thinness might have passed for a quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose might have counted without missing one in the reckoning.
On this accursed bed Don Quixote stretched himself, and the hostess and her daughter soon covered him with plasters from top to toe, while Maritornes—for that was the name of the Asturian—held the light for them, and while plastering him, the hostess, observing how full of wheals Don Quixote was in some places, remarked that this had more the look of blows than of a fall.
It was not blows, Sancho said, but that the rock had many points and projections, and that each of them had left its mark.
“Pray, señora,” he added, “manage to save some tow, as there will be no want of someone to use it, for my loins too are rather sore.”
“Then you must have fallen too,” said the hostess.
“I did not fall,” said Sancho Panza, “but from the shock I got at seeing my master fall, my body aches so that I feel as if I had had a thousand thwacks.”
“That may well be,” said the young girl, “for it has many a time happened to me to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and shaken as if I had really fallen.”
“There is the point, señora,” replied Sancho Panza, “that I without dreaming at all, but being more awake than I am now, find myself with scarcely less wheals than my master, Don Quixote.”
“How is the gentleman called?” asked Maritornes the Asturian.