes the part that I knew Sancho would not believe, and which I nonetheless told, because a knight must tell everything. Montesinos showed me, in the meadow outside, three country girls leaping and frisking like young goats. I knew them at once. The first was my lady Dulcinea, in the very shape in which the enchanters had shown her to me on the road outside El Toboso, and the others were the two girls who rode with her. I called to her; she did not answer, but turned her back and ran off so fast that a crossbow bolt could not have caught her.

Then one of her two companions came up to me, with tears in her eyes, and said in a low voice that her lady kissed my hands and begged me to be good enough to lend her six reales on the security of a new dimity petticoat which she had brought with her, for she was in great need. I was much moved. I said I had only four reales on me. These I gave her. I told her to tell her mistress that I would not rest until I had freed her, and that the money was a loan of no importance to so great a creditor. The girl, instead of curtseying, cut a caper two yards into the air and was gone.

04 What Sancho says

The cousin said that I had been gone only a little over half an hour. I said I had spent three days below and seen night fall and day break three times. He wrote this down in his notebook and said he would put the cave in his book either way. Sancho asked how I could have had three days and three nights in half an hour, and I told him that enchantments make time run differently, as anyone who has read the books knows. He asked whether the enchanted ate. I said no. He asked whether they slept. I said no.

When I came to Dulcinea and the six reales, Sancho went a curious colour and then began to laugh so hard that he had to hold on to Dapple's neck to stay standing. He said that God forgive me, but the people down there had muddled my wits, and that he had never heard a tale so full of holes. I understand why he laughed. He knows, better than anyone, the truth of what happened on the road outside El Toboso, and to hear that the enchanters had kept my lady in that same shape must have struck him very hard.

Still, I will admit this much. I have since asked an ape that tells fortunes whether the things I saw in the cave were true or a dream, and the ape said that some were true and some were false. I am content with that. The true part was the important part, and as for the false, there is a dimity petticoat somewhere in La Mancha that owes me four reales, and I shall collect it when my lady is free.

Read nextA palace in El TobosoHow my lady came to be enchanted in the first place.

Cide Hamete, I know your pen may hesitate at this chapter. Let it not. Write what I saw, and let the reader decide; but warn him that the reader, too, has never been down a hundred fathoms of rope.