c. 1308-1320 2026
This is an AI modernization of Inferno into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and thrown out of it in 1302. He had been away in Rome on an embassy when his faction lost the city; the new government fined him, exiled him, and ruled that if he ever came back he would be burned alive. He never came back. He wrote this poem in other men's houses in other men's towns, and died at Ravenna in 1321 without seeing Florence again.
The Inferno is the first of its three parts. A man of thirty-five, lost in a wood, is found by the ghost of Virgil, who has been sent to lead him down through Hell and out the other side. It is set in Holy Week of the year 1300, two years before the exile, which lets the dead keep telling Dante what is about to happen to him. He wrote it in Tuscan Italian instead of Latin, which was not what a serious poem was written in, and that decision is a large part of why Italians today speak Italian. He called the whole thing a Comedy. Divine was added by admirers later.
What makes it unlike other visions of the afterlife is that it is full of people the author knew or could have met. Popes, neighbours, bankers, his own former teacher, the man who betrayed the city — all named, all still arguing about Florentine politics, all certain they were in the right. Francesca explains how she and her husband's brother were caught, and blames the book they were reading. Ulysses describes sailing out past Gibraltar. Ugolino describes eight days locked in a tower with his sons and then stops.
The tone changes as the funnel narrows, and it is worth knowing that in advance. The upper circles are sad and courteous. The middle is slapstick — three cantos of demons who cheat each other and fall in the pitch, ending on a joke about a trumpet. The bottom is flat, cold and very quiet. Readers who expect one solemn register the whole way down will think something has gone wrong; nothing has.
This is a translation from the Italian, complete, keeping the shape Dante built: thirty-four cantos, 4,720 lines, three-line stanzas in the same number and order. The rhyme is not attempted, because his interlocking triple rhyme cannot be carried into English without padding, and padding is the one thing a poem this compressed cannot take. The Inferno is one third of one poem, and the other two thirds, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, are in this collection as separate volumes. The last word of each of them is stars.
Midway through the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way had been lost.
How hard it is to say what that wood was — wild, rough, relentless — the very thought of it brings the fear back!
It is so bitter that death is hardly worse; but to tell of the good I found there I will tell the other things I saw.
I cannot rightly say how I came to be in it, I was so full of sleep at the moment when I left the true road.
But when I had come to the foot of a hill, there where the valley ended that had pierced my heart with fear,
I looked up and saw its shoulders already wearing the rays of the planet that leads us straight on every road.
Then the fear grew a little quieter that had lasted in the lake of my heart through the night I spent in such misery.
And as a man with labouring breath, having escaped the deep water to the shore, turns back to the dangerous water and stares,
so my mind, which was still running, turned back to look again at the pass that has never yet let anyone through alive.
After I had rested my tired body a little I took the empty slope again, so that my firm foot was always the lower.
And there, almost at the start of the climb, was a leopard, quick and very light, covered in a spotted hide;
and she would not go from in front of my face — she blocked my way so completely that I turned again and again to go back.
It was the beginning of the morning, and the sun was climbing with the stars that were with him when divine love
first set those beautiful things in motion; so the beast with her bright hide gave me good reason to hope,
and so did the hour and the sweet season; but not enough to keep me from fear when a lion appeared in front of me.
He seemed to be coming straight at me, his head high, in a raging hunger, so that the air itself seemed to tremble.
And a she-wolf, who in all her leanness seemed loaded with every craving, and has made many people live in misery —
she pressed so much weight on me with the fear that came out of her look that I lost all hope of the height.
And as a man who is glad to be gaining, when the time comes that makes him lose, weeps and grieves in all his thoughts,
so the restless beast made me: coming against me, little by little, she drove me back to where the sun is silent.
While I was falling back to that low place someone appeared before my eyes who seemed faint from a long silence.
When I saw him in that great wilderness I cried out to him, "Have pity on me, whatever you are — a shadow, or a living man!"
He answered: "Not a man; I was a man once. My parents were Lombards, both of them Mantuans by birth.
I was born under Julius, though late in his time, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the days of the false and lying gods.
I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilion was burned.
But why are you going back to so much trouble? Why do you not climb the delightful mountain that is the beginning and the cause of all joy?"
"Then are you that Virgil, that spring that pours out so broad a river of speech?" I answered him, my forehead full of shame.
"O light and honour of all the other poets, let my long study count for me, and the great love that made me search your book.
You are my master and my author. You alone are the one I took from the beautiful style that has done me honour.
Look at the beast that turned me back; help me against her, famous sage — she makes my veins and my pulses shake."
"You will have to go by another road," he answered, when he saw me weeping, "if you want to get out of this wild place;
because this beast you are crying out about lets nobody pass along her way, but blocks him so far that she kills him;
and her nature is so vicious and so evil that her greedy appetite is never filled, and after feeding she is hungrier than before.
Many are the animals she mates with, and there will be more, until the Hound comes, and puts her to death in pain.
He will not feed on land or money but on wisdom, love and courage, and he will be born between felt and felt.
He will be the salvation of that low Italy for which the virgin Camilla died, and Euryalus, and Turnus, and Nisus, of their wounds.
He will hunt her through every town until he has put her back into Hell, out of which envy first let her loose.
So for your own good I think and judge that you should follow me; I will be your guide, and take you out of here through an eternal place,
where you will hear the screaming of despair and see the ancient spirits in their pain, every one of them crying for the second death;
and you will see the ones who are content in the fire, because they hope to come, whenever it may be, among the blessed.
And if you want to climb up to them after that, there will be a soul worthier than I am for it: I will leave you with her when I go;
because that Emperor who reigns up there, since I was a rebel against His law, does not want anyone brought to His city by me.
He governs everywhere and rules there; there is His city and His high seat: how happy is the man He chooses for it!"
And I said to him: "Poet, I beg you by that God you never knew, so that I may escape this evil and worse,
take me where you have just said, so that I may see Saint Peter's gate and the ones you make so sorrowful."
Then he set out, and I kept close behind him.
The day was going, and the darkening air was taking the animals that are on earth out of their labours; and I, alone,
was making ready to bear the war both of the road and of the pity, which memory, that does not err, will set down.
O Muses, O high genius, help me now; O memory that wrote down what I saw, here your nobility will show.
I began: "Poet, you who are my guide, look at my strength, whether it is enough, before you trust me to the deep crossing.
You say that the father of Silvius, still able to be corrupted, went into the immortal world, and in the body.
So, if the adversary of all evil was courteous to him, considering the great effect that was to come out of him, and who and what he was,
that does not seem unworthy to a man of understanding; for in the highest heaven he was chosen to father gracious Rome and her empire:
and the city and the empire, to tell the truth, were established for the holy place where the successor of the greater Peter sits.
On that journey, which you give him credit for, he heard things that were the cause of his victory and of the papal mantle.
Later the Chosen Vessel went there, to bring back strength for that faith which is the beginning of the road to salvation.
But I — why should I come? Who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; neither I nor anyone else believes me worthy of it.
So if I give myself up to going, I am afraid the going may be folly. You are wise; you see it better than I can argue it."
And like a man who un-wants what he wanted, and changes his purpose with new thoughts so that he draws right back from beginning,
that is what I became on that dark slope: by thinking, I used up the undertaking that had been so quick at the start.
"If I have understood your words rightly," answered that shade of the great soul, "your spirit is hurt by cowardice,
which burdens a man so often that it turns him back from an honourable undertaking, the way a false sight turns a beast that shies.
So that you may free yourself of this fear, I will tell you why I came, and what I heard at the first moment I felt sorry for you.
I was among those who are suspended, and a lady called me, blessed and beautiful, so beautiful that I asked her to command me.
Her eyes shone brighter than the morning star; and she began to speak to me, gentle and quiet, with an angel's voice, in her own speech:
'O courteous Mantuan soul, whose fame still lasts in the world, and will last as long as the world lasts,
my friend — and no friend of fortune — is so blocked on the empty slope that he has turned back in fear;
and I am afraid he may already be so lost that I have risen too late to help him, from what I have heard of him in heaven.
Go now, and with your ornamented speech, and with whatever is needed for his escape, help him, so that I may be comforted.
I am Beatrice, who send you; I come from the place I long to return to; love moved me, and makes me speak.
When I stand before my Lord again, I will praise you to him often.' Then she fell silent, and I began:
"O lady of virtue, the one thing by which the human race goes beyond everything held inside the heaven whose circles are the smallest,
your command so pleases me that obeying, even if it were done already, would be late; you need do no more than tell me what you want.
But tell me the reason why you do not shrink from coming down here into this centre from the wide place you burn to go back to."
'Since you want to know so far in,' she answered me, 'I will tell you briefly why I am not afraid to come in here.
One should be afraid only of those things that have the power to do harm; of the rest, no — they are not frightening.
God in his mercy has made me such that your misery does not touch me, and no flame of this burning attacks me.
There is a gentle lady in heaven who grieves at this obstacle where I am sending you, so that she breaks hard judgement up there.
She called Lucia, and made her request, and said: "Now your faithful one has need of you, and I commend him to you."
Lucia, the enemy of everything cruel, rose and came to the place where I was, sitting with the ancient Rachel.
She said: "Beatrice, true praise of God, why do you not help the man who loved you so much that for you he left the common crowd?
Do you not hear the pity in his weeping? Do you not see the death fighting him on that flood the sea itself cannot boast over?"
Nobody in the world was ever as quick to seek their own good or to run from their own harm as I was, once those words had been spoken,
to come down here from my blessed seat, trusting in your honest speech, which honours you and everyone who has heard it.'
After she had said this to me, she turned her shining eyes away, weeping, which made me the quicker to come.
And I came to you as she wanted: I took you out from in front of that beast that blocked the short way up the beautiful mountain.
So then — what is it? Why, why do you hold back? Why do you let so much cowardice into your heart? Why have you no daring, no freedom,
when three such blessed ladies are caring for you in the court of heaven, and my words promise you so much good?"
As little flowers, bent down and shut by the cold of the night, straighten themselves all open on their stems when the sun whitens them,
so I did, out of my tired strength, and so much good daring ran into my heart that I began like a person set free:
"Oh, how full of pity she was, who helped me! And how courteous you were, obeying so quickly the true words she brought you!
You have set my heart so full of desire to go, with the things you have said, that I have come back to my first purpose.
Go now: one will belongs to us both — you are my guide, you are my lord, you are my master." So I said to him; and when he had set out,
I entered on the deep and wooded road.
"Through me the way into the grieving city, through me the way into eternal pain, through me the way among the people who are lost.
Justice moved my high maker; divine power made me, the highest wisdom, and the first love.
Before me nothing was created but eternal things, and I last eternally. Abandon all hope, you who enter."
I saw these words, dark in colour, written at the top of a gate; and I said: "Master, their meaning is hard for me."
And he to me, like someone who understood: "Here you must leave every suspicion behind; here every cowardice has to die.
We have come to the place where I told you you would see the people in their grief, who have lost the good of the intellect."
And when he had laid his hand on mine with a cheerful face, which comforted me, he brought me inside, among the secret things.
There sighs, and crying, and high wailing rang through the starless air, so that at the very start I wept at it.
Different languages, horrible speech, words of pain, accents of anger, voices high and hoarse, and the sound of hands with them,
made a tumult that goes round and round forever in that air stained without time, like sand when a whirlwind blows.
And I, with my head ringed round with horror, said: "Master, what is this that I hear? And who are these people so beaten down by grief?"
And he to me: "This miserable way of being belongs to the sad souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They are mixed in with that worthless choir of angels who were not rebels and were not faithful to God, but were for themselves.
Heaven drove them out, so as not to be less beautiful, and deep Hell will not take them in, because the damned would get some glory out of them."
And I: "Master, what lies so heavy on them that makes them lament so loudly?" He answered: "I will tell you very briefly.
These have no hope of death, and their blind life is so low that they are envious of every other lot.
The world lets no report of them survive; mercy and justice both despise them: let us not talk about them — look, and pass on."
And I, looking, saw a banner that ran round and round so fast it seemed to me unworthy of any rest;
and behind it came so long a train of people that I would never have believed death had undone so many.
After I had recognised one or two of them, I saw and knew the shade of the one who out of cowardice made the great refusal.
At once I understood, and was certain, that this was the sect of the worthless, hateful to God and to God's enemies.
These wretches, who had never been alive, were naked, and were badly stung by hornets and by wasps that were there.
The insects streaked their faces with blood, which, mixed with their tears, was gathered at their feet by disgusting worms.
And when I gave myself to looking further, I saw people on the bank of a great river; so I said: "Master, now let me
know who these are, and what custom makes them look so ready to cross over, as far as I can make out in the faint light."
And he to me: "These things will be made plain to you when we bring our steps to a stop on the sad shore of Acheron."
Then, with my eyes ashamed and lowered, afraid my talking had been a burden to him, I kept from speaking until we reached the river.
And here, coming towards us in a boat, was an old man, white with ancient hair, shouting: "Woe to you, you crooked souls!
Never hope to see the sky again: I come to take you to the other shore, into the eternal dark, into heat and ice.
And you there — you, the living soul — get away from these others, who are dead." But when he saw that I did not go,
he said: "By another way, by other ports you will come to a shore, not here, to cross: a lighter boat will have to carry you."
And my guide to him: "Charon, do not torment yourself: this is willed there where whatever is willed can be done, and ask no more than that."
At that the woolly cheeks went quiet on the ferryman of the livid marsh, who had wheels of flame around his eyes.
But those souls, who were exhausted and naked, changed colour and ground their teeth together as soon as they took in the raw words.
They cursed God and their parents, the human race, the place, the time, the seed of their sowing and of their births.
Then they drew back together, all of them, weeping hard, to the evil shore that waits for every man who does not fear God.
Charon the demon, with eyes of burning coal, signals to them and gathers them all in; he beats with his oar any that settle down.
As in autumn the leaves lift away one after another, until the branch sees all its clothing lying on the ground,
in the same way the bad seed of Adam throw themselves off that shore one by one, at a signal, like a bird to its call.
So they go off across the dark water, and before they have landed on the other side a new crowd is already gathering on this one.
"My son," said my courteous master, "everyone who dies in the anger of God comes together here, out of every country;
and they are eager to cross the river, because divine justice spurs them on, so that their fear turns into wanting.
No good soul ever passes this way; and so, if Charon complains about you, you can understand now what his words mean."
When this was over, the dark countryside shook so hard that out of the terror my mind still bathes me in sweat.
The land of tears gave out a wind that flashed a crimson light, and it overcame every sense in me;
and I fell like a man taken by sleep.
A heavy thunder broke the deep sleep in my head, so that I shook myself like a person woken up by force;
and I moved my rested eye around, standing straight up, and looked hard to make out the place where I was.
The truth is I found myself on the edge of the valley of the grieving abyss that gathers the thunder of endless wailing.
It was dark and deep and so full of mist that however hard I fixed my sight on the bottom I could make out nothing there at all.
"Now let us go down there into the blind world," the poet began, gone completely pale. "I will be first, and you will be second."
And I, who had noticed the colour of his face, said: "How shall I come, if you are afraid, you who are my comfort when I doubt?"
And he to me: "The anguish of the people who are down here paints on my face that pity you are taking for fear.
Let us go: the long road is urging us on." So he set out, and so he made me enter the first circle that girdles the abyss.
There, as far as listening could tell, there was no weeping, only sighs that made the eternal air tremble;
and that came from grief without torment, felt by the crowds, which were many and large, of infants and of women and of men.
My good master to me: "Are you not going to ask what spirits these are that you see? Now I want you to know, before you go further,
that they did not sin; and if they have merits it is not enough, because they did not have baptism, which is the gate of the faith you believe in;
and if they lived before Christianity they did not worship God as they should have: and I myself am one of these.
For such shortcomings, and for no other wrong, we are lost, and hurt only this far: that we live in longing, and without hope."
Great grief took me at the heart when I heard it, because I knew that people of great worth were suspended in that limbo.
"Tell me, my master, tell me, my lord," I began, wanting to be certain of that faith which conquers every error:
"did anyone ever go out of here, by his own merit or by another's, and afterwards be blessed?" And he, who understood what I meant without saying it,
answered: "I was new in this condition when I saw a mighty one come here, crowned with the sign of victory.
He took out from among us the shade of our first father, and of Abel his son, and of Noah, of Moses the lawgiver, the obedient;
Abraham the patriarch, and David the king, Israel with his father and with his sons and with Rachel, for whom he did so much,
and many others; and he made them blessed. And I want you to know that before them no human spirits were saved."
We did not stop walking while he talked, but went on crossing the wood the whole time — the wood, I mean, of crowded spirits.
Our road had not yet taken us far from where I had slept, when I saw a fire that overcame a hemisphere of darkness.
We were still a little way off from it, but not so far that I could not partly see that people of honour held that place.
"O you who honour knowledge and art, who are these, with such honour on them that it sets them apart from the way of the rest?"
And he to me: "The honoured name that sounds of them up there in your life wins them a grace in heaven that advances them."
Meanwhile a voice reached me: "Honour the highest poet; his shade is coming back, that had gone away."
When the voice had stopped and was quiet, I saw four great shades coming towards us: their faces were neither sad nor glad.
My good master began to speak: "Look at the one with that sword in his hand, who comes in front of the three like a lord:
that is Homer, the sovereign poet; the next is Horace the satirist; Ovid is the third, and the last is Lucan.
Because each of them shares with me the name the single voice called out, they do me honour, and in that they do well."
So I saw gathered the beautiful school of that lord of the highest song who flies over the others like an eagle.
After they had talked together a while they turned to me with a sign of greeting, and my master smiled at it;
and then they did me much more honour still, because they made me one of their company, so that I was sixth among so much wisdom.
So we went on as far as the light, talking of things it is right to be silent about now, as it was right to speak of them there.
We came to the foot of a noble castle, ringed seven times with high walls, defended all round by a beautiful little stream.
We crossed this as if it were solid ground; through seven gates I went in with those sages: we came to a meadow of fresh green grass.
There were people there with slow, grave eyes, with great authority in their faces: they spoke seldom, with gentle voices.
So we drew off to one side, into an open place, bright and high, where all of them could be seen.
There, straight ahead, on the green enamel, the great spirits were shown to me, and I lift my own heart for having seen them.
I saw Electra with many companions, among whom I knew Hector and Aeneas, Caesar in armour with his falcon eyes.
I saw Camilla and Penthesilea; on the other side I saw King Latinus, who sat with Lavinia his daughter.
I saw that Brutus who drove out Tarquin, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia and Cornelia; and by himself, apart, I saw Saladin.
When I lifted my eyes a little higher I saw the master of those who know sitting among his family of philosophers.
All of them look at him, all do him honour: there I saw Socrates and Plato, who stand nearer to him than the rest;
Democritus, who puts the world down to chance, Diogenes, Anaxagoras and Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus and Zeno;
and I saw the good gatherer of the qualities of plants — Dioscorides, I mean; and I saw Orpheus, Cicero, and Linus, and Seneca the moralist;
Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Avicenna and Galen, Averroes, who made the great commentary.
I cannot give a full account of all of them, because the long theme drives me so hard that many times the telling falls short of the fact.
The company of six shrinks to two: my wise guide takes me another way, out of the quiet, into the trembling air.
And I come to a place where nothing shines.
So I went down out of the first circle into the second, which rings a smaller space and so much more pain that it stings them into howling.
Minos stands there, horrible, and snarls: he examines the sins at the entrance; he judges, and sends them off, by his own coiling.
I mean that when the badly born soul comes in front of him, it confesses everything; and that expert in sins
sees which place of Hell it belongs in; he winds his tail around himself as many times as the number of levels he wants it sent down.
There are always many standing before him: they go to judgement one after another, they speak and hear, and then are whirled below.
"O you who come to the house of grief," said Minos to me when he saw me, breaking off the business of that great office,
"watch how you come in, and who you trust; do not let the width of the entrance fool you!" And my guide to him: "Why do you keep shouting?
Do not obstruct his fated going: this is willed there where whatever is willed can be done, and ask no more than that."
Now the notes of grief begin to make themselves heard by me; now I have come where a great deal of weeping strikes at me.
I came into a place mute of all light, which bellows the way the sea does in a storm when it is fought over by contrary winds.
The hellish gale, which never rests, drives the spirits along in its plundering; whirling and striking, it torments them.
When they come up in front of the ruin, there are the shrieks, the moaning, the lament; there they curse the divine power.
I understood that to a torment made like this the sinners of the flesh are condemned, who put reason under appetite.
And as starlings are carried on their wings in the cold season, in a wide full flock, so that wind carries the evil spirits
this way, that way, down, up; no hope ever comforts them — not of rest, not even of a smaller pain.
And as cranes go singing their laments, making a long line of themselves in the air, so I saw them come, drawing out their wailing,
shades carried by the struggle I have described; so I said: "Master, who are those people the black air punishes like that?"
"The first of the ones you want news about," he said to me then, "was empress over many languages.
She was so broken by the vice of lust that she made what she liked lawful in her law, to take away the blame she had brought on herself.
She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus and had been his wife: she held the land the Sultan rules now.
The next is the one who killed herself for love and broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus; then comes Cleopatra, full of lust.
See Helen, for whom so many evil years turned round, and see the great Achilles, who fought with love at the end.
See Paris, Tristan" — and he showed me and named with his finger more than a thousand shades that love had parted from our life.
After I had heard my teacher name the ancient ladies and the knights, pity took me, and I was almost lost.
I began: "Poet, I would gladly speak to those two who go together and seem to be so light on the wind."
And he to me: "You will see, when they are nearer to us; then call to them by the love that drives them, and they will come."
As soon as the wind bent them towards us I raised my voice: "O worn-out souls, come and speak with us, if no one forbids it!"
As doves called by desire come through the air to the sweet nest with wings lifted and still, carried by their will,
so these came out of the flock where Dido is, coming to us through the malignant air: so strong was the loving cry.
"O living creature, gracious and kind, who go visiting through the darkened air to us who stained the world with blood,
if the king of the universe were our friend we would pray to him for your peace, since you pity our perverse suffering.
Whatever you like to hear and to speak about, we will hear and speak about with you, while the wind, as it is doing now, is quiet for us.
The city where I was born sits on the shore where the Po comes down to be at peace with the streams that follow it.
Love, which is quickly caught in a noble heart, took hold of this man for the beautiful body that was taken from me; and the way of it still offends me.
Love, which lets nobody who is loved off from loving, took hold of me so strongly with his beauty that, as you see, it has still not left me.
Love led us to a single death. Caina is waiting for the one who put out our life." These were the words carried from them to us.
When I had heard those wounded souls I bent my face, and held it down so long that at last the poet said: "What are you thinking?"
When I answered, I began: "Oh, how sad — how many sweet thoughts, how much longing brought these two to the sorrowful crossing!"
Then I turned back to them and spoke, and I began: "Francesca, your sufferings make me weep for sadness and for pity.
But tell me: in the time of the sweet sighs, by what, and how, did love allow you to know your uncertain desires?"
And she to me: "There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when you are in misery; and your teacher knows that.
But if you have so much longing to know the first root of our love, I will do it like someone who weeps as he speaks.
One day, for pleasure, we were reading about Lancelot, and how love bound him; we were alone, and suspected nothing.
Several times that reading pushed our eyes to meet, and drained the colour out of our faces; but it was a single moment that overcame us.
When we read how the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who will never be divided from me,
kissed my mouth, trembling all over. The book was our go-between, and so was the man who wrote it: that day we read no further in it."
While the one spirit was saying this the other was weeping, so that out of pity I fainted, as if I were dying.
And I fell as a dead body falls.
When my mind came back, which had closed itself in front of the pity of those two who were kin by marriage, and had left me all confused with sadness,
new torments and new tormented people are around me, however I move and however I turn, and wherever I look.
I am in the third circle, of the rain that is eternal, cursed, cold and heavy; its rule and its quality never change.
Huge hail, filthy water and snow pour down through the darkened air; the ground that receives it stinks.
Cerberus, a cruel and monstrous beast, barks like a dog out of three throats over the people who are sunk down here.
His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly wide, and his hands have claws; he grabs the spirits, flays them, tears them apart.
The rain makes them howl like dogs; they make a shield of one side for the other; the wretched profane ones keep turning over.
When Cerberus, the great worm, made us out, he opened his mouths and showed us his fangs; he had no limb that he could hold still.
And my guide spread out his hands, took up earth, and with full fists threw it into the ravenous gullets.
As a dog that barks in its craving goes quiet as soon as it bites into its food, because it strains and struggles only to swallow,
that is what happened to the filthy faces of the demon Cerberus, who thunders at the souls until they would rather be deaf.
We were walking over the shades the heavy rain beats down, and we were setting our feet on their emptiness, which looks like a person.
They were all lying on the ground, except one who sat up quickly as soon as he saw us passing in front of him.
"O you who are being led through this Hell," he said to me, "recognise me, if you can: you were made before I was unmade."
And I to him: "The anguish you are in is perhaps pulling you out of my memory, so that it seems as if I never saw you.
But tell me who you are, put into so sad a place, with a punishment made like this, which, if others are greater, none is more disgusting."
And he to me: "Your city, which is so full of envy that the sack is already spilling over, held me inside it in the clear life.
You citizens called me Ciacco: for the damaging sin of the throat, as you see, I am broken down by the rain.
And I, a sad soul, am not alone; all these are under the same punishment for the same fault." And he said no more.
I answered him: "Ciacco, your suffering weighs on me so much it moves me to weep; but tell me, if you know, what will become
of the citizens of the divided city; whether anyone in it is just; and tell me the reason why so much discord has attacked it."
And he to me: "After a long quarrel they will come to blood, and the party from the woods will drive the other out with much violence.
Then, within three suns, this party has to fall and the other one to rise, by the strength of a man who is sitting on the fence now.
It will hold its forehead high a long time, keeping the other one under heavy weights, however much that one weeps or is ashamed.
Two men are just, and are not listened to there; pride, envy and greed are the three sparks that have set the hearts alight."
Here he made an end of his tearful sound. And I to him: "I want you to teach me more, and to make me the gift of more speech.
Farinata and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo and Mosca, and the others who set their minds on doing good —
tell me where they are, and let me know them; because a great longing presses me to learn whether heaven sweetens them or Hell poisons them."
And he: "They are among the blackest souls; different faults weigh them down to the bottom: if you go that far down, you will be able to see them.
But when you are back in the sweet world, I beg you to bring me back to other people's minds: I tell you no more, and I answer you no more."
Then he twisted his straight eyes into a squint; he looked at me a moment and bent his head, and fell with it, level with the other blind ones.
And my guide said to me: "He does not wake again this side of the sound of the angelic trumpet, when the hostile power comes:
every one of them will see his sad tomb again, will take back his flesh and his shape, and will hear what echoes eternally."
So we crossed through that foul mixture of shades and rain, at a slow pace, touching a little on the life to come;
so I said: "Master, these torments — will they grow after the great judgement, or be less, or burn just as hot?"
And he to me: "Go back to your science, which holds that the more perfect a thing is the more it feels both the good and the pain.
Although these cursed people will never come to true perfection, they expect to be nearer it afterwards than now."
We went round that road in a circle, talking a good deal more than I am repeating; we came to the point where it goes down:
and there we found Plutus, the great enemy.
"Papè Satàn, papè Satàn aleppe!" Plutus began, in his clucking voice; and that gentle sage, who knew everything,
said, to comfort me: "Do not let your fear hurt you; whatever power he has, he will not stop us climbing down this rock."
Then he turned to that swollen face and said: "Be quiet, you cursed wolf! Eat yourself up inside with your own rage.
It is not without reason that we go into the depth: it is willed on high, where Michael took vengeance on the arrogant outrage."
As sails swollen by the wind fall in a tangle when the mast snaps, so the cruel beast fell to the ground.
So we went down into the fourth ditch, taking in more of the grieving bank that bags up all the evil of the universe.
Ah, justice of God! Who heaps up as many new labours and pains as I saw? And why does our own fault ruin us like this?
As the wave does over Charybdis, breaking against the wave it runs into, so the people here have to dance their round.
Here I saw people, far more of them than anywhere else, on one side and the other, howling loudly, rolling weights along by shoving with their chests.
They crashed into each other; and then, right there, each of them turned round, rolling back, shouting "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you throw away?"
So they came back round the gloomy circle on both sides to the opposite point, shouting their shameful refrain at each other again;
then each of them turned, when he had got there, through his half-circle, to the next joust. And I, whose heart was almost pierced,
said: "My master, show me now who these people are, and whether they were all clerics, these tonsured ones on our left."
And he to me: "Every one of them was so squinting in the mind, in the first life, that they spent nothing by measure.
Their voices bark it out clearly enough when they come to the two points of the circle where the opposite fault splits them apart.
These were clerics, who have no hairy lid on their heads — popes and cardinals too, in whom greed practises its excess."
And I: "Master, among people like these I ought to recognise some, who were filthy with these particular evils."
And he to me: "You are gathering an empty thought: the undiscerning life that made them foul now makes them too dark for any recognising.
Eternally they will come to their two collisions: these will rise out of the tomb with their fists closed, and these with their hair cut off.
Bad giving and bad keeping have taken the beautiful world from them and put them in this brawl: what it is like, I use no fine words about.
Now you can see, my son, the short joke of the goods that are entrusted to Fortune, for which the human race scuffles;
because all the gold that is under the moon, and all that ever was, could not give one of these tired souls a moment's rest."
"My master," I said, "tell me this as well: this Fortune you are touching on — what is she, that has the world's goods so in her claws?"
And he to me: "Oh, foolish creatures, how great the ignorance is that damages you! Now I want you to take my judgement of it.
He whose knowledge goes beyond everything made the heavens, and gave them their guides, so that every part shines to every part,
distributing the light equally. In the same way, for the splendours of the world, he appointed a general minister and guide
to shift the empty goods from time to time from people to people, and from one bloodline to another, beyond any defence human wits can put up;
so one nation rules and another languishes, following her judgement, which is hidden, like a snake in the grass.
Your knowledge cannot argue against her: she foresees, she judges, and she keeps up her kingdom as the other gods do theirs.
Her changes have no truce: necessity makes her quick; so often does someone come whose turn has arrived.
This is the one who is so crucified by the very people who ought to praise her, blaming her wrongly and giving her a bad name;
but she is blessed, and does not hear it: with the other first creatures, happy, she turns her sphere and enjoys her blessedness.
Now let us go down to a greater misery; already every star is setting that was rising when I set out, and staying too long is forbidden."
We cut across the circle to the other bank, above a spring that boils up and pours over into a channel that runs out of it.
The water was far darker than dark blue; and we, in the company of those grey waves, went in and down by a strange path.
This sad little stream runs into a marsh that has the name Styx, once it has come down to the foot of the malignant grey slopes.
And I, standing there intent on looking, saw muddy people in that swamp, all of them naked, and with angry faces.
They were hitting each other, not only with their hands but with their heads and their chests and their feet, tearing pieces off each other with their teeth.
My good master said: "Son, now you see the souls of those whom anger conquered; and I want you to believe this for certain too,
that under the water there are people sighing, and they make this water bubble at the surface, as your eye tells you, wherever it turns.
Fixed in the slime they say: 'We were sad in the sweet air that the sun makes glad, carrying the smoke of sloth inside us:
now we are sad in the black mire.' This is the hymn they gurgle in their throats, because they cannot say it in whole words."
So we went round a great arc of the filthy pool between the dry bank and the swamp, with our eyes turned on those gulping down mud.
At last we came to the foot of a tower.
Continuing, I say that long before we came to the foot of the high tower our eyes went up to its top,
because of two little flames we saw set there, and another answering the signal from far off, so far that the eye could barely take it in.
And I turned to the sea of all knowledge; I said: "What does this one say? And what does that other fire answer? And who are the ones who made them?"
And he to me: "Out over the dirty waves you can already make out what is expected, if the smoke of the swamp does not hide it from you."
No bowstring ever drove an arrow from itself that ran away through the air so fast as a little boat I saw
coming through the water towards us just then, under the steering of a single oarsman, who shouted: "Now you are caught, wicked soul!"
"Phlegyas, Phlegyas, you are shouting for nothing," said my lord, "this time: you will have us no longer than it takes to cross the mud."
Like a man who hears of some great deception that has been played on him, and then broods over it, that is what Phlegyas became, in his gathered anger.
My guide went down into the boat and then made me get in after him; and only when I was in did it seem loaded.
As soon as my guide and I were in the boat the ancient prow goes cutting on its way, deeper in the water than it does with others.
While we were running down the dead channel one full of mud rose up in front of me and said: "Who are you, coming before your time?"
And I to him: "If I come, I do not stay; but who are you, who have made yourself so foul?" He answered: "You can see that I am one who weeps."
And I to him: "With weeping and with mourning, cursed spirit, stay where you are; I know you, even though you are all filth."
Then he stretched both hands towards the boat; at which my alert master pushed him off, saying: "Away there, with the other dogs!"
Then he put his arms around my neck; he kissed my face and said: "Indignant soul, blessed is she who carried you in her womb!
That man was a proud person in the world; there is no goodness to decorate his memory: that is why his shade is furious here.
How many up there think themselves great kings who will lie here like pigs in the muck, leaving nothing but horrible contempt behind them!"
And I: "Master, I would very much like to see him ducked in this soup before we come out of the lake."
And he to me: "Before the shore lets itself be seen by you, you will be satisfied: it is right that you should enjoy such a wish."
A little after that I saw the muddy people make such a mangling of him that I still praise and thank God for it.
They were all shouting: "At Filippo Argenti!" and the wild Florentine spirit turned on himself with his own teeth.
We left him there, and I tell no more about him; but a wailing struck my ears, so that I open my eyes wide and stare ahead.
My good master said: "Now, my son, the city called Dis is coming close, with its grave citizens, with its great garrison."
And I: "Master, I can already make out its mosques there in the valley, distinctly, red as if they had come out of a fire."
And he said to me: "The eternal fire that burns inside them shows them red, as you can see, in this low Hell."
So we came inside the deep moats that trench that disconsolate town: the walls looked to me as if they were iron.
Not without making a great circuit first, we came to a place where the ferryman shouted loudly: "Get out here; this is the entrance."
Over the gates I saw more than a thousand who had rained down from heaven, and who angrily said: "Who is this, who without dying
goes through the kingdom of the dead people?" And my wise master made a sign that he wanted to speak with them privately.
Then they shut in their great scorn a little and said: "You come alone, and let that one go, who has entered this kingdom so boldly.
Let him go back alone by his mad road: let him try, if he knows the way; because you will stay here, you who have escorted him through so dark a country."
Think, reader, whether I was not discouraged at the sound of those cursed words, because I did not believe I would ever come back.
"O my dear guide, who more than seven times have given me my safety back, and drawn me out of the deep danger that stood against me,
do not leave me," I said, "so undone; and if going any further is denied us, let us find our own footsteps again together, quickly."
And that lord who had brought me there said to me: "Do not be afraid; our crossing cannot be taken from us: it was given by such a one.
But wait for me here, and comfort your tired spirit and feed it with good hope, because I will not leave you in the lower world."
So the sweet father goes away and abandons me there, and I am left in doubt, with yes and no fighting each other in my head.
I could not hear what he offered them; but he had not been standing there with them long when they all ran back inside, racing each other.
Those adversaries of ours shut the gates in my lord's face, and he stayed outside and turned back to me with slow steps.
His eyes were on the ground, and his brows were stripped of all confidence, and he said in his sighs: "Who has denied me the houses of grief!"
And he said to me: "You — because I am angry, do not be dismayed; I will win this contest, whoever moves about inside to defend it.
This insolence of theirs is nothing new; they used it once already at a less secret gate, which is still standing there without a lock.
You saw the dead writing over it: and already, this side of it, coming down the slope, passing through the circles without an escort,
is one who will open the town for us.
The colour that cowardice painted on the outside of me when I saw my guide turning back drove his own new colour in the quicker.
He stopped, attentive, like a man listening; because the eye could not carry far through the black air and the thick fog.
"All the same, we have to win this fight," he began; "unless... Such a one offered herself. Oh, how long it is taking for the other to get here!"
I saw clearly enough how he covered over the beginning with what came after it, which were words different from the first ones;
but his speech gave us fear all the same, because I drew the broken sentence out into a worse meaning, perhaps, than it held.
"Does anyone from the first level ever come down into this bottom of the sad hollow, whose only punishment is hope cut off?"
That was my question; and he answered: "It rarely happens that any of us makes the journey I am making now.
It is true that I was down here once before, conjured by that cruel Erichtho who used to call shades back into their bodies.
My flesh had only just been stripped off me when she made me go inside that wall to bring out a spirit from the circle of Judas.
That is the lowest place, and the darkest, and the furthest from the heaven that turns everything: I know the road well, so put your mind at rest.
This marsh, which breathes out the great stench, rings the grieving city all around, where we cannot get in now without anger."
And he said other things, but I do not remember them; because my eye had drawn me entirely towards the high tower with its glowing top,
where in one instant three hellish Furies, stained with blood, had risen bolt upright, who had the limbs and the movements of women
and were girded with the greenest water snakes; they had little serpents and horned vipers for hair, binding their savage temples.
And he, who knew the handmaids well of the queen of the eternal weeping, said to me: "Look at the ferocious Erinyes.
This is Megaera on the left side; the one weeping on the right is Alecto; Tisiphone is in the middle" — and he said no more.
Each of them was tearing her breast with her nails; they beat themselves with their palms and shrieked so loudly that I pressed close to the poet in my fear.
"Let Medusa come: then we will turn him to stone," they all said, looking down; "we took poor revenge for Theseus's raid."
"Turn round, and keep your eyes shut; because if the Gorgon shows herself and you saw her there would be no going back up, ever."
So said my master; and he himself turned me, and did not trust my hands, but closed my eyes with his own as well.
O you who have sound intellects, look at the teaching that is hidden under the veil of these strange verses.
And already there was coming over the muddy waves a crashing sound, full of terror, at which both the banks were shaking,
made exactly like a wind, violent from the conflict of heats, that strikes a forest, and without any check
snaps the branches, knocks them down and carries them off; dusty and proud, it goes on ahead and makes the wild animals and the shepherds run.
He freed my eyes and said: "Now direct the nerve of your sight out over that ancient scum, towards the place where the smoke is bitterest."
As frogs scatter through the water in front of the enemy snake, until every one of them is huddled on the bottom,
so I saw more than a thousand ruined souls running away in front of one who was crossing Styx at the ford, with dry feet.
He kept pushing that thick air from his face, waving his left hand in front of him often; and only that trouble seemed to tire him.
I understood well enough that he was sent from heaven, and I turned to my master; and he made a sign that I should stand quiet and bow to him.
Ah, how full of scorn he looked to me! He came to the gate, and with a little wand he opened it, and nothing resisted him.
"O you who are cast out of heaven, despised people," he began, on the horrible threshold, "where does this arrogance in you come from?
Why do you kick against that will whose end can never be cut short, and which has more than once increased your pain?
What is the use of butting your head against fate? Your Cerberus, if you remember it rightly, still carries his chin and his throat rubbed bare for it."
Then he turned back along the filthy road, and said no word to us, but had the look of a man gripped and gnawed by some other care
than the care of the person standing in front of him; and we moved our feet towards the town, feeling safe after those holy words.
We went inside without any struggle; and I, who wanted to look at the condition that such a fortress shuts in,
as soon as I was inside, send my eye around: and I see a great plain on every side, full of grief and of cruel torment.
As at Arles, where the Rhone goes still, as at Pola, near the Quarnaro that shuts Italy in and washes her borders,
the tombs make the whole ground uneven, so they did here, on every side, except that the manner of it was more bitter;
because flames were scattered among the graves, and they were so completely set alight by them that no craft needs iron any hotter.
All their lids were standing up, and out of them came such hard laments that they were plainly of the wretched and the wounded.
And I: "Master, who are these people who, buried inside those chests, make themselves heard with such grieving sighs?"
And he to me: "Here are the heresiarchs with their followers, of every sect; and the tombs are loaded far fuller than you think.
Like is buried here with like, and the monuments are hotter and less hot." And then, when he had turned to the right hand,
we passed between the torments and the high battlements.
Now my master goes along a secret path between the wall of the town and the torments, and I behind his shoulders.
"O highest power, who turn me through these impious circles as you please," I began, "speak to me, and satisfy my desires.
Could the people who lie in these tombs be seen? All the lids are lifted already, and nobody is standing guard."
And he to me: "They will all be shut when they come back here from Jehoshaphat with the bodies they have left up there.
On this side they have their cemetery with Epicurus and all his followers, who make the soul die along with the body.
So the question you are asking me will be satisfied in here soon enough, and so will the wish you are keeping quiet from me."
And I: "Good guide, I do not keep my heart hidden from you, except to say little, and you yourself have more than once disposed me to that."
"O Tuscan, going alive through the city of fire and speaking so decently, please be willing to stop in this place.
Your speech makes it plain that you were born in that noble homeland which I perhaps did too much harm to."
This sound came out suddenly from one of the chests; so, out of fear, I moved a little closer to my guide.
And he said to me: "Turn round! What are you doing? Look at Farinata there, who has stood up: you will see all of him from the waist upward."
I had already fixed my face on his; and he was rising with his chest and his forehead as if he held Hell in great contempt.
And the spirited, ready hands of my guide pushed me among the tombs towards him, saying: "Let your words be well counted."
When I was at the foot of his tomb he looked at me a moment, and then, almost scornfully, he asked me: "Who were your ancestors?"
And I, who was eager to obey, did not hide it from him but laid it all open; at which he raised his eyebrows a little;
then he said: "They were fiercely hostile to me, and to my forefathers, and to my party, so that twice over I scattered them."
"If they were driven out, they came back from every side," I answered him, "both times; but your people never learned that art properly."
Then, in the uncovered opening, there rose a shade beside this one, as far as the chin: I think it had got up on its knees.
It looked around me, as if it wanted to see whether anyone else was with me; and when its suspicion was completely spent,
it said, weeping: "If you go through this blind prison by the height of your genius, where is my son? And why is he not with you?"
And I to him: "I do not come of myself: the one waiting over there is leading me through, and perhaps your Guido held him in scorn."
His words and the manner of his punishment had already read out his name to me; and that is why my answer was so complete.
Straightening up suddenly, he cried: "What? You said 'he held'? Is he not still alive? Does the sweet light not strike his eyes?"
When he noticed the little delay I made before answering, he fell back flat, and did not appear outside again.
But that other great-souled one, at whose asking I had stopped, did not change his expression, did not move his neck, did not bend his side;
and, going on from what he had said before, "If they have learned that art badly," he said, "that torments me more than this bed does.
But the face of the lady who reigns here will not be lit again fifty times before you learn how heavy that art is.
And so may you get back to the sweet world — tell me: why is that people so pitiless against my family in every law it makes?"
So I to him: "The slaughter and the great butchery that turned the Arbia red is what makes prayers like that in our temple."
When he had shaken his head, sighing, "I was not alone in that," he said, "and I certainly would not have moved with the others without a reason.
But I was alone, there where every one of them was willing to have Florence wiped out, the one man who defended her in the open."
"Ah, so may your seed one day find rest," I begged him, "untie for me the knot that has tangled my judgement here.
It seems that you can see, if I understand rightly, what time is bringing with it, before it comes, while for the present you have another way of it."
"We see, like people with bad light," he said, "the things that are far away from us; that much the supreme guide still shines on us.
When they come close, or are here, our understanding is entirely useless; and if nobody brings us news we know nothing of your human condition.
So you can understand that all our knowledge will be quite dead from the moment the gate of the future is shut."
Then, as if pricked by my own fault, I said: "So tell that one who fell back that his son is still joined with the living;
and if I was silent before I answered, let him know I was silent because I was already thinking about the error you have untangled for me."
And by now my master was calling me back; so I begged the spirit more quickly to tell me who was lying there with him.
He said to me: "I lie here with more than a thousand: in here is the second Frederick and the Cardinal; and about the others I say nothing."
Then he hid himself; and I turned my steps towards the ancient poet, thinking over that speech which seemed hostile to me.
He set off; and then, as we went, he said to me: "Why are you so lost?" And I satisfied him about his question.
"Let your mind keep what you have heard against yourself," that sage commanded me; "and now attend to this," and he raised his finger:
"when you stand before the sweet ray of her whose beautiful eye sees everything, from her you will learn the journey of your life."
Then he moved his foot to the left hand: we left the wall and went towards the middle along a path that strikes into a valley
whose stench made itself unpleasant even up there.
On the outer edge of a high bank made of great broken stones in a circle, we came above a crueller pen;
and there, because of the horrible excess of the stench the deep abyss throws up, we drew back and took shelter behind the lid
of a great tomb, where I saw an inscription that said: "I keep Pope Anastasius, whom Photinus drew off the straight road."
"Our going down will have to be slow, so that the sense gets used a little first to the wretched breath of it; then we shall not mind it."
So my master; and I said to him: "Find some compensation, so that the time does not pass wasted." And he: "You see that I am thinking of it.
My son, inside these rocks," he began to say then, "there are three smaller circles, grade below grade, like the ones you are leaving.
They are all full of cursed spirits; but so that afterwards the sight alone will be enough for you, understand how they are penned, and why.
The end of every wickedness that earns hatred in heaven is injury, and every end of that kind grieves somebody else, either by force or by fraud.
But because fraud is an evil peculiar to man, it displeases God more; and so the fraudulent are placed lower down, and more pain attacks them.
The whole first circle is of the violent; but because violence is done to three persons, it is divided and built in three rings.
Violence can be done to God, to oneself, to one's neighbour — I mean to them, and to what belongs to them — as you will hear explained plainly.
Death by force, and painful wounds, are given to a neighbour; and to his property, ruin, arson and damaging extortion;
so murderers, and everyone who strikes to hurt, wreckers and robbers, are all tormented by the first ring, in separate bands.
A man can lay a violent hand on himself and on his own goods; and so in the second ring, and without any profit in it, must repent
anyone who takes himself away from your world, who gambles away and squanders his estate, and weeps where he ought to be happy.
Violence can be done to the godhead by denying it in the heart and cursing it, and by despising nature and her goodness;
and so the smallest ring stamps with its seal both Sodom and Cahors, and anyone who speaks despising God in his heart.
Fraud, which gnaws at every conscience, a man may use on someone who trusts him and on someone who has no trust invested.
This second way seems only to cut the bond of love that nature makes; so in the second circle there nest
hypocrisy, flattery, and those who cast spells, falsification, theft and simony, pimps, grafters, and filth of that kind.
By the other way, the love that nature makes is forgotten, and so is the love added to it, out of which special trust is created;
so in the smallest circle, at the point of the universe on which Dis sits, anyone who betrays is eaten up eternally."
And I: "Master, your reasoning goes quite clearly, and it distinguishes very well this pit and the people it holds.
But tell me: those of the fat marsh, and those the wind drives, and those the rain beats, and those who meet each other with such harsh tongues —
why are they not punished inside the red-hot city, if God has them in his anger? And if he does not, why are they in such a state?"
And he to me: "Why does your understanding wander so far from what it usually does?" he said. "Or is your mind looking somewhere else?
Do you not remember the words with which your Ethics deals thoroughly with the three dispositions heaven does not want —
incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality? And how incontinence offends God less, and earns less blame?
If you consider that judgement properly, and bring to mind who the people are who take their punishment up there outside,
you will see clearly why they are set apart from these criminals, and why divine vengeance hammers them in less anger."
"O sun that heals every troubled sight, you satisfy me so much when you untie a thing that doubting pleases me no less than knowing.
Go back a little way again," I said, "to where you say that usury offends the divine goodness, and unpick that knot."
"Philosophy," he said to me, "notes for anyone who understands it, and not in one place only, how nature takes her course
from the divine intellect and from its art; and if you take good note of your Physics you will find, not many pages in,
that your art follows nature as far as it can, the way a pupil follows his master; so that your art is a kind of grandchild to God.
From these two — if you bring to mind Genesis from the beginning — mankind is meant to take its living and to get ahead.
And because the usurer takes another road, he despises nature in herself and in her follower too, since he puts his hope in something else.
But follow me now, because it pleases me to go: the Fishes are quivering up on the horizon and the Wain lies right over Caurus,
and the cliff goes down over there.
The place where we came to climb down the bank was mountainous, and, because of what was also there, such that any eye would shrink from it.
As with that landslide which struck the flank of the Adige this side of Trent, whether by earthquake or by the ground giving way,
where from the top of the mountain it started from down to the plain the rock is so broken away that it would give some path to anyone above:
that is what the descent of that ravine was like; and there on the edge of the shattered gully the infamy of Crete was stretched out,
that was conceived in the false cow; and when it saw us it bit into itself, like someone whose anger is breaking him from inside.
My wise one shouted at it: "Do you perhaps think this is the Duke of Athens, who dealt you your death up in the world?
Get away, beast: this man is not coming schooled by your sister, but is going through to see your punishments."
As a bull breaks loose at the moment when it has taken the mortal blow, and cannot walk but jumps about here and there,
that is how I saw the Minotaur behave; and that alert one shouted: "Run for the gap; while he is raging, it is a good time to go down."
So we took our way down over the spill of those stones, which often shifted under my feet because of the new weight.
I went on thinking; and he said: "You are thinking, perhaps, about this landslide, which is guarded by that bestial rage I have just put out.
Now I want you to know that the other time I came down here into the lower Hell this rock had not yet fallen.
But certainly, if I judge rightly, it was a little before the coming of the one who took the great spoil away from Dis, out of the highest circle,
that the deep filthy valley shook on every side, so that I thought the universe was feeling that love by which, as some believe,
the world has more than once been turned back into chaos; and at that moment this old rock, here and elsewhere, made such a collapse.
But fix your eyes on the valley: we are getting near the river of blood, in which anyone boils who does harm to others by violence."
Oh blind greed and mad anger, that spur us so in the short life, and then steep us so wretchedly in the eternal one!
I saw a wide ditch bent into an arc, one that embraces the whole plain, just as my escort had told me;
and between the foot of the bank and it, in file, ran centaurs, armed with arrows, as they used to go hunting in the world.
Seeing us coming down, every one of them halted, and three broke away from the troop with bows and shafts chosen beforehand;
and one shouted from a distance: "To what torment are you coming, you who are climbing down the slope? Say it from there; if not, I draw the bow."
My master said: "We will make our answer to Chiron there, close by: it was always your misfortune to want so quickly."
Then he touched me and said: "That one is Nessus, who died for the beautiful Deianira and took his own revenge for himself.
And the one in the middle, looking down at his own chest, is the great Chiron, who brought up Achilles; that other one is Pholus, who was so full of rage.
They go round the ditch in their thousands, shooting any soul that lifts itself further out of the blood than its guilt allots it."
We came up to those quick beasts: Chiron took an arrow, and with the notch of it pushed his beard back off his jaws.
When he had uncovered his great mouth he said to his companions: "Have you noticed that the one behind moves whatever he touches?
The feet of the dead do not usually do that." And my good guide, who was already at his chest, where the two natures are joined together,
answered: "He is indeed alive, and it falls to me to show him the dark valley, and to do it alone; necessity brings us here, not pleasure.
Someone left off singing hallelujah to give me this new office: he is no thief, and I am no thieving soul.
But by that power through which I move my steps along so wild a road, give us one of your company to be beside us,
to show us where the ford is, and to carry this man on his back, because he is not a spirit that can go through the air."
Chiron turned about on his right flank and said to Nessus: "Go back, and guide them, and make any other troop you meet give way."
Now we moved off with that trusty escort along the edge of the crimson boiling, where the boiled ones were shrieking loudly.
I saw people in it up to the eyebrow; and the great centaur said: "These are tyrants who laid hands on blood and on property.
Here they weep for their pitiless damage; here is Alexander, and fierce Dionysius, who gave Sicily its years of grief.
And that forehead with such black hair is Azzolino; and that other one, the fair one, is Opizzo of Este, who in truth
was put out up in the world by his own stepson." Then I turned to the poet, and he said: "Let him be first for you now, and me second."
A little further on the centaur stopped over a group who, as far as the throat, seemed to be coming up out of that boiling.
He showed us one shade standing apart on its own, saying: "That one split, in the lap of God, the heart that is still dripping on the Thames."
Then I saw people who held their heads and even their whole chests out of the river; and I recognised a good many of these.
So, little by little, that blood grew shallow, until it only cooked their feet; and that was where we crossed the ditch.
"Just as on this side you can see the boiling stream growing continually shallower," said the centaur, "I want you to believe
that on the other side its bottom presses down lower and lower, until it comes round again to where tyranny has to groan.
Divine justice stings on this side that Attila who was a scourge on earth, and Pyrrhus, and Sextus; and eternally it milks
the tears that the boiling unlocks out of Rinier of Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, who made so much war on the roads."
Then he turned back and crossed the ford again.
Nessus had not yet reached the other side when we set out through a wood that was not marked by any path.
No green leaves, but dark in colour; no straight branches, but knotted and twisted; no fruit there, but thorns with poison in them.
The wild beasts that hate the farmed country between Cecina and Corneto have no thickets so rough or so dense as this.
Here the foul Harpies make their nests, who drove the Trojans out of the Strophades with a grim announcement of harm to come.
They have broad wings, and human necks and faces, feet with claws, and their great bellies feathered; they make their laments in the strange trees.
And my good master began to say to me: "Before you go any further in, know that you are in the second ring, and will be
until you come to the horrible sand. So look carefully; you will see things that would take the belief out of my words."
I could hear wailing drawn out on every side and could see nobody making it; so I stopped, completely lost.
I think he thought that I was thinking that all those voices came, among those stumps, from people who were hiding from us.
So my master said: "If you break off some little twig from one of these plants, the thoughts you have will all be cut short."
Then I put my hand a little way out and picked a small branch from a great thorn bush; and its trunk shouted: "Why are you tearing me?"
And when it had turned dark with blood it began again: "Why are you ripping me? Have you no spirit of pity at all?
We were men, and now we are made into thorn bushes: your hand ought to be more merciful, even if we had been the souls of snakes."
As a green log that has been set alight at one end drips at the other, and hisses with the air escaping,
so out of the broken splinter there came together words and blood; at which I let the tip fall and stood like a man afraid.
"If he had been able to believe before," my sage answered, "wounded soul, what he has seen only in my verses,
he would not have put out his hand against you; but the thing was unbelievable, and made me lead him to an act that weighs on me too.
But tell him who you were, so that by way of some amends he can refresh your fame up in the world, where he is allowed to go back."
And the trunk: "You so bait me with your sweet talk that I cannot keep silent; and do not be annoyed if I get stuck a little in the telling.
I am the one who held both the keys of Frederick's heart, and turned them, locking and unlocking, so gently
that I kept almost every other man out of his secrets; I carried such faith to that glorious office that I lost sleep and pulse for it.
That whore who never turns her sluttish eyes away from Caesar's household — the common death, and the vice, of courts —
inflamed every mind there against me; and those she inflamed inflamed Augustus so that my glad honours turned into sad mourning.
My mind, in a scornful mood, believing it could escape scorn by dying, made me unjust against my own just self.
By the new roots of this wood I swear to you that I never broke faith with my lord, who was so worthy of honour.
And if either of you goes back into the world, let him strengthen my memory again, which is still lying under the blow that envy gave it."
He waited a little, and then: "Since he is silent," the poet said to me, "do not lose the moment; speak, and ask him, if you would like more."
So I to him: "You ask him instead whatever you think will satisfy me; because I could not, so much pity fills my heart."
So he began again: "So may this man freely do for you what your words are asking, imprisoned spirit, may it also please you
to tell us how the soul is bound into these knots; and tell us, if you can, whether any of them is ever loosed from such limbs."
Then the trunk blew hard, and afterwards that wind was converted into this voice: "You will be answered briefly.
When the ferocious soul departs from the body it has torn itself out of, Minos sends it to the seventh mouth.
It falls into the wood, and no place is chosen for it; but wherever fortune flings it, there it sprouts like a grain of spelt.
It rises as a shoot and as a wild plant; then the Harpies, feeding on its leaves, cause pain, and a window for the pain.
Like the rest, we shall come for our own remains, but not so that any of us puts them on again, because it is not just to have what one has thrown away.
We shall drag them here, and through the mournful wood our bodies will be hung, each on the thorn of its own hostile shade."
We were still attending to the trunk, thinking it might want to tell us more, when we were taken by surprise by a noise,
like a man who hears the boar and the hunt coming towards his stand, and hears the animals and the branches crashing.
And here were two on the left side, naked and scratched, running so hard that they broke every barrier of the wood.
The one in front: "Now come, come quickly, death!" And the other, to whom it seemed too slow, was shouting: "Lano, your legs were not
so nimble at the jousting at the Toppo!" And then, when perhaps his breath was failing, he made a knot of himself and a bush.
Behind them the wood was full of black bitches, ravenous and running like greyhounds slipped off the chain.
They set their teeth in the one who had squatted down and tore him apart piece by piece; then they carried off those suffering limbs.
Then my escort took me by the hand and led me to the bush, which was weeping in vain through its bleeding breaks.
"O Jacopo of Santo Andrea," it said, "what good has it done you to make a screen of me? What blame do I carry for your wicked life?"
When my master had stopped over it he said: "Who were you, who through so many wounds breathe out a sorrowful speech with blood?"
And he to us: "O souls who have come to see the shameful mangling that has torn my leaves so far from me,
gather them up at the foot of this sad thicket. I was of the city that changed its first patron for the Baptist; and because of that
he will always make her sad with his art; and if it were not that at the crossing of the Arno some sight of him still remains,
those citizens who rebuilt her afterwards on the ashes Attila left would have laboured in vain.
I made a gallows for myself out of my own house."
Because love for the place where I was born moved me, I gathered the scattered leaves and gave them back to the one who was already hoarse.
Then we came to the boundary where the second ring parts from the third, and where a horrible art of justice can be seen.
To make these new things properly plain, I say that we arrived at a plain that pushes every plant off its bed.
The sorrowful wood makes a garland round it, as the sad ditch does round the wood; we stopped our steps right at the very edge.
The floor was a dry, deep sand, made in no other fashion than the one that was once trodden by Cato's feet.
O vengeance of God, how much you ought to be feared by everyone who reads what was made plain to my eyes!
I saw many flocks of naked souls, all of them weeping very miserably, and a different law seemed set on each.
Some of the people lay flat on the ground; some were sitting all hunched up; and others were walking continually.
Those going about were the most numerous, and those lying down in the torment the fewest, but they had their tongues loosest in their grief.
Over the whole sand, falling slowly, broad flakes of fire were raining down, like snow in the mountains when there is no wind.
As Alexander, in those hot parts of India, saw flames fall on his army and reach the ground still whole,
so that he saw to it that the ground was trampled by his troops, because the vapour was better put out while it was still on its own:
so the eternal burning came down; and the sand caught fire from it, like tinder under a flint, to double the pain.
The dance of the wretched hands was never at rest, beating off from themselves now here, now there, the fresh burning.
I began: "Master, you who overcome everything except the hard demons who came out against us at the entrance of the gate,
who is that big one who seems not to care about the fire, and lies there contemptuous and twisted, so that the rain does not seem to torment him?"
And that same one, who had noticed that I was asking my guide about him, shouted: "What I was alive, I am dead.
Let Jove tire out his blacksmith, from whom in his anger he took the sharp thunderbolt with which I was struck on my last day;
and let him tire out the others, shift after shift, in Mongibello at the black forge, calling 'Good Vulcan, help, help!'
as he did at the battle of Phlegra, and let him shoot at me with all his strength: he would not have a happy revenge out of it."
Then my guide spoke with such force that I had never heard him so loud: "O Capaneus, in that your pride
is not put out, you are punished the more; no torment except your own rage would be a pain to match your fury."
Then he turned to me with a better face, saying: "That was one of the seven kings who besieged Thebes; and he held, and it seems he still holds,
God in contempt, and seems to value him little; but, as I told him, his own scorn is a very fitting decoration for his chest.
Now come behind me, and take care not to set your feet, as yet, on the burning sand; but always keep them close in to the wood."
In silence we came to where there spurts out of the wood a little stream, whose redness still makes my flesh crawl.
As a rivulet comes out of the Bulicame that the sinful women share out among themselves, so this one went down across the sand.
Its bed, and both its slopes, were made of stone, and the margins at the sides; and from that I understood the crossing was there.
"Among everything else I have shown you since we came in through the gate whose threshold is refused to nobody,
nothing has been made out by your eyes as notable as the present stream, which puts out all the little flames above it."
These were my guide's words; at which I begged him to grant me the food of which he had granted me the appetite.
"In the middle of the sea there sits a wasted country," he said then, "which is called Crete, under whose king the world was once chaste.
There is a mountain there that was once glad with water and with leaves, and was called Ida; now it is deserted like a thing gone stale.
Rhea once chose it as the trusted cradle of her son, and to hide him better she had shouting made there when he cried.
Inside the mountain a great old man stands upright, who keeps his shoulders turned towards Damietta and looks at Rome as if it were his mirror.
His head is formed of fine gold, and his arms and his chest are pure silver, then he is copper as far as the fork;
from there down he is all choice iron, except that his right foot is baked clay; and he stands on that one more than on the other.
Every part except the gold is broken by a crack that drips tears, which, gathered together, bore through that cave.
Their course tumbles down into this valley; they make Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon; then they go down by this narrow channel
until, where there is no more going down, they make Cocytus; and what that pool is like you will see for yourself, so it is not told here."
And I to him: "If the present stream runs down like that from our world, why does it only appear to us at this rim?"
And he to me: "You know the place is round; and although you have come a long way, always to the left, going down towards the bottom,
you have not yet turned through the whole circle; so, if something new appears to us, it should not bring astonishment to your face."
And I again: "Master, where are Phlegethon and Lethe to be found? You say nothing of the one, and say the other is made out of this rain."
"You please me in all your questions, certainly," he answered, "but the boiling of the red water ought to have settled one of the two you ask.
You will see Lethe, but outside this pit, there where the souls go to wash themselves when their guilt is repented and taken away."
Then he said: "Now it is time to draw away from the wood; see that you come behind me: the margins make a road, because they are not burnt,
and above them every falling flame is put out."
Now one of the hard margins carries us along; and the smoke of the stream makes a shade above, so that it saves the water and the banks from the fire.
As the Flemings between Wissant and Bruges, afraid of the flood that rushes at them, build their barrier to make the sea run away;
and as the Paduans do along the Brenta, to defend their towns and their castles before Carinthia feels the heat:
these were made on the same pattern, although whoever the builder was made them neither so high nor so thick.
We had already gone so far from the wood that I would not have seen where it was even if I had turned round to look,
when we met a troop of souls coming along the bank, and every one of them looked at us the way people do in the evening
when they look at each other under a new moon; and they sharpened their eyebrows towards us the way an old tailor does at the eye of a needle.
Eyed like that by such a household, I was recognised by one, who took me by the hem and cried: "What a marvel!"
And I, when he stretched his arm out to me, fixed my eyes so hard on his baked face that the scorching did not stop
my mind from knowing him; and bending my hand down towards his face I answered: "Are you here, Ser Brunetto?"
And he: "O my son, do not be displeased if Brunetto Latini turns back a little way with you and lets the file go on."
I said to him: "I beg it of you as much as I can; and if you want me to sit down with you, I will do it, if it pleases this man I am going with."
"O my son," he said, "any of this flock who stops for a moment then lies a hundred years without brushing off the fire when it strikes him.
So go on: I will come along at your skirts; and afterwards I will rejoin my band, who go weeping for their eternal losses."
I did not dare come down off the road to walk level with him; but I kept my head bent, like a man walking reverently.
He began: "What fortune or what destiny brings you down here before your last day? And who is this, showing you the way?"
"Up there above, in the clear life," I answered him, "I lost myself in a valley before my years were full.
Only yesterday morning I turned my back on it: this one appeared to me as I was going back into it, and is bringing me home along this road."
And he to me: "If you follow your star you cannot fail of a glorious harbour, if I judged rightly in the beautiful life;
and if I had not died so early, seeing heaven so kind to you, I would have given you comfort in the work.
But that ungrateful, malicious people who came down from Fiesole long ago, and still have something of the mountain and the rock in them,
will make themselves your enemy for your good deeds; and there is a reason for it: it is not fitting for the sweet fig to bear fruit among sour sorb apples.
Old report in the world calls them blind; they are a greedy, envious and arrogant people: see that you clean yourself of their habits.
Your fortune keeps so much honour for you that both parties will be hungry for you; but the grass will be far from the beak.
Let the beasts of Fiesole make fodder of themselves, and not touch the plant, if any still rises in their dung,
in which the holy seed lives again of those Romans who stayed there when that nest of so much wickedness was made."
"If everything I wish for had been granted," I answered him, "you would not yet have been put in exile from human nature;
because it is fixed in my mind, and grieves my heart now, that dear and good, fatherly image of you when, in the world, hour after hour,
you taught me how a man makes himself eternal: and how much I value it, while I am alive, must be made out in my own tongue.
What you tell me of my course I am writing down, and keeping it to be glossed, with another text, by a lady who will know how, if I reach her.
This much I want to be plain to you: as long as my conscience does not scold me, I am ready for Fortune to do as she likes.
Such an earnest is nothing new to my ears: so let Fortune turn her wheel as she pleases, and the peasant his mattock."
Then my master turned back on his right cheek and looked at me; then he said: "He listens well who takes note of it."
And none the less I go on talking with Ser Brunetto, and I ask him who his best known and highest companions are.
And he to me: "It is good to know of some of them; about the others it will be praiseworthy to keep quiet, because the time would be short for so much talking.
In short, know that they were all clerics and great men of letters, and of great fame, all filthy in the world with the same sin.
Priscian goes along with that miserable crowd, and Francesco d'Accorso too; and if you had had any appetite for such scurf, you could have seen there
the one who was transferred by the servant of servants from the Arno to the Bacchiglione, where he left his badly stretched nerves.
I would say more; but the coming on and the talking can be no longer, because I see new smoke rising over there off the sand.
People are coming with whom I must not be. Let my Treasure be commended to you, in which I am still alive; and I ask no more."
Then he turned, and seemed like one of those who run for the green cloth at Verona across the country; and he seemed, of those,
the one who wins, not the one who loses.
I was already in a place where you could hear the rumbling of the water falling into the next circle, like the sound beehives make,
when three shades together broke away, running, from a troop that was passing under the rain of that harsh torment.
They came towards us, and each of them shouted: "Stop, you who by your clothes seem to us to be someone from our own corrupt town."
Ah, what wounds I saw on their limbs, new ones and old, burned in by the flames! It still hurts me only to remember it.
My teacher paid attention to their shouts; he turned his face to me and said: "Now wait; to these men we ought to be courteous.
And if it were not for the fire that the nature of this place shoots down, I would say that haste suited you better than them."
When we had stopped, they started up again their old refrain; and when they reached us all three of them made a wheel of themselves.
As champions do, naked and oiled, sizing up their hold and their advantage before they come to blows and thrusts,
so, wheeling round, each of them kept his face turned towards me, so that his neck travelled continually against his feet.
And "If the misery of this loose ground makes us and our prayers despicable," one of them began, "and our scorched and hairless look,
let our reputation bend your mind to tell us who you are, who rub your living feet so confidently through Hell.
This one, in whose footprints you see me treading, although he goes naked and stripped of his hair, was of higher rank than you would believe:
he was the grandson of the good Gualdrada; his name was Guido Guerra, and in his life he did much with his good sense and with the sword.
The other, who treads the sand behind me, is Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, whose voice ought to be welcome up in the world.
And I, who am put on this cross with them, was Jacopo Rusticucci; and certainly my savage wife harms me more than anything else."
If I had had any cover from the fire I would have thrown myself down among them, and I think my teacher would have allowed it;
but because I would have been burnt and cooked, fear defeated the good will in me that was making me greedy to embrace them.
Then I began: "Not contempt, but grief, your condition fixed inside me — so much of it that it will be slow to strip off —
as soon as this lord of mine said words to me from which I understood that people such as you were coming.
I am from your town, and always I have repeated your deeds and your honoured names with affection, and listened to them.
I am leaving the gall and going for the sweet apples promised me by my truthful guide; but first I have to fall as far as the centre."
"So may your soul go on guiding your limbs a long time," he answered then, "and may your fame shine after you —
tell us whether courtesy and valour still live in our city as they used to, or whether they have gone right out of it;
because Guglielmo Borsiere, who has been grieving with us only a short while, and goes there with the others, torments us a good deal with what he says."
"The new people and the sudden profits have generated pride and excess in you, Florence, so that already you weep for it."
So I cried out, with my face lifted; and the three, who took that for an answer, looked at one another as men do at the truth.
"If it costs you so little at other times," they all answered, "to satisfy other people, happy are you, if you speak so freely!
So, if you escape from these dark places and go back to see the beautiful stars again, when it will please you to say 'I was there',
see that you talk about us to people." Then they broke their wheel, and as they ran their nimble legs looked like wings.
An "amen" could not have been said as quickly as they disappeared; so it seemed good to my master to move on.
I followed him, and we had gone only a little way when the sound of the water was so close to us that we would hardly have heard each other speak.
Like that river which has a course of its own first from Monte Viso towards the east, on the left slope of the Apennines,
and is called the Acquacheta up there, before it goes down into its low bed and is empty of that name at Forlì,
and roars up there above San Benedetto of the Alps, falling in a single drop where a thousand ought to have received it:
so, down a steep bank, we found that dark water resounding, so that in a short time it would have hurt the ear.
I had a cord tied round me, and with it I had once thought to catch the leopard with the painted hide.
After I had untied the whole of it from me, as my guide had ordered me, I handed it to him, knotted and coiled up.
At which he turned to the right-hand side and, some way out from the edge, threw it down into that deep gorge.
"Something new is surely bound to answer," I said inside myself, "that new signal which the master follows so with his eye."
Ah, how careful men ought to be with those who see not only the deed but look with their minds inside your thoughts!
He said to me: "Soon there will come up what I am waiting for, and what your thought is dreaming of; soon it must be uncovered to your sight."
To a truth that has the face of a lie a man ought to keep his lips shut as long as he can, because it brings shame on him without any fault;
but here I cannot keep quiet; and by the notes of this comedy, reader, I swear to you — so may they not be empty of long favour —
that I saw, through that thick and dark air, a figure come swimming upwards, a marvel to any confident heart,
just as a man comes back up who goes down sometimes to free an anchor that has caught on a rock or something else shut in the sea,
stretching upward and drawing his feet in.
"Look at the beast with the pointed tail, that crosses mountains and breaks walls and weapons! Look at the one that makes the whole world stink!"
That is how my guide began to speak to me; and he signalled to it to come to the shore, near the end of the marble path we had been walking.
And that filthy image of fraud came, and brought its head and its chest ashore, but did not draw its tail onto the bank.
Its face was the face of a just man — so kindly was the skin of it on the outside — and all the rest of the body was a serpent's;
it had two paws, hairy up to the armpits; its back and its chest and both its flanks were painted with knots and little wheels.
Neither Tartars nor Turks ever made cloths with more colour in warp and in weft, nor were such webs ever set up by Arachne.
As boats sometimes lie at the shore, partly in the water and partly on land, and as, over there among the guzzling Germans,
the beaver settles down to make his war, so that worst of beasts lay on the stone rim that shuts in the sand.
All its tail was flickering in the void, twisting the poisonous fork upward that armed its point like a scorpion's.
My guide said: "Now our way has to be twisted a little, as far as that wicked beast lying over there."
So we came down on the right-hand side and took ten steps along the very edge, to keep well clear of the sand and the flames.
And when we had come to it, a little further on I see people sitting on the sand, near the empty place.
There my master said to me: "So that you may carry away a full experience of this ring, go and see how those people are.
Let your talk with them be short; while you come back, I will speak with this one and ask it to lend us its strong shoulders."
So, along the very edge of that seventh circle, I went on again entirely alone, to where the miserable people were sitting.
Their pain was bursting out through their eyes; with their hands they helped themselves here and there, now against the falling fire, now against the hot ground:
it is no different from what dogs do in summer, now with their muzzles, now with their paws, when they are bitten by fleas or flies or gadflies.
When I had put my eyes on the faces of some on whom the painful fire falls, I did not recognise any of them; but I noticed
that from each one's neck there hung a purse with a certain colour and a certain badge, and that their eyes seem to feed on it.
And as I come looking among them, I saw blue on a yellow purse that had the face and the bearing of a lion.
Then, my gaze running on further, I saw another one, red as blood, showing a goose whiter than butter.
And one who had a blue and swollen sow marked on his white bag said to me: "What are you doing in this ditch?
Get away now; and since you are still alive, know that my neighbour Vitaliano will sit here on my left flank.
Among these Florentines I am a Paduan: many times they deafen my ears by shouting: 'Let the sovereign knight come,
who will bring the purse with the three goats!'" Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue, like an ox licking its nose.
And I, afraid that staying longer would annoy the one who had warned me to stay only a little, turned back from those weary souls.
I found my guide already climbed up on the back of the savage animal, and he said to me: "Now be strong and brave.
From now on we go down by stairs like these; get up in front, because I want to be in the middle, so that the tail cannot do you any harm."
Like a man who has the shivering fit of a quartan fever so near that his nails are already pale, and who trembles all over just at the sight of shade,
that is what I became at the words he offered me; but shame made its threats to me, which makes a servant brave in front of a good lord.
I settled myself on those horrible shoulders; I wanted to say — but the voice did not come as I expected — "Hold on to me."
But he, who had helped me another time in another danger, as soon as I was up put his arms round me and held me;
and he said: "Geryon, move off now: wide circles, and go down gently; think of the new load you are carrying."
As a little boat goes out from its place backwards, backwards, so it drew off from there; and when it felt itself entirely free
it turned its tail round to where its chest had been, and, stretching it out, moved it like an eel, and gathered the air to itself with its paws.
I do not believe there was greater fear when Phaethon let go of the reins, so that the sky was scorched, as it still appears;
nor when poor Icarus felt his loins losing their feathers as the wax heated, and his father shouted to him, "You are going the wrong way!" —
than mine was, when I saw that I was in the air on every side, and saw every sight put out except the beast's.
It goes off swimming very, very slowly; it wheels and goes down, but I do not notice it, except that the wind comes at my face and from below.
Already on the right hand I could hear the whirlpool making a horrible roar underneath us, at which I stick my head out with my eyes turned down.
Then I was more afraid of the drop, because I saw fires and heard weeping; so, trembling all over, I huddle back.
And then I saw, because I had not seen it before, the going down and the wheeling, by the great torments that were coming closer on different sides.
As a falcon that has been long on the wing, and which, without seeing lure or bird, makes the falconer say "Oh no, you are coming down!",
descends tired through a hundred circles to where it started off quick, and settles far away from its master, sullen and angry:
so Geryon set us down at the bottom, right at the foot of the sheer rock, and, unloaded of our persons,
vanished like an arrow off the string.
There is a place in Hell called Malebolge, the evil ditches, all of stone the colour of iron, like the wall that circles round it.
Right in the middle of that malignant field a well gapes, very wide and deep, whose construction I will describe in its place.
So the belt that is left is round, between the well and the foot of the high hard bank, and it has its bottom divided into ten valleys.
Just as, where more and more moats are ringed round castles to guard the walls, the part where they are makes a pattern,
these made a pattern like that here; and as such fortresses have little bridges from their thresholds to the outer bank,
so from the bottom of the rock there ran ridges that cut across the banks and the ditches as far as the well that clips and gathers them.
This was the place we found ourselves in when we were shaken off Geryon's back; and the poet kept to the left, and I moved along behind.
On the right hand I saw new misery, new torment and new whippers, with which the first pouch was filled.
In the bottom the sinners were naked; from the middle towards us they came facing us, beyond it they went with us, but with longer strides,
as the Romans, because of the great crowd, in the year of the jubilee, have found a way of getting people over the bridge,
so that on one side they all have their faces towards the castle and go to Saint Peter's, and on the other bank they go towards the hill.
On this side and on that, along the black stone, I saw horned demons with big whips, who beat them cruelly from behind.
Ah, how they made them lift their heels at the first strokes! Nobody, by then, waited for the second or the third.
As I went, my eyes met one of theirs; and immediately I said: "I am not fasting from having seen this man before."
So I planted my feet to work out who he was; and my sweet guide stopped with me and consented to my going back a little.
And that whipped one thought he could hide by lowering his face; but it did him little good, because I said: "You, throwing your eye at the ground —
if the features you carry are not false, you are Venedico Caccianemico. But what brings you into such stinging pickle?"
And he to me: "I say it unwillingly; but your clear speech forces me to, and makes me remember the old world.
I was the one who brought Ghisolabella to do the marquis's will, whatever way the ugly story is told.
And I am not the only Bolognese weeping here; the place is so full of us that there are not so many tongues taught now
to say 'sipa' between Savena and Reno; and if you want faith or evidence of it, just bring our greedy nature to mind."
As he spoke, a demon struck him with his lash, and said: "Get on, pimp! There are no women here to coin."
I rejoined my escort; then with a few steps we came to where a ridge ran out of the bank.
We climbed it easily enough; and turning right along its jagged spine we left those eternal circles behind.
When we were at the place where it gapes underneath to give a passage to the whipped ones, my guide said: "Stop here, and let
the sight of these other badly born ones strike you, whose faces you have not seen yet, because they have been going the same way as us."
From the old bridge we watched the file that was coming towards us from the other side, and which the whip drives on in the same way.
And my good master, without my asking, said to me: "Look at that big one coming, who does not seem to shed a tear for the pain:
what a royal look he still keeps! That is Jason, who by courage and by cunning robbed the Colchians of the ram.
He passed by the island of Lemnos after the bold, pitiless women had put all their males to death.
There, with tokens and with ornamented words, he deceived Hypsipyle, the young girl who had first deceived all the others.
He left her there, pregnant and alone; such guilt condemns him to such a torment; and Medea is avenged as well.
With him goes everyone who deceives that way; and let that be enough to know about the first valley and about those it takes in its teeth."
We were already where the narrow path crosses the second bank and makes of it the shoulder for another arch.
From there we heard people whining in the next pouch, and snorting through their snouts, and beating themselves with their palms.
The banks were crusted with a mould from the breath below that cakes on them, and it fought with our eyes and with our noses.
The bottom is so hollow that there is nowhere it can be seen from without climbing to the crown of the arch, where the ridge stands highest.
There we came; and from there, down in the ditch, I saw people dunked in a filth that seemed to have come out of human privies.
And while I search down there with my eye, I saw one with his head so plastered with shit that it was not clear whether he was layman or cleric.
He shouted at me: "Why are you so greedy to look at me more than the other filthy ones?" And I to him: "Because, if I remember rightly,
I have seen you before with dry hair, and you are Alessio Interminei of Lucca: that is why I eye you more than all the rest."
And he then, beating his own gourd: "The flatteries I could never get my tongue tired of have sunk me down here."
After that my guide said to me: "See that you push your face a little further forward, so that your eye takes in properly
the face of that filthy, dishevelled slut who is scratching herself over there with shitty nails, and now squats down and now stands up.
She is Thaïs, the whore who answered her lover when he said, 'Have I great thanks from you?': 'Amazing ones!'
And with this let our seeing be satisfied."
O Simon Magus, O you wretched followers who take the things of God, which ought to be brides of goodness, and in your greed
prostitute them for gold and for silver, now the trumpet must sound for you, because you are in the third pouch.
We had already climbed to the next tomb, up onto that part of the ridge that hangs exactly over the middle of the ditch.
O highest wisdom, how great is the art you show in heaven, on earth and in the evil world, and how justly your power distributes!
I saw, along the sides and along the bottom, the livid stone full of holes, all of one width, and each of them round.
They did not seem to me any wider or narrower than the ones in my beautiful San Giovanni that are made as places for the baptisers;
and one of those, not many years ago, I broke, for the sake of someone drowning inside it: and let this be the seal to undeceive everyone.
Out of the mouth of each one there stuck a sinner's feet, and his legs up to the calf, and the rest of him stayed inside.
The soles of all of them were on fire, at which their joints twitched so hard that they would have snapped withies and ropes.
As the flame on oiled things usually moves only along the outer skin, so it was there, from heels to toes.
"Who is that one, master, who torments himself, twitching more than the others of his company," I said, "and whom a redder flame sucks at?"
And he to me: "If you want me to carry you down there by the bank that lies lower, you will learn from him about himself and his wrongs."
And I: "Whatever pleases you is good for me: you are my lord, and you know that I do not depart from your wishes, and you know what is left unsaid."
Then we came onto the fourth bank; we turned and went down on the left hand into the narrow bottom full of holes.
My good master did not set me down off his hip until we reached the crack of the one who was weeping with his shanks.
"Whoever you are, holding your upper part below, sad soul planted like a stake," I began to say, "speak, if you can."
I stood like the friar who confesses the treacherous assassin, who, once he is fixed in the hole, calls him back so as to put off his death.
And he cried: "Are you standing there already, are you standing there already, Boniface? The writing lied to me by several years.
Are you so soon glutted with that wealth for which you were not afraid to take by fraud the beautiful lady, and then to tear her apart?"
I became like people who stand there not understanding what has been answered them, almost made fools of, and unable to reply.
Then Virgil said: "Tell him at once: 'I am not the one, I am not the one you think'"; and I answered as I was told.
At which the spirit twisted both his feet; then, sighing, and with a voice full of tears, he said to me: "Then what do you want from me?
If knowing who I am matters so much to you that you have run down the bank for it, know that I was dressed in the great mantle;
and truly I was a son of the she-bear, so greedy to advance the cubs that up there I pursed the money, and here myself.
Underneath my head are dragged the others who went before me in simony, flattened into the cracks of the stone.
Down there I shall fall as well, when the one comes whom I thought you were when I put my sudden question.
But my feet have already been cooking, and I have already been upside down like this, longer than he will stand planted with red feet;
because after him, from the west, there will come a shepherd without any law, of uglier deeds, one fit to cover over both him and me.
He will be a new Jason, of the kind we read of in Maccabees; and as that one's king was soft to him, so the one who rules France will be to this man."
I do not know whether I was too rash here, but I answered him in this measure: "Ah, tell me now: how much treasure
did Our Lord require from Saint Peter before he put the keys into his keeping? Certainly he asked nothing but 'Follow me.'
Neither Peter nor the others took gold or silver from Matthias when he was chosen by lot for the place the guilty soul had lost.
So stay where you are, because you are well punished; and keep good guard over the ill-gotten money that made you bold against Charles.
And if it were not that I am still forbidden by reverence for the highest keys that you held in the glad life,
I would use words heavier still; because your greed makes the world sad, trampling the good and lifting up the wicked.
The Evangelist had you shepherds in mind when the one who sits upon the waters was seen by him whoring with the kings —
the one who was born with the seven heads, and had her strength out of the ten horns, as long as virtue pleased her husband.
You have made yourselves a god of gold and silver; and what is the difference between you and the idolater, except that he prays to one and you to a hundred?
Ah, Constantine, how much evil was mothered not by your conversion but by that dowry which the first rich father took from you!"
And while I was singing him notes like these, whether it was anger or conscience gnawing at him, he kicked hard with both his soles.
I do believe it pleased my guide, he listened with so contented a face to the sound of the true words spoken.
So he took me up with both arms; and when he had me right up on his chest he climbed back by the way he had come down.
And he did not tire of holding me clasped to him, but carried me right up to the crown of the arch that is the crossing from the fourth bank to the fifth.
There he set his load down gently — gently, because of the rough and steep ridge, which would have been a hard crossing for goats.
From there another valley was uncovered to me.
I have to make verses about a new punishment and give material to the twentieth canto of the first song, which is about the submerged.
I was already entirely disposed to look into the uncovered bottom, which was bathed in anguished weeping;
and I saw people coming through the round valley, silent and weeping, at the pace of processions in this world.
As my sight went lower down on them, each one appeared marvellously twisted between the chin and the beginning of the chest,
because his face was turned round towards his kidneys, and he had to come backwards, since seeing in front had been taken from him.
Perhaps by the force of a palsy someone has been twisted round like that completely; but I have never seen it, and do not believe it happens.
Reader, so may God let you take fruit from your reading — now think for yourself how I could have kept my face dry
when close up I saw our own image so wrenched round that the weeping of the eyes bathed the buttocks in the cleft.
I certainly wept, leaning against one of the rocks of the hard ridge, so that my escort said to me: "Are you still one of the other fools?
Here pity lives when it is properly dead; who is more criminal than the man who brings passion into God's judgement?
Lift your head up, lift it, and see the one for whom the earth opened before the eyes of the Thebans, so that they all cried out, 'Where are you falling to,
Amphiaraus? Why are you leaving the war?' And he did not stop falling down the valley as far as Minos, who lays hold of everyone.
Look how he has made a chest of his shoulders; because he wanted to see too far ahead, he looks behind him and makes a backward road.
See Tiresias, who changed his appearance when he turned from male into female, with every one of his limbs transformed;
and afterwards he had to strike the two twined serpents again with his rod before he got his masculine feathers back.
Aruns is the one who backs onto his belly, who in the mountains of Luni, where the man of Carrara who lives below them hoes,
had his cave among the white marbles for his home; from which, to watch the stars and the sea, his view was not cut short.
And the one who covers her breasts, which you cannot see, with her loosened braids, and has all her hairy skin on that side,
was Manto, who searched through many lands; afterwards she settled where I was born; so it pleases me a little that you should listen to me.
After her father had gone out of life and the city of Bacchus had become a slave, she wandered the world a long time.
Up in beautiful Italy there lies a lake at the foot of the Alps that shut Germany in above the Tyrol, and it is called Benaco.
By a thousand springs, I think, and more, the country between Garda and Val Camonica and Pennino is bathed with the water that settles in that lake.
There is a place in the middle where the shepherd of Trent, and the one of Brescia, and the one of Verona could each give a blessing, if he came that way.
Peschiera sits there, a beautiful and strong device for facing the men of Brescia and of Bergamo, where the shore round about is lowest.
There everything has to fall that cannot stay in Benaco's lap, and it becomes a river down through green pastures.
As soon as the water gets a head to run with it is no longer Benaco but is called the Mincio, as far as Governolo, where it falls into the Po.
It has not run far before it finds a flat, where it spreads out and turns into marsh; and in summer it can sometimes be foul.
Passing that way, the harsh virgin saw land in the middle of the swamp, uncultivated and bare of inhabitants.
There, to escape all human company, she stopped with her servants to practise her arts, and lived, and left her empty body there.
Then the men who were scattered round about gathered to that place, which was strong because of the marsh it had on every side.
They made the city over those dead bones; and after the woman who first chose the place they called it Mantua, without other divination.
Its people were once thicker inside it, before the folly of Casalodi was tricked by Pinamonte.
So I instruct you: if you ever hear my town's origin told otherwise, let no lie defraud the truth."
And I: "Master, your reasonings are so certain to me, and take my faith so completely, that all the others would be dead coals to me.
But tell me, of the people going along there, whether you see any worth noting; because that is the only thing my mind keeps returning to."
Then he said to me: "That one who spreads his beard from his cheek over his dark shoulders was — when Greece was so emptied of males
that hardly any were left even in the cradles — an augur, and gave the moment, with Calchas, at Aulis, for cutting the first cable.
Eurypylus was his name, and my high tragedy sings of him like that in one place: you know it well, who know the whole of it.
That other one, so thin in the flanks, was Michael Scot, who truly knew the game of magical frauds.
See Guido Bonatti; see Asdente, who would like now to have stuck to his leather and his thread, but repents too late.
See the wretched women who left the needle, the shuttle and the spindle, and made themselves fortune-tellers; they made their spells with herbs and with images.
But come along now, because Cain and his thorns already hold the boundary of both hemispheres and touch the water below Seville;
and last night the moon was already full: you should remember it well, because it did you no harm at times in the deep wood."
So he talked to me, and we went on meanwhile.
So, from bridge to bridge, talking of things my comedy does not care to sing, we came; and we were holding the crown of it when
we stopped to see the next cleft of Malebolge, and the next futile weeping; and I saw it marvellously dark.
As in the arsenal of the Venetians the sticky pitch boils in winter for caulking their unsound ships,
because they cannot sail — and instead of sailing one builds his ship new, another plugs the ribs of one that has made many voyages;
one hammers at the bow, another at the stern; some make oars, others twist rope; one patches the jib and the mainsail —
so, not by fire but by divine art, a thick tar was boiling down there that plastered the bank on every side.
I could see it, but I could see in it nothing except the bubbles the boiling raised, and the whole of it swelling and settling flat again.
While I was staring down there my guide, saying "Look out, look out!", pulled me to him from the place where I stood.
Then I turned like a man who is impatient to see the thing he has to run from, and whom a sudden fear unstrings,
so that he does not put off going in order to look: and I saw behind us a black devil come running up along the ridge.
Ah, how fierce he was to look at! And how savage he seemed to me in his movements, with his wings spread and light on his feet!
His shoulder, which was sharp and high, was loaded with a sinner by both haunches, and he had him gripped by the tendon of the feet.
From our bridge he said: "O Malebranche, you Evil Claws, here is one of Santa Zita's elders! Put him under, while I go back for more
to that town, which is well stocked with them: every man there is a grafter except Bonturo; there they turn a no into a yes for money."
He threw him down and turned back along the hard ridge; and no mastiff was ever loosed in such a hurry to chase a thief.
That one went under and came up doubled over; but the demons who had the shelter of the bridge shouted: "There is no Holy Face here!
Here you swim differently from the Serchio! So, if you do not want a taste of our hooks, do not stick up above the pitch."
Then they bit into him with more than a hundred prongs and said: "You have to dance down here under cover, so that you can grab on the sly, if you can."
It is no different from the way cooks make their boys duck the meat down in the middle of the cauldron with their hooks, so that it does not float.
My good master said to me: "So that it does not show that you are here, squat down behind a splinter of rock, and take some cover from it;
and whatever insult may be done to me, do not be afraid, because I know about these things: I was in a brawl like this once before."
Then he went on past the head of the bridge; and when he reached the sixth bank he needed a steady face.
With the fury and the storm that dogs come out at a poor man with when he stops suddenly and begs,
those came out from under the little bridge and turned all their grappling hooks on him; but he shouted: "Let none of you be a villain!
Before your hook takes hold of me, let one of you come forward and hear me, and after that take counsel about hooking me."
They all shouted: "Let Malacoda go!" So one moved forward — and the others stood still — and came to him saying: "What good will it do him?"
"Do you believe, Malacoda, that you see me come here," said my master, "already safe from all your defences,
without divine will and favourable fate? Let us go on, because it is willed in heaven that I should show another man this wild road."
Then his pride fell so far that he let the hook drop to his feet, and said to the others: "Now let him not be struck."
And my guide to me: "You there, sitting among the splinters of the bridge, crouched down, you can safely come back to me now."
So I moved and came to him quickly; and the devils all pressed forward, so that I was afraid they would not keep the bargain;
that is how I once saw the soldiers who came out of Caprona under terms grow afraid, seeing themselves among so many enemies.
I brought my whole body up close alongside my guide, and did not turn my eyes away from their looks, which were not good.
They lowered their prongs, and "Shall I touch him," one said to another, "on the rump?" And they answered: "Yes, see that you get him there."
But that demon who was in conversation with my guide turned round very quickly and said: "Down, down, Scarmiglione!"
Then he said to us: "You cannot go any further along this ridge, because the sixth arch lies all in pieces at the bottom.
And if you would still like to go on, go along by this bank; there is another ridge close by that makes a way.
Yesterday, five hours later than this hour, it was a thousand two hundred and sixty-six years since the road here was broken.
I am sending some of my company that way to see whether anyone is airing himself; go with them, they will not be wicked."
"Step forward, Alichino, and Calcabrina," he began to say, "and you, Cagnazzo; and let Barbariccia lead the ten.
Let Libicocco come too, and Draghignazzo, tusked Ciriatto and Graffiacane and Farfarello and mad Rubicante.
Search around the boiling glue; let these two be safe as far as the next ridge that goes over the dens in one piece."
"Oh, master, what is it that I see?" I said. "Please, let us go on alone, without an escort, if you know the way; I do not want one for myself.
If you are as sharp as you usually are, do you not see that they are grinding their teeth and threatening us with harm in their eyebrows?"
And he to me: "I do not want you to be frightened; let them grind as much as they please: they do it for the wretched boiled ones."
They wheeled off along the left bank; but first each of them had gripped his tongue with his teeth, towards their leader, as a signal;
and he had made a trumpet of his arse.
I have seen horsemen strike camp before, and open an attack, and hold a review, and sometimes ride off to save themselves;
I have seen raiders in your country, men of Arezzo, and I have seen foraging parties go out, tournaments struck and jousts run;
now with trumpets, and now with bells, with drums and with signals from the castles, with our own things and with foreign ones;
but I never saw horsemen or foot soldiers set out to so strange a pipe, nor a ship, at a sign from land or from star.
We were going along with the ten demons. Ah, savage company! But in church with the saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons.
My attention was all on the pitch, to see everything the pouch contained and the people burning inside it.
As dolphins do, when they make a sign to sailors with the arch of their backs that they should look to saving their ship,
so, from time to time, to ease his pain, one of the sinners would show his back and hide it again quicker than lightning.
And as at the edge of the water in a ditch the frogs sit with only their snouts out, hiding their feet and the rest of their bulk,
so the sinners sat on every side; but as soon as Barbariccia came near they pulled themselves back down under the boiling.
I saw — and my heart still shudders at it — one waiting like that, as it happens that one frog stays and another jumps;
and Graffiacane, who was most opposite him, hooked him by his tarred hair and pulled him up, so that he looked to me like an otter.
I already knew all their names, I had noted them so carefully when they were chosen, and afterwards, when they called to each other, I listened.
"O Rubicante, see that you set your claws in his back and flay him!" all the cursed ones shouted together.
And I: "My master, find out, if you can, who the unlucky man is who has come into the hands of his enemies."
My guide went and stood beside him and asked him where he was from, and he answered: "I was born in the kingdom of Navarre.
My mother put me into a lord's service, having got me by a scoundrel who destroyed himself and his possessions.
Then I was in the household of good King Thibault; there I set myself to graft, for which I am paying the account in this heat."
And Ciriatto, out of whose mouth a tusk stuck on each side, like a pig's, made him feel how one of them can rip.
The mouse had come among bad cats; but Barbariccia shut him in with his arms and said: "Stand back, while I have him on my fork."
And he turned his face to my master: "Ask more," he said, "if you want to know more from him, before somebody undoes him."
So my guide: "Now tell me: of the other guilty ones under the pitch, do you know any who are Italian?" And he: "I left,
a moment ago, one who was from a place near there. I wish I were still under cover with him, because then I should not fear claw or hook!"
And Libicocco said: "We have put up with too much," and took his arm with the hook, and, tearing, carried a muscle away.
Draghignazzo also wanted to grab at him down at the legs; at which their decurion turned round and round with a bad look.
When they had quietened a little, my guide asked the man, who was still staring at his own wound, without waiting:
"Who was the one you say you made such a bad parting from, to come ashore?" And he answered: "It was Friar Gomita,
the one from Gallura, a vessel of every fraud, who had his master's enemies in his hands and treated them so that every one of them praises him.
He took their money and let them go quietly, as he tells it; and in his other offices too he was a grafter, not a small one but a sovereign.
Master Michel Zanche of Logodoro keeps company with him; and their tongues never feel tired of talking about Sardinia.
Oh — look at that other one grinning; I would say more, but I am afraid he is getting ready to scratch my scurf."
And the great provost, turning to Farfarello, who was rolling his eyes to strike, said: "Get off there, you evil bird!"
"If you want to see or to hear Tuscans or Lombards," the frightened one began again then, "I will make some come;
but let the Malebranche stand back a little, so that the others need not fear their revenge; and I, sitting in this same place,
for the one that I am will make seven come when I whistle, as it is our custom to do whenever one of us puts himself outside."
Cagnazzo lifted his snout at those words, shaking his head, and said: "Listen to the trick he has thought up for throwing himself back down!"
At which he, who had snares in great plenty, answered: "I am tricky indeed, when I get more sorrow for my own side."
Alichino could not hold himself in, and, against the others, said to him: "If you go down I will not come after you at a gallop
but will beat my wings over the pitch. Let us leave the height, and let the bank be a screen, and see whether you alone are worth more than us."
Reader, you are about to hear a new game: every one of them turned his eyes to the other side, and first of all the one who had been most against it.
The Navarrese picked his moment well; he set his soles on the ground, and in an instant jumped, and was free of their provost.
Every one of them was stung with guilt at it, but most of all the one who had caused the failure; so he moved and shouted: "I have got you!"
But it did him little good: wings could not outrun terror; the one went under and the other turned his chest upward in his flight:
it is no different from the way a duck suddenly dives under when the falcon comes close, and he goes back up angry and defeated.
Calcabrina, furious at the trick, kept flying behind him, wanting the man to escape so that there could be a scuffle;
and as soon as the grafter had disappeared he turned his claws on his own companion and locked with him above the ditch.
But the other was a full-grown hawk too at clawing him properly, and the pair of them fell into the middle of the boiling pond.
The heat unlocked them at once; but there was no getting up out of it, their wings were so limed with the stuff.
Barbariccia, grieving with the rest of his troop, made four of them fly to the other side with all their prongs, and very quickly
they came down to their stations on this side and that; they held out their hooks to the two who were stuck, already cooked inside their crust.
And we left them tangled up like that.
Silent, alone, without company, we were going, one in front and the other behind, as the Friars Minor go along the road.
My thoughts had turned, because of the brawl just now, to Aesop's fable, where he tells of the frog and the mouse;
because "now" and "this instant" are no closer than the one is to the other, if you couple beginning and end together with an attentive mind.
And as one thought bursts out of another, so out of that one another was born, which doubled my first fear.
I was thinking like this: "These have been made fools of on our account, with damage and mockery of a kind that I am sure annoys them.
If anger is wound onto their ill will, they will come after us more cruelly than the dog does after the hare it snaps up."
I could already feel all my hair standing on end with fear, and I was straining to look behind, when I said: "Master, if you do not hide
yourself and me quickly, I am terrified of the Malebranche. They are behind us already; I imagine them so hard that I already hear them."
And he: "If I were a mirror of leaded glass I would not draw your outward image to me faster than I take in the one inside you.
Your thoughts were coming in among mine just now, with the same gesture and the same face, so that I have made a single plan out of both.
If the right-hand bank lies in such a way that we can go down into the next pouch, we shall escape the hunt you are imagining."
He had not finished giving that advice when I saw them come with their wings spread, not far off, meaning to take us.
My guide picked me up at once, like a mother woken by the noise who sees the flames burning close to her,
and takes her son and runs, and does not stop, caring more about him than about herself, so that she puts on only a shift;
and down from the top of the hard bank he gave himself, on his back, to the sloping rock that stops one of the sides of the next pouch.
Water never ran so fast down a channel to turn the wheel of a land mill at the moment it comes closest to the paddles,
as my master went down that edge, carrying me on his chest with him, like his son, not like a companion.
Hardly had his feet reached the bed of the bottom when they were on the ridge right above us; but there was no danger there,
because the high providence that willed to set them as ministers of the fifth ditch takes from every one of them the power to leave it.
Down there we found a painted people going round with very slow steps, weeping, and looking tired and defeated.
They had cloaks with hoods pulled down in front of their eyes, cut in the fashion that is made for the monks at Cluny.
On the outside they are gilded, so that they dazzle; but inside they are all lead, and so heavy that Frederick's were straw beside them.
Oh, a mantle to labour under eternally! We turned again, still to the left hand, along with them, attending to their sad weeping;
but because of the weight, those tired people came so slowly that we had new company at every movement of the hip.
So I to my guide: "See if you can find someone known by his deeds or by his name, and, as you go, move your eyes about."
And one who caught the Tuscan speech shouted behind us: "Hold your feet, you who are running so through the dark air!
Perhaps you will get from me what you are asking." At which my guide turned and said: "Wait, and then go on at his pace."
I stopped, and saw two showing in their faces a great hurry of mind to be with me; but the load and the narrow road held them back.
When they had come up they eyed me a long while with a sidelong look, saying nothing; then they turned to each other and said between themselves:
"That one seems alive, by the working of his throat; and if they are dead, by what privilege do they go uncovered by the heavy stole?"
Then they said to me: "O Tuscan, who have come to the college of the sad hypocrites, do not think it beneath you to say who you are."
And I to them: "I was born and grew up on the beautiful river Arno, in the great town, and I am in the body I have always had.
But who are you, down whose cheeks I see so much grief distilling? And what punishment is on you that glitters so?"
And one of them answered me: "The orange cloaks are of lead, and so thick that the weights make our scales creak like this.
We were Jovial Friars, and Bolognese; I was called Catalano and this one Loderingo, and we were taken together by your city
as a single man is usually taken to keep its peace; and we were such that it still shows around the Gardingo."
I began: "O friars, your evils..." but I said no more, because there ran into my eye one crucified on the ground with three stakes.
When he saw me he twisted all over, blowing into his beard with sighs; and Friar Catalano, who noticed it,
said to me: "That nailed one you are looking at advised the Pharisees that it was expedient to put one man to torture for the people.
He is stretched across the road, naked, as you see, and it is necessary for him to feel how much everyone who passes weighs, first.
And his father-in-law is racked in the same way in this ditch, and the others of that council which was a bad seed for the Jews."
Then I saw Virgil marvel over the one stretched out on the cross so basely in the eternal exile.
After that he turned this speech to the friar: "May it not displease you, if you are allowed, to tell us whether on the right hand there is any opening
by which the two of us can get out without forcing the black angels to come and take us out of this bottom."
So he answered: "Nearer than you hope there is a ridge that runs out of the great circling wall and crosses all the savage valleys,
except that at this one it is broken and does not roof it; you will be able to climb up over the ruin, which slopes against the side and heaps up on the bottom."
My guide stood a moment with his head bent; then he said: "That one who hooks the sinners over there gave a bad account of the business."
And the friar: "I once heard it said at Bologna that the devil has plenty of vices, among which I heard that he is a liar, and the father of lies."
After that my guide went off with long strides, disturbed a little with anger in his face; so I left the loaded people
and followed after the prints of the dear feet.
In that part of the young year when the sun tempers his hair under Aquarius and the nights are already going towards half the day,
when the frost copies onto the ground the image of her white sister, but the temper of her pen does not last long,
the little farmer, who is short of fodder, gets up and looks and sees the countryside all white; at which he slaps his thigh,
goes back into the house, and grumbles here and there like a poor wretch who does not know what to do; then he comes out again, and gathers up hope again,
seeing that the world has changed its face in a little while, and takes his crook and drives the sheep out to graze.
So my master made me dismayed when I saw his forehead so troubled, and just as quickly the plaster came to the sore;
because when we came to the broken bridge my guide turned to me with that sweet look I had first seen at the foot of the mountain.
He opened his arms, after choosing some plan inside himself, having first looked hard at the landslide, and took hold of me.
And like a man who works and calculates, who always seems to provide for what is ahead, so, lifting me up towards the top
of one boulder, he was already picking out another spur, saying: "Then get a grip on that one; but test it first, to see if it will hold you."
It was no road for anyone dressed in a cloak, because even we — he light, and I pushed from below — could hardly climb from hold to hold.
And if it had not been that on that side of the wall the slope was shorter than on the other, I do not know about him, but I would have been beaten.
But because the whole of Malebolge leans towards the mouth of the lowest well, the position of each valley means
that one side rises and the other goes down; all the same we came out at last at the point where the last stone breaks away.
My breath was so milked out of my lungs when I was up that I could go no further, and I sat down as soon as I arrived.
"Now you must shake off this sloth," said my master; "sitting on down, and under the bedclothes, brings nobody to fame;
and whoever uses up his life without it leaves the same trace of himself on the earth as smoke in the air and foam on the water.
So get up: overcome your breathlessness with the mind, which wins every battle unless it sinks under the weight of the body.
There is a longer stairway still to be climbed; getting away from these is not enough. If you understand me, act on it now."
Then I got up, showing myself better furnished with breath than I felt, and said: "Go on; I am strong and brave."
We took our way up along the ridge, which was rocky, narrow and hard to manage, and far steeper than the one before.
I went on talking, so as not to seem weak; at which a voice came out of the next ditch, not suited to forming words.
I do not know what it said, although I was already on the crown of the arch that crosses there; but whoever was speaking seemed moved to anger.
I was turned downward; but living eyes could not go to the bottom, because of the dark; so I said: "Master, get across
to the next belt and let us go down the wall; because, as I hear from here and do not understand, so I look down and make out nothing."
"The only answer I give you," he said, "is doing it; because a decent request should be followed by the deed, in silence."
We came down from the bridge at the head where it joins the eighth bank, and then the pouch was plain to me:
and inside it I saw a terrible mass of serpents, and of such various kinds that the memory still curdles my blood.
Let Libya boast no more of her sand; because although she produces chelydri, jaculi and pharea, and cenchres with amphisbaena,
she never showed such plagues, nor such evil ones, together with the whole of Ethiopia and everything that lies over the Red Sea.
Among that cruel, most miserable heap naked, terrified people were running, with no hope of a hole or of a heliotrope:
their hands were tied behind them with snakes; these drove their tails and their heads through the loins, and were knotted in front.
And here, at one who was near our bank, a serpent flung itself and pierced him there where the neck is knotted to the shoulders.
Neither O nor I was ever written so fast as he caught fire and burned, and had to become entirely ashes as he fell;
and when he was so destroyed on the ground the dust gathered itself together of its own accord and immediately went back into the same man.
So it is affirmed by the great sages that the phoenix dies and then is born again when it comes near its five hundredth year;
it feeds on no grass or grain in its life but only on tears of incense and of balsam, and nard and myrrh are its last swaddling clothes.
And like a man who falls, and does not know how, by the force of a demon that drags him to the ground or of some other stoppage that binds a man,
who, when he gets up, looks around him completely lost from the great anguish he has been through, and sighs as he looks:
that is what the sinner was like after he had got up. Oh, power of God, how severe it is, that showers down such blows for vengeance!
My guide then asked him who he was; at which he answered: "I rained down out of Tuscany a short while ago, into this savage throat.
A beast's life pleased me, not a man's, mule that I was; I am Vanni Fucci, a beast, and Pistoia was a fit den for me."
And I to my guide: "Tell him not to slip away, and ask what sin has pushed him down here; because I knew him as a man of blood and rages."
And the sinner, who heard, did not pretend, but turned his mind and his face towards me and was painted with a miserable shame;
then he said: "It hurts me more that you have caught me in the misery where you see me than it did when I was taken out of the other life.
I cannot deny what you are asking; I am put down so far because I was the thief of the fine furnishings from the sacristy,
and it was falsely charged on somebody else. But so that you may not enjoy this sight, if you are ever outside these dark places,
open your ears to my announcement, and hear it. First Pistoia grows thin of the Blacks; then Florence renews her people and her ways.
Mars draws up a vapour from Val di Magra that is wrapped in turbid clouds; and with an impetuous and bitter storm
there will be fighting over Campo Piceno; at which it will suddenly break the mist, so that every White will be wounded by it.
And I have told you so that it may grieve you!"
At the end of his words the thief raised his hands with both the figs, shouting: "Take them, God — I am aiming them at you!"
From then on the snakes were my friends, because one of them coiled round his neck just then as if to say "I do not want you saying any more";
and another round his arms, and tied him up again, clinching itself so tightly in front that he could not give a shrug with them.
Ah, Pistoia, Pistoia, why do you not decide to burn yourself to ashes and last no longer, since you outdo your own seed in doing evil?
Through all the dark circles of Hell I did not see a spirit so arrogant against God — not even the one who fell from the walls at Thebes.
He ran off and said not another word; and I saw a centaur come, full of rage, calling: "Where is he, where is that sour one?"
I do not think the Maremma has as many snakes as he had along his back as far as where our human shape begins.
On his shoulders, behind the nape, a dragon lay with its wings spread; and it sets fire to anybody it meets.
My master said: "This is Cacus, who under the rock of Mount Aventine made a lake of blood many times over.
He does not go by the same road as his brothers, because of the fraudulent theft he made of the great herd that was near him;
at which his crooked doings stopped under the club of Hercules, who perhaps gave him a hundred blows, and he did not feel the tenth."
While he was speaking, and Cacus ran past, three spirits came up below us, whom neither I nor my guide noticed
until they shouted: "Who are you?" At which our story stopped, and after that we attended only to them.
I did not know them; but it happened, as it usually happens by some chance, that one of them had to name another,
saying: "Where can Cianfa have got to?" So I, to make my guide pay attention, laid my finger from my chin up to my nose.
If you are slow now, reader, to believe what I am going to say, it will be no wonder, because I who saw it hardly allow it myself.
As I was holding my eyebrows raised towards them, a serpent with six feet launched itself in front of one of them, and fastened all over him.
With its middle feet it clasped his belly and with the front ones took hold of his arms; then it bit into both his cheeks;
it stretched its hind feet along his thighs and put its tail between the two of them and stretched it back up along his loins.
Ivy was never so rooted to a tree as that horrible beast twisted its own limbs around the other's.
Then they stuck together as if they had been hot wax, and mixed their colours, and neither of them seemed now what he had been:
the way a brown colour runs on ahead of the burning, up the paper, which is not black yet, and the white is dying.
The other two were watching, and each of them was crying: "Oh no, Agnello, how you are changing! Look — you are already neither two nor one."
The two heads had already become one when two shapes appeared to us, mixed in one face, where the two were lost.
Two arms were made out of the four strips; the thighs with the legs, and the belly and the chest, became limbs that were never seen before.
Every original look was cancelled there: the perverse image seemed both two and none; and so it went away with a slow step.
As the lizard, under the great lash of the dog days, changing hedges, seems lightning if it crosses the road,
so there seemed, coming towards the bellies of the other two, a little serpent, burning, livid and black as a peppercorn;
and it pierced one of them in the part where our nourishment is first taken; then it dropped down, stretched out in front of him.
The pierced one stared at it but said nothing; instead, with his feet planted, he yawned, as if sleep or a fever were coming over him.
He looked at the serpent and it looked at him; the one through his wound and the other through its mouth smoked hard, and the two smokes met.
Let Lucan be silent now, where he touches on wretched Sabellus and on Nasidius, and wait to hear what is loosed off here.
Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa; because if he converts him into a serpent and her into a spring in his poetry, I do not envy him;
because he never transmuted two natures face to face in such a way that both forms were ready to exchange their matter.
They answered each other by such rules that the serpent split its tail into a fork, and the wounded man drew his footprints together.
His legs and his thighs stuck to each other so completely that in a moment the join made no mark that could be seen.
The split tail was taking on the shape that was being lost over there, and its skin was going soft while the other's went hard.
I saw the arms go in at the armpits, and the two feet of the beast, which were short, lengthen as much as the arms shortened.
Then the hind feet, twisted together, became the member that a man hides, and the wretch had two put out of his own.
While the smoke veils each of them in a new colour, and generates hair on the one side and strips it off the other,
the one rose up and the other fell down, without either of them turning aside those wicked lamps under which each was changing his snout.
The one who was standing drew his in towards the temples, and out of the excess matter that came there ears came out of the smooth cheeks;
what did not run backward and was held of that surplus made a nose for the face and thickened the lips as much as was needed.
The one lying down drives his muzzle forward and draws his ears back into his head as a snail does with its horns;
and the tongue, which he had had whole and ready for speech before, splits, and the forked one in the other closes up; and the smoke stops.
The soul that had become a beast runs off hissing along the valley, and the other, behind him, spits as he talks.
Then he turned his new shoulders on him and said to the third: "I want Buoso to run on all fours down this road, as I have done."
So I saw the seventh ballast change and change about; and here let the strangeness excuse me if my pen has blurred a little.
And although my eyes were somewhat confused and my mind bewildered, those two could not slip away so hidden
that I did not make out Puccio Sciancato clearly; and he was the only one of the three companions who had come at the beginning who was not changed;
the other was the one you weep for, Gaville.
Rejoice, Florence, since you are so great that you beat your wings over sea and land, and your name is spread through Hell!
Among the thieves I found five such citizens of yours, which brings me shame, and you do not rise to any great honour by it.
But if we dream the truth near morning, you will feel, in a little while from now, what Prato, not to speak of others, longs for you.
And if it had already happened, it would not be too soon. So let it be, since it has to be! Because it will weigh on me more, the older I get.
We left, and up the stairs the projections had made for us to come down by before my guide climbed back, and drew me after him;
and going on along that lonely road, among the splinters and the boulders of the ridge, the foot could not get on without the hand.
I grieved then, and I grieve again now when I turn my mind to what I saw, and I curb my genius more than I usually do,
so that it may not run where virtue does not guide it; so that, if a good star or something better has given me the gift, I may not begrudge it to myself.
As many as the fireflies which the peasant, resting on the hillside at the season when the one who lights the world keeps his face least hidden,
when the fly gives way to the mosquito, sees down along the valley, perhaps just where he gathers grapes and ploughs:
with just so many flames the eighth pouch was all shining, as I made out as soon as I was where the bottom could be seen.
And as the man who was avenged by the bears saw Elijah's chariot at its going, when the horses rose steeply into the sky
and he could not follow it with his eyes so as to see anything but the flame alone, going up like a little cloud:
so each of these moves along the throat of the ditch, because none of them shows its theft, and every flame steals away a sinner.
I was standing on the bridge, risen up to see, so that if I had not caught hold of a rock I would have fallen down without being pushed.
And my guide, who saw me so intent, said: "The spirits are inside the fires; each of them is wrapped in what burns him."
"My master," I answered, "hearing you makes me more certain; but I had already thought that it was so, and was already going to ask you:
who is in that fire that comes so divided at the top, as if it were rising from the pyre where Eteocles was laid with his brother?"
He answered me: "In there Ulysses and Diomedes are tortured; and they go together in the vengeance as they went together in the anger;
and inside their flame there is groaning for the ambush of the horse that made the gate out of which the noble seed of the Romans went;
inside it there is weeping for the trick because of which Deidamia, dead, still grieves for Achilles; and there the penalty for the Palladium is carried."
"If they can speak inside those sparks," I said, "master, I beg you very much, and beg again, so that the prayer may count for a thousand,
that you will not refuse me the waiting until the horned flame comes here; see how desire bends me towards it!"
And he to me: "Your prayer deserves much praise, and so I accept it; but see that your tongue holds itself back.
Let me do the talking; because I have grasped what you want; and they, being Greeks, would perhaps be shy of what you might say."
When the flame had come to the place that seemed to my guide the right time and place, I heard him speak in this form:
"O you who are two inside one fire, if I deserved anything of you while I lived, if I deserved anything of you, much or little,
when I wrote the high verses in the world, do not move away; but let one of you tell where, having lost himself, he went to die."
The greater horn of the ancient flame began to shake itself, murmuring, just like one that the wind wearies;
then, moving its tip this way and that, as if it were the tongue that spoke, it threw a voice out and said: "When
I left Circe, who had kept me more than a year there near Gaeta, before Aeneas gave it that name,
neither the sweetness of a son, nor the duty to an old father, nor the love I owed that should have made Penelope glad,
could overcome in me the burning I had to become experienced in the world, and in the vices of men, and in their worth;
but I put out on the high open sea with a single ship, and with that small company that had never deserted me.
I saw both shores as far as Spain, as far as Morocco, and the island of the Sardinians, and the others that sea washes round about.
My companions and I were old and slow when we came to that narrow mouth where Hercules set up his markers
so that no man should put himself further out; on the right hand I left Seville behind, on the other I had already left Ceuta.
'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the west, to this so brief a watch
of our senses that is still left to us do not refuse the experience, following the sun, of the world where nobody lives.
Consider the seed you came from: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.'
With this little speech I made my companions so keen for the road that afterwards I could hardly have held them back;
and, turning our stern towards the morning, we made wings of our oars for the mad flight, always gaining on the left-hand side.
Night already saw all the stars of the other pole, and ours so low that it did not rise out of the ocean floor.
The light underneath the moon had been rekindled five times, and as many times put out, since we had entered on the deep crossing,
when a mountain appeared to us, dark with distance, and it seemed to me higher than any I had ever seen.
We rejoiced, and it soon turned to weeping; because out of the new land a whirlwind rose and struck the ship on its forward corner.
Three times it made her spin with all the waters; at the fourth it lifted her stern in the air and drove her bow down, as pleased Another,
until the sea had closed again above us."
The flame was already straight up and quiet, having no more to say, and was already going from us with the permission of the sweet poet,
when another, coming along behind it, made us turn our eyes to its tip because of a confused sound that came out of it.
As the Sicilian bull, which bellowed first with the crying of the man — and that was right — who had shaped it with his file,
bellowed with the voice of whoever was tortured, so that, although it was made of bronze, it still seemed pierced through with the pain;
so, having no way and no opening out of the fire at the start, the wretched words were converted into its language.
But after they had found their way up to the point, giving it the flicker that the tongue had given them in their passage,
we heard it say: "O you at whom I aim my voice, and who were speaking Lombard just now, saying 'Now go on your way; I do not urge you further' —
although I have arrived a little late, perhaps, do not be reluctant to stop and talk with me; see that I am not reluctant, and I am burning!
If you have only now fallen into this blind world out of that sweet Italian country from which I bring all my guilt,
tell me whether the Romagnoles have peace or war; because I came from the mountains there between Urbino and the ridge that unlocks the Tiber."
I was still leaning down and attentive when my guide touched me on the side, saying: "You speak; this one is Italian."
And I, who had my answer ready already, began to speak without delay: "O soul who are hidden down there,
your Romagna is not, and never was, without war in the hearts of her tyrants; but I left no open war there just now.
Ravenna stands as it has stood for many years: the eagle of Polenta broods over it, so that it covers Cervia with its pinions.
The city that once made the long resistance and a bloody heap of Frenchmen finds itself under the green claws.
And the old mastiff and the new one of Verrucchio, who governed Montagna so badly, make a drill of their teeth where they always did.
The cities of the Lamone and the Santerno are led by the young lion of the white nest, who changes sides between summer and winter.
And the one whose flank the Savio washes, just as it sits between the plain and the mountain, lives between tyranny and a free state.
Now I beg you to tell us who you are; do not be harder than another has been, so may your name hold up its head in the world."
When the fire had roared a while in its way, it moved its sharp point this way and that, and then gave out this breath:
"If I thought my answer were being made to anyone who would ever go back to the world, this flame would stand without another shake;
but since nobody ever went back alive out of this bottom, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of disgrace.
I was a man of arms, and then I wore the cord, believing that, girded like that, I would make amends; and my belief would certainly have come out whole,
if it had not been for the great priest — bad luck to him! — who put me back into my first sins; and I want you to hear how, and why.
While I was the shape of bones and flesh that my mother gave me, my works were not a lion's but a fox's.
The tricks and the covered ways — I knew all of them, and I worked their art so well that the sound of it went out to the ends of the earth.
When I saw that I had come to that part of my life where everyone should take in the sails and coil up the ropes,
what had pleased me before then grieved me; and I gave myself up, penitent and confessed; ah, wretched me — and it would have worked.
The prince of the new Pharisees, having a war on near the Lateran, and not with Saracens or with Jews,
because every enemy of his was a Christian, and none of them had been at the taking of Acre or a merchant in the Sultan's country,
paid no regard in himself to his high office or to holy orders, nor in me to that cord that used to make its wearers leaner.
But as Constantine sent for Sylvester inside Soracte to cure his leprosy, so this man sent for me as his physician
to cure the fever of his pride; he asked me for advice, and I said nothing, because his words sounded drunk.
And then he said again: 'Do not let your heart suspect anything; I absolve you here and now, and you teach me how to throw Palestrina to the ground.
I have the power to lock and unlock heaven, as you know; that is why there are two keys that my predecessor did not hold dear.'
Then his weighty arguments pushed me to where saying nothing seemed the worse course, and I said: 'Father, since you wash me
of the sin I now have to fall into — a long promise with a short keeping will make you triumph on the high seat.'
Francis came for me afterwards, when I was dead; but one of the black cherubim said to him: 'Do not carry him off: do not wrong me.
He has to come down among my servants because he gave the fraudulent advice, and from then till now I have been at his hair;
because a man who does not repent cannot be absolved, and repenting and willing cannot be done at once, by the contradiction that does not allow it.'
Oh, wretched me! How I shuddered when he took hold of me, saying: 'Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!'
He carried me to Minos; and he twisted his tail eight times round his hard back, and after he had bitten it in his great rage
he said: 'This one is for the thieving fire'; so I am lost where you see me, and going about dressed like this I eat my heart out."
When he had finished what he had to say like that, the flame went away grieving, twisting and beating its sharp horn.
We went on, my guide and I, up along the ridge as far as the next arch that covers the ditch where the fee is paid
by those who load themselves with guilt by pulling things apart.
Who could ever, even in free prose, tell fully of the blood and the wounds that I saw now, however many times he told it?
Every tongue would certainly fall short, because of our speech, and our minds, which have too little room to take in so much.
If all the people were gathered together again who once, on the fated ground of Apulia, grieved for their own blood
because of the Trojans, and because of the long war that made such a high spoil of rings, as Livy writes, who does not err,
together with those who felt the pain of blows from standing against Robert Guiscard; and the others whose bones are still being collected
at Ceperano, where every Apulian turned liar, and over there at Tagliacozzo, where old Alardo won without weapons;
and if one showed his pierced limb and another his cut-off one, it would be nothing beside the filthy manner of the ninth pouch.
No cask that has lost its middle stave or its end board gapes as I saw one man gape, split open from the chin down to where we fart.
His guts were hanging between his legs; you could see his organs, and the miserable sack that makes shit out of what is swallowed.
While I fasten myself on seeing all of him, he looked at me and opened his chest with his hands, saying: "Now look how I split myself!
Look how mangled Muhammad is! In front of me Ali goes weeping, cleft in the face from the chin to the forelock.
And all the others you see here were sowers of scandal and of schism while they lived, and that is why they are split like this.
There is a devil back here who trims us so cruelly, putting every one of this batch back to the edge of the sword
each time we have gone round the grieving road; because the wounds close up again before anyone comes back in front of him.
But who are you, loitering there on the ridge, perhaps to put off going to the punishment that has been judged on your own accusations?"
"Death has not reached him yet, and no guilt brings him to be tormented," my master answered; "but to give him a full experience of it,
it falls to me, who am dead, to lead him down here through Hell, from circle to circle; and this is true, as I am speaking to you."
There were more than a hundred who, when they heard him, stopped in the ditch to look at me in astonishment, forgetting their torture.
"Then tell Fra Dolcino to arm himself, you who will perhaps see the sun before long, if he does not want to follow me here soon —
to arm himself with provisions, so that pressure of snow does not bring the victory to the man from Novara, who would not find it easy to win otherwise."
Muhammad said these words to me after he had lifted one foot to go; then he stretched it to the ground and left.
Another, who had his throat pierced through and his nose cut off up to the eyebrows, and had no more than a single ear,
having stopped with the others to stare in astonishment, opened his windpipe before the others — it was crimson on every side outside —
and said: "O you whom no guilt condemns, and whom I saw up in the Italian country, unless too much likeness is deceiving me,
remember Pier da Medicina, if you ever go back to see the sweet plain that slopes down from Vercelli to Marcabò.
And let the two best men of Fano know, Messer Guido, and Angiolello too, that if seeing ahead here is not empty,
they will be thrown out of their vessel and drowned in a sack near La Cattolica through the treachery of a wicked tyrant.
Between the islands of Cyprus and Majorca Neptune never saw so great a crime, not from pirates, nor from the people of Argos.
That traitor who sees out of one eye only, and holds the town that one who is here with me wishes he had never set eyes on,
will get them to come and parley with him; then he will act so that they will need neither vow nor prayer against the wind off Focara."
And I to him: "Show me and explain, if you want me to carry news of you up there, who it is who found the sight so bitter."
Then he put his hand on the jaw of one of his companions and opened his mouth, shouting: "This is the man, and he does not speak.
This one, when he was driven out, drowned the doubting in Caesar, saying that a man who is ready always suffers loss by waiting."
Oh, how dismayed he looked to me, with his tongue cut out of his gullet — Curio, who had been so bold in speech!
And one who had both his hands cut off, lifting the stumps through the dark air so that the blood made his face filthy,
shouted: "You will remember Mosca too, who said — alas! — 'A thing done has an end,' which was a bad seed for the Tuscan people."
And I added: "And death to your own family"; at which he, piling grief on grief, went off like a person miserable and mad.
But I stayed to look at the crowd, and I saw a thing I would be afraid to tell by itself, without more evidence;
except that conscience gives me confidence — the good companion that makes a man free under the breastplate of feeling himself clean.
I certainly saw, and it still seems that I see it, a trunk without a head walking along as the others of that miserable flock walked;
and it held the cut-off head by the hair, swinging it in its hand like a lantern; and the head looked at us and said: "Oh, me!"
It was making a lamp of itself for itself, and they were two in one and one in two; how that can be, he knows who so governs.
When it was right at the foot of the bridge it lifted its arm high with the whole head, to bring its words nearer to us,
which were: "Now see the miserable punishment, you who go breathing, looking at the dead: see whether any is as great as this.
And so that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, the one who gave the young king his bad counsel.
I made the father and the son rebels against each other; Ahithophel did no more to Absalom and to David with his wicked goadings.
Because I divided people who were so joined, I carry my brain divided — alas — from its beginning, which is in this trunk.
So the counter-suffering is observed in me."
The many people and the various wounds had made my eyes so drunk that they wanted to stay and weep.
But Virgil said to me: "What are you staring at? Why does your sight keep resting down there among the sad mutilated shades?
You did not do this at the other pouches; consider, if you think you can count them, that the valley goes round twenty-two miles.
And the moon is already under our feet; the time allowed us now is short, and there is more to see than you are seeing."
"If you had paid attention," I answered then, "to the reason why I was looking, you would perhaps still have let me stay."
My guide was moving off, and I was going behind him, already making my answer, and adding: "Inside that hollow
where I was keeping my eyes fixed just now, I think a spirit of my own blood is weeping for the guilt that costs so much down there."
Then my master said: "Do not let your thought break itself over him from now on. Attend to something else, and let him stay there;
because I saw him at the foot of the little bridge pointing at you and threatening hard with his finger, and I heard him named as Geri del Bello.
You were so completely taken up then with the one who once held Altaforte that you did not look that way, and he went off."
"O my guide, the violent death that has still not been avenged for him," I said, "by any of those who share the shame,
made him indignant; and so he went away without speaking to me, as I judge it: and by that he has made me pity him more."
So we talked until we reached the first place on the ridge that would show the next valley, right to its bottom, if there were more light.
When we were over the last cloister of Malebolge, so that its lay brothers could appear to our sight,
laments of all kinds shot at me, with arrows barbed with pity; so I covered my ears with my hands.
Such pain as there would be if the diseases from the hospitals of Valdichiana between July and September, and from Maremma and from Sardinia,
were all together in a single ditch — that is what it was like there, and such a stench came out of it as usually comes off rotting limbs.
We went down onto the last bank of the long ridge, still on the left hand; and then my sight grew keener
down towards the bottom, where the servant of the high Lord, infallible justice, punishes the falsifiers she registers here.
I do not believe it was a sadder sight when the whole people of Aegina were sick, when the air was so full of poison
that all the animals, down to the little worm, fell dead; and afterwards the ancient people, as the poets hold for certain,
were restored out of the seed of ants — than it was to see, through that dark valley, the spirits languishing in different heaps.
One lay on the belly and one on the shoulders of another, and one was dragging himself on all fours along the miserable path.
Step by step we went, without talking, looking at and listening to the sick people, who could not lift their bodies.
I saw two sitting propped against each other, as one pan is propped on another to warm, spotted with scabs from head to foot;
and I never saw a currycomb worked by a stable boy whose master is waiting for him, or by one who stays up unwillingly,
the way each of these worked the bite of his nails on himself, in the great fury of the itching, which has no other relief;
and their nails dragged the scab off as a knife does the scales of a bream or of some other fish with larger ones.
"O you who unmail yourself with your fingers," my guide began to one of them, "and who sometimes make pincers of them,
tell us whether there is any Italian among those in here — so may your nails last you eternally for this work."
"We are Italians, both of us, whom you see so ruined here," one answered, weeping; "but who are you, who asked about us?"
And my guide said: "I am one who comes down with this living man from ledge to ledge, and I mean to show him Hell."
Then their mutual propping broke apart; and each of them turned to me, trembling, with others who heard it at second hand.
My good master drew right up to me, saying: "Say to them whatever you want"; and I began, since he wished it:
"So may your memory not be stolen from human minds in the first world, but live on under many suns —
tell me who you are, and of what people; do not let your ugly and disgusting punishment frighten you out of showing yourselves to me."
"I was from Arezzo, and Albero of Siena," one of them answered, "had me put to the fire; but what I died for is not what brings me here.
It is true that I said to him, talking for fun: 'I know how to lift myself into the air and fly'; and he, who had a lot of curiosity and little sense,
wanted me to show him the art; and only because I did not make him Daedalus he had me burnt by one who treated him as a son.
But to the last pouch of the ten Minos, who is not permitted to err, condemned me for the alchemy I practised in the world."
And I said to the poet: "Now was there ever a people as vain as the Sienese? Certainly the French are not, by a long way!"
At which the other leper, who caught what I said, answered: "Except Stricca, who knew how to spend in moderation;
and Niccolò, who first discovered the expensive habit of the clove in the garden where such seed takes root;
and except the club in which Caccia d'Asciano squandered his vineyard and his great estate, and Abbagliato showed off his good sense.
But so that you may know who is backing you against the Sienese like this, sharpen your eye at me, so that my face may answer you properly:
then you will see that I am the shade of Capocchio, who falsified metals by alchemy; and you must remember, if I eye you rightly,
what a good ape of nature I was."
At the time when Juno was angry because of Semele, against the Theban blood, as she showed more than once,
Athamas went so completely mad that when he saw his wife go by loaded with two sons, one on each hand,
he shouted: "Let us spread the nets, so that I can take the lioness and the cubs at the pass"; and then he stretched out his pitiless claws,
taking the one who was called Learchus, and whirled him round and dashed him on a rock; and she drowned herself with the other load.
And when fortune brought down the pride of the Trojans, who had dared everything, so that the king was cancelled along with the kingdom,
Hecuba, sad, wretched and captive, after she had seen Polyxena dead, and, on the shore of the sea, had made out
her Polydorus — the sorrowing woman — barked out of her senses like a dog; so much did grief twist her mind.
But no fury of Thebes and no fury of Troy was ever seen so cruel in anyone, goading beasts, let alone human limbs,
as I saw in two pale naked shades who ran biting in the way a pig does when it is let out of the sty.
One of them reached Capocchio, and set his tusks in the knot of his neck, so that, dragging him, he made his belly scrape on the hard bottom.
And the Aretine, who was left, said to me, trembling: "That goblin is Gianni Schicchi, and he goes about rabid, treating others like that."
"Oh," I said to him, "so may the other not fix his teeth in you — do not find it a trouble to say who that is before it darts away from here."
And he to me: "That is the ancient soul of criminal Myrrha, who became her father's lover, outside right love.
She came to sin with him like that, falsifying herself into another's shape, just as the one going off there took on,
so as to win the queen of the herd, the falsifying of Buoso Donati in himself, making a will and giving the will due form."
And when the two rabid ones had gone past, on whom I had kept my eye, I turned it to look at the other badly born ones.
I saw one made in the shape of a lute, if only he had had his groin cut off at the place where a man is forked.
The heavy dropsy, which so unpairs the limbs with the humour it converts badly that the face does not answer to the belly,
was making him hold his lips open as a consumptive does, who, out of thirst, turns the one down to the chin and the other up.
"O you who are without any punishment, and I do not know why, in the wretched world," he said to us, "look, and give your attention
to the misery of Master Adam; alive, I had plenty of what I wanted, and now, alas, I long for a single drop of water.
The little streams that come down from the green hills of the Casentino into the Arno, making their channels cool and soft,
are always in front of me, and not for nothing, because the image of them dries me up far more than the disease that strips the flesh off my face.
The rigid justice that searches me takes its occasion from the place where I sinned to set my sighs going faster.
There stands Romena, where I falsified the alloy stamped with the Baptist; for which I left my body burnt up there.
But if I could see down here the miserable soul of Guido, or of Alessandro, or of their brother, I would not give up the sight of it for Fonte Branda.
One of them is in here already, if the raging shades who go about are telling the truth; but what use is it to me, with my limbs tied?
If I were still light enough to move an inch in a hundred years, I would already have set out along the path
looking for him among these disfigured people, even though it goes round eleven miles and is not less than half a mile across.
It is because of them that I am in such a family; they induced me to strike the florins that had three carats of dross in them."
And I to him: "Who are the two wretches who steam like wet hands in winter, lying pressed close on your right-hand border?"
"I found them here — and they have not turned over since —" he answered, "when I rained down into this hollow, and I do not think they will turn for all eternity.
One is the false woman who accused Joseph; the other is the false Sinon, the Greek from Troy: a sharp fever makes them give off such a stink."
And one of them, who took it badly, perhaps, to be named so obscurely, struck him with his fist on his stiff paunch.
It sounded as if it were a drum; and Master Adam struck him in the face with his arm, which seemed no less hard,
saying to him: "Even though the moving of my limbs is taken from me, because they are heavy, I have my arm free for a job like this."
At which he answered: "When you went to the fire you did not have it so ready; but you had it so, and more, when you were coining."
And the dropsical one: "You tell the truth in that; but you were not so true a witness when you were asked for the truth at Troy."
"If I spoke false, you falsified the coin," said Sinon; "and I am here for one offence, and you for more than any other devil!"
"Remember the horse, you perjurer," answered the one with the swollen paunch; "and let it be your torment that the whole world knows it!"
"And let it be yours, the thirst that cracks your tongue," said the Greek, "and the rotten water that hedges your belly up in front of your eyes!"
Then the coiner: "So your mouth is split open for your own harm, as it always is; because if I am thirsty and the humour stuffs me,
you have the burning and the aching head, and you would not want many words of invitation to lick the mirror of Narcissus."
I was completely fixed on listening to them when my master said to me: "Just keep looking — it needs very little for me to quarrel with you!"
When I heard him speak to me in anger I turned towards him with such shame that it still goes round in my memory.
Like a man who dreams he is being harmed, and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, so that he longs for what is as if it were not,
that is what I became, unable to speak, because I wanted to excuse myself, and was excusing myself all the time, and did not believe I was doing it.
"Less shame washes away a greater fault," said my master, "than yours has been; so unburden yourself of all your sadness.
And consider that I am always at your side, if it happens again that fortune brings you where there are people in a squabble like that:
because wanting to hear that is a low wish."
One and the same tongue first bit me, so that it coloured both my cheeks, and then held out the medicine to me;
so I have heard that the lance of Achilles and of his father used to be the cause first of a sad gift and then of a good one.
We turned our backs on that miserable valley, going up the bank that rings it round, crossing it without any talk.
There it was less than night and less than day, so that my sight went only a little way ahead; but I heard a high horn sound
so loud that it would have made any thunder faint, and, following its own way back against itself, it directed my eyes all to one place.
After the sorrowful rout, when Charlemagne lost the holy company, Roland did not sound so terribly.
I had not held my head turned that way long before it seemed to me I saw many high towers; so I said: "Master, tell me, what town is this?"
And he to me: "Because you run on through the darkness from too far away, it happens that you go astray afterwards in imagining.
You will see well enough, when you get there, how much the sense is deceived at a distance; so spur yourself on a little more."
Then he took me tenderly by the hand and said: "Before we go any further, so that the fact may seem less strange to you,
know that they are not towers but giants, and they are in the well, around its bank, every one of them from the navel down."
As, when the fog is dispersing, the sight little by little makes out again what the vapour that packs the air is hiding,
so, boring through that thick dark air, coming nearer and nearer to the edge, my error fled and my fear grew;
because, as Montereggione crowns itself with towers on its round wall, so the rim that circles the well
was towered over, from half their bodies up, by the horrible giants, whom Jove still threatens out of heaven when he thunders.
And I could already make out the face of one of them, the shoulders and the chest and much of the belly, and both arms down along the ribs.
Nature certainly did very well when she left off the art of animals like these, to take such executioners away from Mars.
And if she does not repent of elephants and whales, anyone who looks carefully holds her the more just and the more discreet for it;
because where the instrument of the mind is added to ill will and to power, people can put up no defence at all.
His face seemed to me as long and as broad as the pine cone of Saint Peter's in Rome, and his other bones were in proportion to it;
so that the bank, which was an apron from the middle down, still showed us so much of him above it that three Frisians would have boasted
wrongly of reaching to his hair; because I could see thirty great spans of him down from the place where a man buckles his cloak.
"Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi," the savage mouth began to shout, for which no sweeter psalms were fitting.
And my guide, towards him: "Stupid soul, stick to your horn, and let yourself out with that when anger or some other passion touches you!
Feel at your neck, and you will find the strap that keeps it tied on, confused soul, and look at it lying across your great chest."
Then he said to me: "He accuses himself; this is Nimrod, and because of his evil thought one single language is not used in the world.
Let us leave him alone and not talk to no purpose; because every language is to him what his is to others, which nobody knows."
So we made a longer journey, turning to the left; and at a crossbow shot we found the next one, far more savage and larger.
Who the master was who girded him I cannot say, but he had the other arm bound in front and the right one behind
by a chain that held him fastened from the neck down, so that on the uncovered part it was wound round as far as the fifth turn.
"This proud one wanted to try out his own power against the highest Jove," said my guide, "and this is what he has earned by it.
His name is Ephialtes, and he made his great attempts when the giants frightened the gods; the arms he swung then he never moves again."
And I to him: "If it can be, I would like my eyes to have experience of the immeasurable Briareus."
So he answered: "You will see Antaeus near here, who speaks and is unbound, and who will set us down in the bottom of all guilt.
The one you want to see is much further off, and is bound and made like this one, except that he seems more ferocious in the face."
There was never an earthquake so violent that it shook a tower as hard as Ephialtes was quick to shake himself.
Then I feared death more than ever, and the terror alone would have been enough for it if I had not seen the fetters.
We went on further then, and came to Antaeus, who stood a good five ells, without the head, out of the pit.
"O you who in the fated valley that made Scipio the heir of glory, when Hannibal and his men turned their backs,
once brought home a thousand lions for prey, and about whom it still seems to be believed that if you had been at the high war
with your brothers, the sons of the earth would have won: put us down below, and do not be disgusted at it, where the cold locks up Cocytus.
Do not make us go to Tityos or to Typhon: this man can give what is longed for here; so bend down, and do not twist your snout at us.
He can still give you fame back in the world, because he is alive, and expects a long life yet, if grace does not call him to itself before his time."
So said my master; and the other in haste stretched out his hands and took hold of my guide, whose grip Hercules once felt to be great.
Virgil, when he felt himself taken, said to me: "Come here, so that I can take you"; then he made a single bundle of himself and me.
As the Carisenda looks, seen from underneath the leaning side, when a cloud goes over it in such a way that it seems to be leaning the other way:
that is how Antaeus looked to me as I stood watching for him to bend down; and it was such a moment that I would have liked to go by another road.
But he set us down lightly on the bottom that devours Lucifer along with Judas; and, bent as he was, he did not stay there,
but rose like a mast in a ship.
If I had rhymes harsh and clucking enough to suit the miserable hole that all the other rocks bear down on,
I would press the juice of my conception out more fully; but since I have not, it is not without fear that I bring myself to speak;
because describing the bottom of the whole universe is not an undertaking to be picked up in fun, nor one for a tongue that says mummy and daddy.
But let those ladies help my verse who helped Amphion to close Thebes in, so that the telling may not differ from the fact.
Oh, rabble worse created than all others, who are in the place that is hard to speak of, better for you if you had been sheep or goats here!
When we were down in the dark well, well below the giant's feet, and I was still looking up at the high wall,
I heard someone say: "Watch how you go: walk so that you do not tread with your soles on the heads of the wretched, weary brothers."
So I turned, and saw in front of me and under my feet a lake that with the freezing had the look of glass and not of water.
The Danube in Austria never made so thick a veil over its course in winter, nor the Don, out there under the cold sky,
as there was here; because if Tambernic had fallen on it, or Pietrapana, it would not have made a creak even at the edge.
And as a frog sits croaking with its snout out of the water, at the season when the peasant woman often dreams of gleaning,
livid, right up to where shame shows, the grieving shades were in the ice, setting their teeth to the note of the stork.
Every one of them held his face turned down; their mouths bear witness to the cold and their eyes to the misery in their hearts.
When I had looked around me a while I turned to my feet, and saw two so tightly pressed that the hair of their heads was mingled together.
"Tell me, you who squeeze your chests together," I said, "who are you?" And they bent their necks; and when they had lifted their faces to me,
their eyes, which had only been wet inside before, dripped over their lips, and the frost bound the tears between them and locked them up again.
No clamp ever bound wood to wood so tightly; so they butted together like two goats, so much did rage overcome them.
And one who had lost both his ears to the cold said, still with his face down: "Why do you mirror yourself in us so long?
If you want to know who those two are, the valley that the Bisenzo runs down belonged to their father Alberto, and to them.
They came out of one body; and you can search the whole of Caina and not find a shade more deserving to be fixed in this jelly:
not the one whose chest and shadow were broken at a single stroke by Arthur's hand; not Focaccia; not this one who blocks me
so with his head that I can see no further, and who was called Sassol Mascheroni; if you are Tuscan you know by now who he was.
And so that you do not set me to more talking, know that I was Camiscion de' Pazzi; and I am waiting for Carlino to excuse me."
After that I saw a thousand faces made dog-like by the cold; at which a shudder comes over me, and always will, at frozen fords.
And while we were going towards the middle where all heaviness gathers itself, and I was trembling in the eternal chill,
whether it was will or destiny or fortune I do not know; but, walking among the heads, I struck my foot hard in the face of one of them.
It shouted at me, weeping: "Why are you trampling me? If you have not come to increase the vengeance for Montaperti, why do you molest me?"
And I: "My master, wait for me here, so that I may get out of a doubt through this one; then you can make me hurry as much as you like."
My guide stopped, and I said to the one who was still cursing hard: "Who are you, who abuse other people like that?"
"Now who are you, going through Antenora hitting other people's cheeks," he answered, "so hard that if you were alive it would be too much?"
"Alive I am, and it can be worth something to you," was my answer, "if you are asking for fame, that I should put your name among my other notes."
And he to me: "I long for the opposite. Get away from here, and give me no more trouble, because you flatter badly down in this hollow!"
Then I took him by the scruff of the neck and said: "You will have to name yourself, or you will have no hair left up here."
So he to me: "Even if you strip me of my hair I will not tell you who I am, nor show you, not if you fall on my head a thousand times."
I already had his hair twisted round my hand and had pulled out more than one lock of it, while he barked with his eyes gathered downwards,
when another shouted: "What is the matter with you, Bocca? Is it not enough for you to make music with your jaws, without barking too? What devil is at you?"
"Now," I said, "I do not want you to say another word, you evil traitor; because to your shame I will carry true news of you."
"Get away," he answered, "and tell what you like; but do not keep quiet, if you get out of here, about the one who had his tongue so ready just now.
He is weeping here for the Frenchmen's silver: 'I saw,' you will be able to say, 'the man of Duera down where the sinners are kept cool.'
If you are asked, 'Who else was there?', you have beside you the man of Beccheria, whose gorget Florence sawed through.
Gianni de' Soldanier, I think, is further on, with Ganelon and Tebaldello, who opened Faenza while it slept."
We had already left him behind when I saw two frozen in a single hole, so that one head was a hat for the other;
and as bread is chewed when a man is starving, so the upper one set his teeth in the other at the place where the brain joins the nape:
it is no different from the way Tydeus gnawed Menalippus's temples in his rage, from the way that one worked at the skull and the rest.
"O you who show by so bestial a sign your hatred of the one you are eating, tell me why," I said, "on this agreement:
that if you complain of him with reason, knowing who you both are and what his fault was, I may still repay you for it up in the world,
if the tongue I speak with does not dry up."
That sinner lifted his mouth from his savage meal, wiping it on the hair of the head he had been ruining behind.
Then he began: "You want me to renew a desperate grief that already presses my heart merely at the thought, before I speak of it.
But if my words are to be a seed that bears fruit of disgrace for the traitor I gnaw, you will see me speak and weep at once.
I do not know who you are, nor by what means you have come down here; but truly you seem to me a Florentine when I hear you.
You should know that I was Count Ugolino and this is Archbishop Ruggieri: now I will tell you why I am such a neighbour to him.
That, through the working of his evil thoughts, trusting him, I was taken and afterwards put to death, there is no need to say;
but what you cannot have heard, that is, how cruel my death was, you shall hear, and you will know whether he has wronged me.
A narrow slit inside the Mew, which because of me has the name of hunger, and in which others still have to be shut,
had already shown me through its opening several moons, when I had the bad dream that tore the veil of the future for me.
This one seemed to me master and lord, hunting the wolf and the wolf cubs on the mountain that stops the Pisans from seeing Lucca.
With lean, eager, well-trained bitches, he had put the Gualandi with the Sismondi and the Lanfranchi out in front of him.
After a short run, the father and the sons seemed to me exhausted, and I seemed to see their flanks torn open by the sharp fangs.
When I woke before the morning I heard my sons, who were with me, crying in their sleep and asking for bread.
You are cruel indeed if you do not grieve already, thinking what my heart was announcing to me; and if you do not weep at this, what do you ever weep at?
They were awake by now, and the hour was coming at which our food was usually brought to us, and each of them was uneasy because of his dream;
and I heard the door of the horrible tower being nailed up below; at which I looked into my sons' faces without saying a word.
I did not weep, I turned so stone inside: they wept; and my little Anselmo said: "You are staring so, father! What is wrong?"
Even then I did not weep, nor did I answer, all that day, nor the night after, until the next sun came out into the world.
When a little ray had got in to the sorrowful prison, and I made out in four faces the look of my own,
I bit into both my hands for grief; and they, thinking I was doing it out of a wish to eat, immediately stood up
and said: "Father, it will be far less pain to us if you eat of us: you dressed us in this miserable flesh, and you take it off."
Then I calmed myself, so as not to make them sadder; that day and the next we all stayed silent; ah, hard earth, why did you not open?
After we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw himself down stretched at my feet, saying: "My father, why do you not help me?"
There he died; and just as you see me, I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth; and then I set myself,
blind by then, to groping over each of them, and for two days I called them, after they were dead. Then fasting had more power than grief."
When he had said that, with his eyes twisted he took the miserable skull in his teeth again, which were strong on the bone, like a dog's.
Ah, Pisa, disgrace to the peoples of the beautiful country where "sì" is spoken, since your neighbours are slow to punish you,
let Capraia and Gorgona move and make a hedge for the Arno at its mouth, so that it may drown every person in you!
Because even if Count Ugolino had the name of having betrayed you of your castles, you ought not to have put the sons on such a cross.
Their young years made them innocent, you new Thebes — Uguccione and Brigata and the other two the song names above.
We went on further, to where the ice roughly swaddles another people, not turned face down, but flat on their backs.
There the weeping itself will not let them weep, and the grief, which finds an obstacle at the eyes, turns inward and makes the anguish grow;
because the first tears make a clot, and, like visors of crystal, fill the whole cup under the eyebrow.
And although, as if from a callus, because of the cold all feeling had left its lodging in my face,
it already seemed to me that I felt some wind; so I said: "My master, who moves this? Is not every vapour put out down here?"
So he to me: "Very soon you will be where your eye will answer you about that, seeing the cause that rains this breath down."
And one of the wretches of the cold crust shouted to us: "O souls so cruel that the last station has been given you,
lift the hard veils off my face, so that I may vent the grief that fills my heart, a little, before the weeping freezes again."
So I to him: "If you want me to help you, tell me who you are; and if I do not free you, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice."
So he answered: "I am Friar Alberigo; I am the one of the fruit from the bad garden, and here I get a date for my fig."
"Oh," I said to him, "are you dead already, then?" And he to me: "How my body is doing up in the world I carry no knowledge.
This Tolomea has that advantage, that many times the soul falls down here before Atropos has given it its push.
And so that you may scrape the glazed tears off my face more willingly, know that as soon as a soul betrays
as I did, its body is taken from it by a demon, who governs it afterwards until all its time has turned round.
It falls headlong into a cistern like this one; and perhaps the body of the shade that winters here behind me still appears up there.
You must know that, if you have only just come down: he is Ser Branca Doria, and several years have passed since he was shut in here."
"I think," I said to him, "that you are deceiving me; because Branca Doria has never died at all, and eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes."
"Up in the ditch of the Malebranche," he said, "where the sticky pitch is boiling, Michel Zanche had not yet arrived
when this one left a devil in his own place in his body, and so did one of his kinsmen who did the treachery along with him.
But now stretch your hand out this way; open my eyes." And I did not open them; and to be a boor to him was courtesy.
Ah, Genoese, men estranged from every good custom and full of every corruption, why are you not scattered from the world?
Because along with the worst spirit of Romagna I found one of you such that for his work his soul is already bathing in Cocytus,
and in body he still seems alive up above.
"Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni — the banners of the king of Hell, towards us; so look ahead," said my master, "and see whether you can make him out."
As, when a thick fog breathes out, or when our hemisphere grows dark, a mill turned by the wind seems to stand far off,
so it seemed to me I saw such a structure then; then, because of the wind, I drew back behind my guide, since there was no other shelter.
I was already — and I put it into verse with fear — where the shades were all covered over, and showed through like a straw in glass.
Some are lying down; some stand upright, one on his head and one on his soles; another, like a bow, bends his face round to his feet.
When we had gone so far forward that it pleased my master to show me the creature that once had the beautiful appearance,
he moved out from in front of me and made me stop, saying: "Look, Dis; and look at the place where you will have to arm yourself with strength."
How I became frozen and faint then, do not ask, reader, because I do not write it, since all speech would be too little.
I did not die, and I did not stay alive; think for yourself now, if you have any wit at all, what I became, deprived of both.
The emperor of the sorrowful kingdom came out of the ice from the middle of his chest; and I am closer in size to a giant
than the giants are to his arms: see now how great that whole must be that fits a part made like that.
If he was as beautiful as he is ugly now, and lifted his brows against his maker, then every mourning must indeed come from him.
Oh, how great a wonder it seemed to me when I saw three faces on his head! One in front, and that one was crimson;
the other two joined onto this one over the middle of each shoulder, and joined each other at the place of the crest:
and the right one seemed between white and yellow; the left one was, to look at, like those who come from where the Nile flows down.
Under each face two great wings came out, as big as suited such a bird: I never saw sails at sea like them.
They had no feathers, but were made in the manner of a bat's; and he was flapping them, so that three winds went out from him:
that is what freezes the whole of Cocytus. He wept with six eyes, and down three chins dripped the tears and a bloody slaver.
In each mouth he was breaking a sinner with his teeth, like a brake for flax, so that he kept three of them in that suffering.
To the one in front, the biting was nothing beside the clawing, which at times left the back entirely stripped of skin.
"That soul up there who has the greatest punishment," said my master, "is Judas Iscariot, who has his head inside and works his legs outside.
Of the other two, who have their heads down, the one hanging from the black muzzle is Brutus: see how he writhes, and does not say a word!
And the other is Cassius, who looks so heavy-limbed. But the night is rising again, and by now it is time to go, because we have seen everything."
As he wished, I clasped his neck; and he took his chance of time and place, and when the wings were wide enough open
he took hold of the shaggy flanks; then he went down from tuft to tuft, between the thick hair and the frozen crusts.
When we had come to where the thigh turns, right on the swell of the hip, my guide, with effort and with anguish,
turned his head where his legs had been, and gripped the hair like a man climbing, so that I thought we were going back into Hell.
"Hold on tight, because by stairs like these," said my master, panting like a tired man, "we have to get away from so much evil."
Then he came out through the hole of a rock and set me down to sit on its edge; then he brought his careful step across to me.
I lifted my eyes and thought I would see Lucifer as I had left him, and I saw him holding his legs upward;
and if I became confused then, let the dull people think of it, who do not see what that point was that I had passed.
"Get up on your feet," said my master; "the way is long and the road is bad, and the sun is already back at half of terce."
It was no palace corridor where we were, but a natural dungeon with a bad floor and a lack of light.
"Before I tear myself out of the abyss, my master," I said when I was standing, "talk to me a little to get me out of my error:
where is the ice? And how is this one fixed so upside down? And how, in so short a time, has the sun made the crossing from evening to morning?"
And he to me: "You are still imagining that you are on the other side of the centre, where I took hold of the hair of the evil worm that bores through the world.
You were on that side as long as I was going down; when I turned, you passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every side.
And now you have arrived under the hemisphere opposite the one that roofs the great dry land, and under whose highest point the man was consumed
who was born and lived without sin; your feet are on a little sphere that makes the other face of the Giudecca.
Here it is morning when it is evening there; and this one, who made a ladder for us with his hair, is still fixed as he was before.
It was on this side that he fell down from heaven; and the land, which used to spread out on this side, made a veil of the sea for fear of him,
and came to our hemisphere; and perhaps to escape him, the part that appears on this side left the space here empty, and ran back up."
There is a place down there as far from Beelzebub as his tomb extends, which is known not by sight but by the sound
of a little stream that comes down there through the hole of a rock it has gnawed with its winding course, which falls only slightly.
My guide and I went in by that hidden road to go back to the bright world; and, without caring about any rest,
we climbed up, he first and I second, until through a round opening I saw some of the beautiful things heaven carries.
And from there we came out to see the stars again.