When we came to Don Alonso's house, they laid us very gently on to two
beds, for fear of rattling our bones, they were so bare with starving;
then with magnifying glasses they began to search all about our faces
for our eyes, and were a long time before they could find out mine,
because I had suffered most, being treated like a servant, and
consequently mine was a royal hunger. Physicians were called, who
ordered the dust should be wiped off our mouths with fox-tails, as if we
had been paintings; and indeed we looked like the picture of death; and
that we should be nourished with good broths and light meats, for fear
of overloading our weak stomachs. Who can be able to express the
rejoicing there was in our guts, the first good soup that we tasted, and
afterwards when we came to eat some fowl? All these things to them were
unknown novelties. The doctors gave order that for nine days nobody
should talk in our chamber, because our stomachs were so empty that the
least word returned an echo in them. These and such like precautions
used caused our spirits to return to us in some measure; but our jaws
were so tanned and shrivelled up that there was no stretching of them,
and therefore care was taken that they should be every day gently forced
out, and, as it were, set upon the last with the bottom of a pestle. In
a few days we got up to try our limbs, but still we looked like the
shadows of other men, and so lean and pale as if we were lineally
descended from the fathers in the desert. We spent the whole day in
praising God for having delivered us out of the clutches of the most
inhuman Cabra, and offered up our earnest prayers, that no Christian
might ever fall into that miserable thraldom. If ever, when we were
eating, we happened to think of the miserable boarding-school table, it
made us so hungry that we devoured twice as much as at any other time.
We used to tell Don Alonso, how, when Cabra sat down to table, he would
inveigh against gluttony though he never knew any thing of it in his
life; and he laughed heartily when we informed him that, in speaking of
the commandment "Thou shall not kill," he made it extend to partridges
and capons, and such other dainties as never came within his doors, and
even to killing of hunger, which he certainly counted a heinous sin, and
therefore had an aversion to all eating. We were three whole months upon
our recovery, and at the end thereof Don Alonso began to think of
sending his son to Alcalá, to finish his Humanity. He asked me whether I
would go, and I thinking I could never be far enough from that inhuman
monster of misery and famine, offered to serve his son faithfully, as
experience should show. He provided him another servant, in the nature
of steward, to look after him, and give an account of the money he sent
for his expenses, by bill upon one Julian Merluza. We put all our
equipage into a cart belonging to one Diego Monge; it consisted of a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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