Before our intrepid adventurer is left for good—if not for dead—because of one affair or other (forgive the gloss; how tolerant a reader must be!), she lives with her beloved and a beloved small pool that has to be cleaned out weekly or it succumbs to algae, and this can only be achieved—because of the lack of a filtering system, indeed because of the lack of electricity—by emptying the pool into fields of fruit trees and refilling it again with the ice cold clear waters of the aquifer of Alayor, on Menorca.
On cloudy days, they drive to the other side of the island, to Ciudadela, calling themselves Sister Cerveza and Sister Dudella because, if they find any money on the beach, they will treat themselves to the local beer in a bar, with an air of nobility to mask the poverty they have sunk to by handing over their last escudos to an old friend for a place to live while they think.
The adventure there involves crossing and recrossing giant stone outcroppings of mysterious origin, reached by parking and hiking the rest of the way. It has been proven scientifically that there is no way for a people to have built these massive taulas, as they are known, without machinery, which didn't exist. They are heads taller than the noble, downtrodden, and wayward who come to see them, and are arranged in spirited, ambiguous designs to infer variously ceremony, imprisonment, shelter, and defense.
The ones that the adventurer feels are defensive she reads as ceremonial, for weddings, funerals, and the receiving of guests. She is aware that the tremendous, tremulous winds, constant and interrogating, have deranged her senses, in a not entirely unpleasant way, and the world is strange. They investigate the huge blocks of precarious massive granite as they travel the roadway every week. They take as their mission to find all the ones on the map.
At this point they caught sight of thirty or forty windmills which were standing on the plain there, and no sooner had Don Quixote laid eyes upon them then he turned to his squire and said, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished; for you see there before you, friend Sancho Panza, some thirty or more lawless giants with whom I mean to do battle. I shall deprive them of their lives, and with the spoils from this encounter, we shall begin to enrich ourselves; for this is righteous warfare, and it is a great service to God to remove so accursed a breed from the face of the earth."
"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.
"Those that you see there," replied his master, "those with the long arms some of which are as much as two leagues in length."
The adventurer has not a scintilla of trouble seeing the giants, because nightly she makes the cocktail of the region, the gin of the Menorcans, blended with the grapefruit juice of their orchard, with ice, and a squirt of a lemon likewise from their orchard, and sips. She and her girl friend sip without regard to duty or money, and praise the orchard and the garden and the shade trees and the animals which now shelter and comfort them. Praise and sip.
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