Inferno
Canto XXXIV
There remains the last ring of the circle, the Giudecca (so named from Judas Iscariot), where the sinners are wholly imprisoned in the ice. Here at the centre of the earth is the monstrous form of Lucifer, half above the ice and half below it. He has three heads; and in his teeth are mangled the spirits of Judas, of Brutus, and of Cassius. All has now been seen. Dante puts his arms round Virgil's neck; and Virgil, clinging by Lucifer’s shaggy side, lets himself down to his waist; there he turns round (at the centre of gravity in the universe), so that his head is where his feet had been, and climbs in the opposite direction, ie. toward the antipodes, which, except for the Mount of Purgatory, is all water. By a long passage in the rock the poets climb up till through a round opening they see the stars, and emerge at last in the southern hemisphere on the shores of the Mount of Purgatory surrounded by the sea.
THE banners of the King of Hell proceed
Toward us,” my Guide said. “If thine eyes avail
To espy him, forward gaze and give good heed.”
As when the thick autumnal mists exhale,
Or when night draws down on our hemisphere,
A mill shows far away with turning sail,
Such structure to my eyes seemed now to appear;
And, for the wind that blew, I shrank behind
My Master, because else no rock was near.
Now was I (verse for them I fear to find) [10]
There where the frozen spirits as in glass
Were covered wholly, and there like straw they shined.
Some prostrate lie, some standing in their place,
This on its head, that on its soles upright,
Another like a bow bends feet to face.
When we had gone so far as appeared right
For the good Master’s purpose to reveal
To me the creature that was once so bright,
He turned about and stayed me upon my heel,
Saying: “Behold Dis, and the place behold [20]
Where thou thy soul with fortitude must steel.”
How faint I then became, how frozen cold,
Ask me not, Reader; for I write it not,
Because all speech would fail, whate’er it told.
I died not, yet of life remained no jot.
Think thou then, if of wit thou hast any share,
What I became, deprived of either lot.
The Emperor of the kingdom of despair
From the mid-breast emerged out of the ice;
And I may with a giant more compare [30][i]30-31. A rough computation makes Dis more than a third of a mile in stature.
Than giants with those monstrous arms of his:
Consider now how huge must be the whole
Proportioned to the part of such a size.
If he was once fair as he now is foul,[ii]34-36. If Lucifer’s beauty, as God created him, was equal to his present ugliness, his revolt against his Creator was an act of such monstrous ingratitude as to be a fitting source of all subsequent sin and sorrow.
And ’gainst his Maker dared his brows to raise,
Fitly from him all streams of sorrow roll.
O what a marvel smote me with amaze
When I beheld three faces on his head!
The one in front showed crimson to my gaze;
Thereunto were the other faces wed [40]
Over the middle of either shoulder’s height,
And where the crest would be, their union made.
The right was coloured between yellow and white,
The left was such to look upon as those
Who come from where Nile flows out of the night.
Two mighty wings from under each arose
Commeasurable with so great a bird:
Never did sails at sea such form disclose.
Feathers they had not, but like bats appeared
The fashion of them, and with these he flapped [50]
So that three winds were from their motion stirred.
Thence all Cocytus was in frost enwrapt.
He wept with six eyes, and the tears beneath
Over three chins with bloody slaver dropt.
At each mouth he was tearing with his teeth
A sinner, as is flax by heckle frayed;[iii]56. “Heckle”: a hemp-brake.
Each of the three of them so suffereth.
The one in front naught of the biting made
Beside the clawing, which at whiles so wrought
That on the back the skin remained all flayed. [60]
“That soul up there to the worst penance brought
Is Judas the Iscariot,” spoke my Lord.
“His head within, he plies his legs without.
Of the other two, hanging with head downward,
Brutus it is whom the black mouth doth maul.
See how he writhes and utters not a word!
Cassius the other who seems so large to sprawl.
But night again is rising; time is now[iv]68. By the time of Jerusalem, it is the evening of Saturday, April 9, 1300. The poets have spent twenty-four hours in their downward journey.
That we depart from hence. We have seen all.”
I clung about his neck, he showed me how, [70]
And choosing well the time and place to trust,
When the great wings were opened wide enow,
He clutched him to the shaggy-sided bust,
And climbed from tuft to tuft down, slipping by
Between the matted hair and icy crust.
When we were come to that part where the thigh
Turns on the thickness of the haunches’ swell,
My Guide with effort and with difficulty
Turned his head where his feet had been; the fell
He grappled then as one who is mounting, so [80]
That I conceived turning back to Hell.
“Hold fast by me, for needs must that we go,”
Said my Guide, panting like a man quite spent,
“By such a ladder from the core of woe.”
And issuing through the rock where it was rent[v]85. Through the chink between Satan’s thigh and the rocky bottom of the ice, they emerge into a cavern which is situated on the other side of the earth’s centre. Virgil puts Dante down on the brink of the crevice.
He made me sit upon the rock’s edge there;
Then toward me moved, eye upon step intent.
I lifted up my eyes, and Lucifer
Thought to have seen as I had left him last;
And saw him with legs uppermost appear. [90]
And if into perplexity I was cast
Let them be judge who are so gross of wit
They see not what the point is I had passed.
“Rise up now,” said the Master, “upon thy feet.
The way is long, and arduous the road.
The sun in mid-tierce now repairs his heat.”[vi]96. “Tierce” embracing the three hours following sunrise, “mid-tierce” is about half-past seven o’clock in the morning.
No palace-chamber was it that now showed
Its flinty floor, but natural dungeon this,
Which but a starving of the light allowed.
“Master, before I pluck me from the abyss,” [100]
Said I, when I had risen erect, “speak on
A little, so my error to dismiss.
Where is the ice? And how is he, head prone,
Thus fixt? And how so soon is it possible
The sun from evening has to morning run?”[vii]105. As Dante presently learns, the change from evening to morning is due, not to any unusual movement of the sun, but to the altered position of the observers, who have passed from one hemisphere to the other. The difference in time between them is 12 hours.
And he: “Thou dost imagine thyself still
On the other side of the centre, where I gript
The hair of the Worm that thrids the earth with ill.
There wast thou while with thee I downward slipt;
But when I turned round, from that point we fled [110]
Whereonto weight from every part is heaped.
Now thou art under the hemisphere’s deep bed[viii]112-117. “Hemisphere” means here hemisphere of the sky, not of the earth. It is the celestial hemisphere which covers the terrestrial Hemisphere of Water. Opposite to it is the celestial hemisphere “neath whose meridian” lies Jerusalem, where Jesus was slain. The “sphere” of line 116 is the circular block of ice and stone immediately surrounding Satan. On the Hell side it is ice, on the other side it is stone.
Opposite that where spreads the continent
Of land, ’neath whose meridian perishèd
The Man who sinless came and sinless went.
Thou hast thy feet upon a little sphere,
Whose surface is Giudecca’s complement;
When it is evening there, ’tis morning here.
And he whose hair for us a ladder made
Is still fixed as before and doth not stir. [120]
He fell from Heaven on this side and there stayed.[ix]121-126. At the time of their creation, sea and land were not separated. Then Satan fell, and all the land shrank away from the surface of the side where he descended, leaving a vast empty bed to be filled by the sea. The ground which he traversed “perhaps” fled away from him, and issued forth to form the Island of Purgatory, leaving a vacant cavern near the centre.
And all the land which ere that stood forth dry,
Covered itself with sea, by him dismayed,
And came to our hemisphere; and, him to fly,
Perhaps, what on this side is seen around
Left its place here void and shot up on high.”
There is a cave that stretches underground
Far from Beelzebub as his tomb extends,
Known not by sight, but only by the sound
Of a stream flowing, that therein descends [130]
Along the hollow of rock that it has gnawed,
Nor falleth steeply down, but winds and bends.
The Guide and I, entering that secret road,
Toiled to return into the world of light,
Nor thought on any resting-place bestowed.
We climbed, he first, I following, till to sight
Appeared those things of beauty that heaven wears
Glimpsed through a rounded opening, faintly bright;
Thence issuing, we beheld again the stars.[x]139. The descent through Hell occupied Friday night and Saturday. Each of the three great divisions of the poem ends with the sweet and hopeful word “stars.”