Adventure of the Cart of the Cortes of Death

The Adventure of the Cart of the Cortes of Death is carried forward here through two linked encounters: a generous, wine-soaked meal between squires, and a conversation in which the Knight of the Mirrors claims to have defeated Don Quixote. The shift from food and comic fellowship to disputed identity gives the episode its shape. Sancho Panza measures the world by appetite and experience; the knights measure it by reputation, enchantment, and the right to claim another man’s victories.

A Squire’s Feast

Sancho has little to eat and is plainly thirsty. The Knight of the Mirrors’s squire notices that Sancho’s spittle has grown dry and offers a remedy from the saddle: a large leather wine bottle and a pasty half a yard across. The pasty is made from a house rabbit so large that Sancho takes it for a goat, perhaps even a kid. The host presents his provisions as proof that he is no paltry squire, but Sancho’s delight is less about status than the abundance before him. He eats readily, gulping mouthfuls while comparing his own meagre stores with the feast: hard cheese, carobs, filberts, and walnuts. He blames the scarcity on his master’s rule that a knight-errant should live on dried fruit and wild herbs.

The other squire rejects that austerity as a rule for his own stomach. He carries a provision basket and wine regardless of what their masters’ chivalric laws prescribe, and treats the wine bottle almost as a beloved companion, kissing and embracing it. Sancho raises it toward his mouth, looks at the stars for a quarter of an hour while drinking, and then praises the wine in terms that amuse his host. Their shared meal briefly makes the squires’ practical needs more compelling than the knights’ elevated codes: hunger and thirst are immediate, while chivalry’s rules are something their masters may choose to obey.

Wine also gives Sancho an opportunity to display a different kind of expertise. He correctly identifies the wine as coming from Ciudad Real and says that he can judge a wine’s origin, type, flavour, soundness, and future changes by smell. To support his confidence, he recounts the inherited skill of two wine-tasters in his father’s family. One detected iron and the other cordovan leather in a cask; the owner denied that either could have affected the wine, but a small key attached to a leather thong was later found inside. The story turns Sancho’s boast into a comic demonstration of practical knowledge: his certainty may sound extravagant, yet the anecdote supplies a concrete reason to take his palate seriously.

The talk then returns to the question of whether adventure is worth pursuing. The Knight of the Mirrors’s squire suggests that they stop seeking further perils and return home, making the homely logic of bread and safety a counterweight to knight-errantry. Sancho will remain with Don Quixote until his master reaches Saragossa, but leaves what comes after undecided. Their long conversation and drinking finally overcome them. They fall asleep clinging to the nearly empty wine bottle, with half-chewed food still in their mouths, and the narrative leaves the squires there as it turns to their masters.

Casildea’s Demands

The Knight of the Mirrors explains his career as a series of ordeals imposed by his beloved, Casildea de Vandalia. He describes his passion as honourable, but says that each task has led only to another: Casildea repeatedly promises that the next labour will bring him the fulfilment he hopes for, while the demands continue to multiply. His account makes service to a beloved both an ideal and a trap, a chain of achievements whose promised reward remains out of reach.

Among the tasks he recounts are confronting La Giralda of Seville, lifting the ancient bulls of Guisando, and plunging into the cavern of Cabra to report what its depths conceal. He claims to have completed all three. At La Giralda, he says, he made the supposedly restless, changeable figure stand still, so that for more than a week only north winds blew. The contrast between that boast and the laborious, impractical nature of the other assignments makes his adventures sound at once heroic and absurd. Even after these feats, he says, Casildea’s scorn and commands remain as active as ever.

Her latest command is more sweeping: he is to travel through Spain and make every wandering knight acknowledge both her beauty and his own unmatched courage and love. The Knight of the Mirrors says he has already traversed much of the country and defeated knights who challenged his claims. He presents the alleged defeat of Don Quixote as his crowning achievement, arguing that Don Quixote’s fame has passed to him along with the victory. His reasoning depends on reputation as something transferable: to overcome the renowned knight, he claims, is to inherit the honour of all the knight’s earlier deeds.

A Disputed Victory

Don Quixote is astonished by the claim and nearly calls the Knight of the Mirrors a liar outright. Instead, he restrains himself, hoping to make his opponent expose the falsehood in his own words. He first says that the reported victory may have been over someone who merely resembled Don Quixote. The rival responds with a detailed description: a tall, gaunt man with long limbs, greying hair, a hooked aquiline nose, and large drooping black moustaches, who fights under the name of the Countenance. He also identifies Sancho Panza as the man’s peasant squire, Rocinante as his famous horse, and Dulcinea del Toboso as the lady of his devotion, adding that she was once called Aldonza Lorenzo.

The precision of these details makes the disagreement harder to dismiss as a simple mistake. Don Quixote acknowledges that the description points to the very man he knows, but calls that man his greatest friend and says he regards him almost as himself. He therefore holds two explanations in tension: the Knight of the Mirrors seems to have encountered Don Quixote, yet Don Quixote believes it impossible that the true knight could have been defeated in the manner described. Enchanters, he says, may have taken his friend’s shape so that another person could be vanquished in his place and his earned fame stolen.

Don Quixote connects this explanation to his recent belief that enchanters transformed Dulcinea into a mean village girl. In his account, the apparent change in her appearance and the rival’s claim to have beaten him belong to the same pattern of hostile magical interference. The conversation thus moves beyond a quarrel over who won: it tests the boundary between observable identity and the explanations Don Quixote uses to preserve his chivalric world. He ends by offering to defend the real Don Quixote himself, on foot or horseback, and turns the rival’s disputed story toward an immediate challenge of arms.

Comic Contrast and Narrative Stakes

The episode places two kinds of credibility side by side. Sancho’s wine story rests on a hidden object discovered in a cask; the Knight of the Mirrors’s account rests on a chain of feats and on his interpretation of what victory entitles him to claim. Don Quixote, in turn, answers physical evidence with the possibility of enchantment. These contrasts do not make every practical judgment automatically true or every chivalric account automatically false; instead, they show how appetite, experience, fame, and belief furnish different standards for making sense of events.

The transition from the sleeping squires to the alert knights also changes the scale of the scene. A bottle and a pasty settle the squires into exhausted fellowship, while a contested name, a claimed inheritance of honour, and a proposed fight set the knights against one another. Sancho’s promise to continue only as far as Saragossa quietly marks a limit to his service, even as Don Quixote’s challenge renews the momentum of his adventures. The episode’s comedy therefore carries a consequential turn: the rival’s boast forces Don Quixote to defend both his identity and the reputation he believes enchanters are trying to take from him.