but perhaps it may prove something different from what we apprehend.” The men on horseback now came up, and raising their lances surrounded Don Quixote in silence, and pointed them at his back and breast, menacing him with death. One of those on foot, putting his finger to his lips as a sign to him to be silent, seized Rocinante’s bridle and drew him out of the road, and the others driving Sancho and Dapple before them, and all maintaining a strange silence, followed in the steps of the one who led Don Quixote. The latter two or three times attempted to ask where they were taking him to and what they wanted, but the instant he began to open his lips they threatened to close them with the points of their lances; and Sancho fared the same way, for the moment he seemed about to speak one of those on foot punched him with a goad, and Dapple likewise, as if he too wanted to talk. Night set in, they quickened their pace, and the fears of the two prisoners grew greater, especially as they heard themselves assailed with⁠—“Get on, ye Troglodytes;” “Silence, ye barbarians;” “March, ye cannibals;” “No murmuring, ye Scythians;” “Don’t open your eyes, ye murderous Polyphemes, ye bloodthirsty lions,” and suchlike names with which their captors harassed the ears of the wretched master and man.