The Cave of Montesinos — Don Quixote

Basilio and Quiteria honour Don Quixote for three days, and he justifies Basilio's wedding trick as deception aimed at virtuous ends while preaching marriage, poverty, and honour to the poor newlyweds. Sancho mutters that his master could take two pulpits on each finger, and they learn the sham wound was Basilio's own device, not Quiteria's plot.

A licentiate's cousin, a humanist compiling books on liveries, burlesque Ovid, and who first had a cold, guides them toward Montesinos and the lakes of Ruidera. Sancho asks who first scratched his head and who was the first tumbler; when the scholar cannot say, Sancho answers Lucifer falling from heaven, and Don Quixote warns that some learned proofs are not worth a farthing once known.

They spend a pleasant day on the road, buy a hundred fathoms of rope at a hamlet two leagues from the cave, and reach a mouth so choked with brambles that Quixote must cut his way in with his sword while crows burst out and knock him down. Sancho begs Don Quixote not to bury himself alive like a bottle in a well, but they tie him and lower him after he prays to Dulcinea. The rope goes slack until they haul up an apparently sleeping knight, who wakes lamenting Montesinos, Durandarte, Belerma, and the daughters of Ruidera, refuses to call the place hell, eats hungrily, and ends by saying, "Let no one rise, and attend to me, my sons," as the vision's narration is about to begin.