Enchantment of Montesinos and his companions

The enchantment of Montesinos and his companions is the captivity Don Quixote claims to witness beneath the Cave of Montesinos: Merlin has confined a legendary company in a crystal palace, preserving their grief and turning some of them into features of the landscape. Its significance lies not only in the strange fate of those prisoners but also in the story’s unsettled truth. Don Quixote presents their confinement as a possible occasion for his own heroic intervention, while Cide Hamete Benengeli declines to certify that the cave vision happened as reported.

The Enchanted Company

Don Quixote places the company in a palace of crystal, within a remarkably cool chamber of alabaster. There he sees Durandarte, not as a sculpted figure but as a man of flesh and bone, stretched upon a marble tomb with one hand resting over his heart. Montesinos explains that Merlin has enchanted both Durandarte and many others. He cannot say why the enchantment began, or how it might end; he can only suspect that the time of release may be near.

The imprisonment preserves a contradiction at its center. Durandarte is dead: Montesinos says he died in his cousin’s arms, and that Montesinos removed his heart in fulfillment of a final request that it be carried to Belerma. Yet Durandarte still groans and sighs as though alive. Montesinos cannot reconcile the apparent signs of life with the death he remembers. The enchantment thus suspends not just its captives but the distinction between a past event and an ongoing condition: Durandarte is at once a dead knight, a speaking prisoner, and the object of continuing mourning.

Montesinos recounts that he wrapped the heart, wiped it with a lace handkerchief, and salted it at the first village after leaving Roncesvalles so that it would keep on the journey to France. In the palace, the heart remains the material focus of Durandarte’s remembered request and Belerma’s grief. Its preservation gives the old story a stubborn physical object: time has passed, but the token of the lovers’ separation is still carried and mourned.

Mourning and Transformation

Belerma appears at the head of a procession of attendants. The damsels wear mourning clothes and white turbans; Belerma herself wears black and carries a cloth holding what Don Quixote takes to be the dried, preserved heart. Montesinos says that she and her attendants make this procession four days a week, singing—or, more accurately, weeping—dirges for Durandarte. Her altered appearance, he explains, reflects the long hardship of enchantment and grief, rather than the beauty for which she is celebrated.

That explanation brings Belerma into direct comparison with Dulcinea del Toboso, and Don Quixote immediately resists it. He insists that the two women should not be measured against one another; Montesinos apologizes for the comparison and declares his deference to Don Quixote’s lady. The exchange briefly shifts attention from the imprisoned lovers to Don Quixote’s own ideals. Even within a scene of ancient sorrow, he treats the defense of Dulcinea’s unique status as a matter demanding correction.

The enchantment also supplies an origin story for features of the living landscape. Montesinos says Merlin, out of compassion for their tears, changed Ruidera, her seven daughters, and two nieces into the Lakes of Ruidera. The seven daughters are associated with the kings of Spain, and the nieces with the Order of Saint John. Their tears do not end with the transformation: they become waters that continue to flow into the world outside the cave.

Guadiana, Durandarte’s squire, undergoes another transformation. Changed into the Guadiana River, he emerges into the sunlight but, overcome by grief at leaving his master, plunges back underground. He returns intermittently to the surface and continues toward Portugal, joined by water from the lakes. In Montesinos’s account, the river’s course preserves the squire’s sorrow; the landscape beyond the palace becomes an extension of the company’s captivity rather than evidence that it has ended.

The Promise of Release

Montesinos identifies Don Quixote as the great knight foretold by Merlin and suggests that, through his intervention, the enchanted company may be freed. The prediction gives the episode a forward-looking purpose: the cave’s prisoners are not merely a display of legendary history but possible beneficiaries of the knight-errant’s actions. Yet no release occurs in the account. Durandarte answers Montesinos’s hope with resignation, and the company remains enclosed within the story Don Quixote tells.

The scene’s language also becomes material for Sancho Panza’s practical and comic learning. After the cave adventure, he says that he has gained knowledge of the cave and the transformations associated with Guadiana and the lakes, which he can use in a work he calls his Spanish Ovid. He also treats Durandarte’s remark about patience and shuffling as evidence that cards were known in the age of Charlemagne, a conclusion he intends to use in a proposed supplement on antiquities. The enchanted story therefore produces a second kind of consequence: Sancho converts its marvels into supposed historical learning and literary projects.

Doubt and the Captivity Motif

Cide Hamete Benengeli’s marginal comment unsettles the episode’s authority. He says that the preceding adventures have seemed possible and probable, but that the cave account exceeds reasonable bounds. He cannot accept that Don Quixote would lie, yet he finds the story’s elaborate detail difficult to reconcile with fabrication. Rather than decide between truth and falsehood, he leaves the judgment to the reader. He further reports that, at the end of his life, Don Quixote was said to have withdrawn the story and admitted inventing it to fit the adventures in his books. That report is itself presented as something people say, not as an independently confirmed explanation.

The uncertainty resonates with the novel’s other accounts of captivity, without making them identical to this imagined enchantment. The Captive’s Tale describes Christian prisoners in Algiers, including a ransom system in which captives could be held in a bano, and an escape planned with a renegade and Zoraida. Separately, Cervantes’s biography records his capture by Algerine galleys in 1575 and his release in 1580 after a ransom was raised. Those accounts concern historical or narrated imprisonment, negotiation, labor, and escape; Montesinos’s company belongs to a legendary vision whose truth the historian explicitly questions. Read alongside them, the cave episode enlarges the novel’s recurring concern with confinement while withholding the reassurance of a verifiable escape.