WHEN they had traveled a few miles they suddenly saw thirty or forty windmills scattered over a plain. Don Quixote pulled in his horse, his eyes staring out of their sockets.
"Look, friend Sancho Panza!" he exclaimed. "Thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves! I mean to engage them all in battle and slay them; for this is righteous warfare. It is serving God to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth!"
"What giants?" asked Sancho curiously.
"Those with the long arms," replied Don Quixote.
"But, your worship," said Sancho, "those are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that make the millstones go."
Hearing his squire make such a foolish remark, Don Quixote could not quite make up his mind whether it was through ignorance, inexperience in the pursuit of adventure, or cowardice, that he spoke like that. So he suggested Sancho would better stay away and pray while he, Don Quixote, fought the giants single-handed. The honor of conquering in such an unequal combat would be so much greater for him, he thought, if he won victory all by himself.
Don Quixote made ready for the attack by commending himself to his Lady Dulcinea, and then he gave the spur to Rocinante in spite of the pleas and outcries of Sancho Panza. Just at this moment a breeze began to blow and the sails of the windmills commenced to move. The knight charged at his hack's fullest gallop, drove his spear with such force into one of the sails that the spear was shattered to pieces while the poor knight fell over the pommel of his saddle, head over heels in the air, and Rocinante fell stunned to the ground. There they rolled together on the plain, in a battered and bruised condition.
Sancho hurried to his master's side as fast as his donkey could carry him. He was worried beyond words, for he expected to find Don Quixote well nigh dead, and he was not bent on giving up all hopes of governing an island, at so early a stage. The misguided knight was unable to move. Nevertheless Sancho Panza could not resist the impulse to reprimand his master. "Did I not tell your worship so!" he admonished. But Don Quixote would hear nothing, answering in a sportsmanlike fashion:
"Hush, friend Sancho! The fortunes of war fluctuate, that's all." And then he added his suspicion that the same Sage Friston, the magician who had carried off his room of books, had turned the giants into windmills so that he would be unable to boast of having conquered them—all out of sheer envy and thirst for vengeance. What he most bewailed, however, was the loss of his lance.
With much difficulty Sancho succeeded in placing Don Quixote on his horse, and they proceeded on their way, following the road to Puerto Lapice. All the while Don Quixote was scanning the woods along the roadside for the branch of an oak-tree that he would deem a worthy substitute for his departed spear. It seemed to him as if he had read somewhere in one of his books that some knight had done such a thing in an emergency.