🏇Don Quixote🫏 by Miguel de Cervantes✒️Story Retold by ✒️Guru Gurunay🗡️

Don Quixote is one of the most delightful and touching tales ever written. Let me tell it as if we are sitting together and recalling the strange adventures of a dreamer.

There lived a thin, elderly gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who had developed a strange habit. He spent all his days and nights reading old romances about knights, stories full of heroic battles, enchanted castles, noble ladies, and daring adventures. Gradually these tales filled his mind so completely that he began to believe they were real.

At last, he made a bold and extraordinary decision: he would become a knight himself.

He polished an old suit of rusty armor that had belonged to his ancestors, found a skinny old horse, and proudly named it Rocinante. 

Then he chose a grand name for himself—Don Quixote, Knight of La Mancha. And because every knight must serve a lady, he selected a simple peasant girl from a nearby village and imagined her to be a noble princess. In his mind she became Dulcinea del Toboso, the lady of his heart. As all knights must have a squire, he roped in a simple farmer, named Sancho Panza, good humoured but practical. Sancho joined him in his second set of adventures although.

Thus armed with dreams and illusions, Don Quixote rode out into the world to seek adventure.

On his very first journey he arrived at a roadside inn, but in his imagination it appeared to be a magnificent castle. The puzzled innkeeper, amused by the strange old man, humored him and pretended to perform a ceremony making him a knight. 

Soon after, Don Quixote tried to rescue a boy whom a farmer was whipping. He forced the farmer to promise kindness, but the moment Don Quixote rode away, the farmer punished the boy even more severely. 

A little later he met a group of merchants and demanded that they declare the unmatched beauty of Dulcinea. The merchants laughed at him, and Don Quixote was beaten and left bruised on the road until neighbors carried him back home.

All such defeats could not extinguish his dream. Soon he set out again, this time accompanied by a good-natured peasant named Sancho Panza, who agreed to serve as his squire in the hope of becoming governor of an island someday. Sancho was practical and sensible, but he admired his master's courage and faithfully followed him wherever he went.

Together they wandered across countryside, and everywhere Don Quixote saw adventure. One day he saw a field of windmills turning slowly in the wind. But Don Quixote did not see windmills, he saw giant monsters waving their enormous arms. Without hesitation he lowered his lance and charged. The spinning sails struck him and knocked him violently to the ground. As Sancho helped him up, Don Quixote insisted that an evil magician must have turned the giants into windmills at the last moment.

Their journey continued with one strange incident after another. Don Quixote attacked monks whom he believed were evil sorcerers kidnapping a princess. He mistook a barber’s shaving basin for the legendary golden helmet of Mambrino and proudly wore it as a priceless treasure. 

At one point he freed a chain of prisoners being marched to the galleys, believing he was performing a noble deed. Yet the very prisoners he rescued soon robbed him and fled.

Many nights they stopped at inns which Don Quixote always imagined to be castles. Fights broke out, misunderstandings multiplied, and more than once both knight and squire were beaten soundly by angry travellers or muleteers.

At times Don Quixote’s madness took stranger forms. In the lonely mountains he performed acts of penance and wild devotion in honor of Dulcinea, whom he imagined to be under a terrible enchantment.

Meanwhile his friends from the village, worried about his condition, tried to trick him into returning home.

Yet Don Quixote continued his wandering adventures. He bravely challenged a caged lion, demanding that the beast come out and fight him, though the lion merely yawned and refused to move. At another time he destroyed a puppet show, believing he was rescuing real knights and princesses from danger.

As for Sancho, the promise of an island came true in a curious way. As part of a practical joke played by a duke and duchess who had heard of Don Quixote’s fame, Sancho was made governor of a mock island.

Surprisingly, the simple peasant governed wisely and fairly, solving disputes with great common sense. But the responsibilities became too exhausting, and he soon gave up the post to return to his wandering master.

After many such adventures, comic, absurd, and sometimes touching, Don Quixote finally met a mysterious knight known as the Knight of the White Moon. In a duel on the beach he was defeated and forced to promise that he would abandon knight-errantry and return home.

Broken in body and spirit, Don Quixote returned to his village. There he fell ill, and slowly the fever of his imagination left him. At last he realized that his life as a wandering knight had been an illusion born from too many books.

Once again he became simply Alonso Quixano.Peacefully, with friends gathered around him, he renounced his dreams of chivalry and soon afterward passed away.

And yet the world has never forgotten him, for though Don Quixote was foolish, he possessed something rare: a heart that believed in honor, courage, and noble ideals even when the world mocked him. For that reason the thin knight of La Mancha still rides through literature, reminding us that sometimes a little madness is the price of great dreams @✒️ GG 🗡️