knight, called the Saracen
Sir Palomides
A knight of the Round Table who is not a Christian, in love with a woman who will never have him, chasing a beast nobody can catch.
Palomides is one of Malory's most sympathetic inventions of tone: a great knight, unbaptised for most of the book, in love with Iseult, and permanently second to Tristram in every arena that matters. He inherits the quest of the Questing Beast — an animal with the noise of thirty couple of hounds in its belly, which can be pursued and never caught — from Pellinore, and it is hard not to read the beast as a comment on the rest of his life. He is eventually baptised, and reconciled with Tristram, and remains the outsider who does everything right.