e was,
waiting for day, and it was not long before the countenance of the fair
Aurora began to show itself at the balconies of the east, gladdening the
grass and flowers, if not the ear, though to gladden that too there came
at the same moment a sound of clarions and drums, and a din of bells, and
a tramp, tramp, and cries of "Clear the way there!" of some runners, that
seemed to issue from the city.

The dawn made way for the sun that with a face broader than a buckler
began to rise slowly above the low line of the horizon; Don Quixote and
Sancho gazed all round them; they beheld the sea, a sight until then
unseen by them; it struck them as exceedingly spacious and broad, much
more so than the lakes of Ruidera which they had seen in La Mancha. They
saw the galleys along the beach, which, lowering their awnings, displayed
themselves decked with streamers and pennons that trembled in the breeze
and kissed and swept the water, while on board the bugles, trumpets, and
clarions were sounding and filling the air far and near with melodious
warlike notes. Then they began to move and execute a kind of skirmish
upon the calm water, while a vast number of horsemen on fine horses and
in showy liveries, issuing from the city, engaged on their side in a
somewhat similar movement. The soldiers on board the galleys kept up a
ceaseless fire, which they on the walls and forts of the city returned,
and the heavy cannon rent the air with the tremendous noise they made, to
which the gangway guns of the galleys replied. The bright sea, the
smiling earth, the clear air--though at times darkened by the smoke of
the guns--all seemed to fill the whole multitude with unexpected delight.
Sancho could not make out how it was that those great masses that moved
over the sea had so many feet.

And now the horsemen in livery came galloping up with shouts and
outlandish cries and cheers to where Don Quixote stood amazed and
wondering; and one of them, he to whom Roque had sent word, addressing
him exclaimed, "Welcome to our city, mirror, beacon, star and cynosure of
all knight-errantry in its widest extent! Welcome, I say, valiant Don
Quixote of La Mancha; not the false, the fictitious, the apocryphal, that
these latter days have offered us in lying histories, but the true, the
legitimate, the real one that Cide Hamete Benengeli, flower of
historians, has described to us!"

Don Quixote made no answer, nor did the horsemen wait for one, but
wheeling