ER LXI.

OF WHAT HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE ON ENTERING BARCELONA, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
MATTERS THAT PARTAKE OF THE TRUE RATHER THAN OF THE INGENIOUS

Don Quixote passed three days and three nights with Roque, and had he
passed three hundred years he would have found enough to observe and
wonder at in his mode of life. At daybreak they were in one spot, at
dinner-time in another; sometimes they fled without knowing from whom, at
other times they lay in wait, not knowing for what. They slept standing,
breaking their slumbers to shift from place to place. There was nothing
but sending out spies and scouts, posting sentinels and blowing the
matches of harquebusses, though they carried but few, for almost all used
flintlocks. Roque passed his nights in some place or other apart from his
men, that they might not know where he was, for the many proclamations
the viceroy of Barcelona had issued against his life kept him in fear and
uneasiness, and he did not venture to trust anyone, afraid that even his
own men would kill him or deliver him up to the authorities; of a truth,
a weary miserable life! At length, by unfrequented roads, short cuts, and
secret paths, Roque, Don Quixote, and Sancho, together with six squires,
set out for Barcelona. They reached the strand on Saint John's Eve during
the night; and Roque, after embracing Don Quixote and Sancho (to whom he
presented the ten crowns he had promised but had not until then given),
left them with many expressions of good-will on both sides.

Roque went back, while Don Quixote remained on horseback, just as he was,
waiting for day, and it was not long before the countenance of the fair
Aurora began to show itself at the balconies of the east, gladdening the
grass and flowers, if not the ear, though to gladden that too there came
at the same moment a sound of clarions and drums, and a din of bells, and
a tramp, tramp, and cries of "Clear the way there!" of some runners, that
seemed to issue from the city.

The dawn made way for the sun that with a face broader than a buckler
began to rise slowly above the low line of the horizon; Don Quixote and
Sancho gazed all round them; they beheld the sea, a sight until then
unseen by them; it struck them as exceedingly spacious and broad, much
more so than the lakes of Ruidera which they had seen in La Mancha. They
saw the galleys along the beach, which, lowering their awnings, displayed
themselves decked with streamers and pennons that tre