The Adventure of the Lions — Don Quixote

When Don Quixote calls for his helmet, Sancho is buying curds from shepherds and, not knowing where else to put them, pours them into the helmet before handing it over. Quixote thrusts it on in haste, and whey runs down his face until he discovers the white mash and roars that Sancho has filled his helmet with curds. Sancho blames enchanters who persecute him as a limb of his master, and Diego de Miranda watches the scene with growing amazement.

A cart flying royal flags approaches, carrying caged lions bound as a gift from the governor of Oran to the King. Diego assumes it is royal treasure; Quixote treats it as adventure summoned for him alone. He orders the keeper to open the cages and turn the beasts loose in the plain, saying he is ready to try conclusions with Satan himself. Diego urges knightly prudence; Sancho weeps and points through the bars to the paw of a real lion bigger than a mountain. The carter unyokes his mules, everyone flees, and Quixote dismounts to fight on foot rather than risk Rocinante's panic.

The narrator breaks into praise of Quixote standing alone with a plain sword before Africa's fiercest lions. The keeper opens the first cage under protest; the enormous lion stretches, yawns, looks around, then turns its hind-quarters to Quixote and lies down again. Quixote demands the keeper provoke it; the keeper refuses. Quixote accepts the victory of having challenged his enemy and waited on the field, then has the event certified and signals the fugitives back with the cloth he used to wipe off the curds.

Sancho learns the lion never came out; Quixote declares enchantments cannot prevail against true valour and renames himself the Knight of the Lions. Diego, who has not read the printed first part of the history, decides Quixote is by turns rational and mad. Quixote answers with a long defence of knight-errantry and valour as the virtue between cowardice and temerity, arguing it is better to lose by a card too many than by one too few. Diego finds the speech proved by reason itself, and by two in the afternoon they reach his village.