After this explanation, the two poets descend the rocky cliff, and find at the bottom a blood-red river, where, guarded by centaurs, are plunged the souls of murderers and robbers, in various depths according to the heinousness of their cruelty and crimes. Crossing this stream they come to a dark and gloomy wood, composed of trees gnarled and twisted into all sorts of fantastic shapes, grimly recalling the contortions of a human body in pain, and covered with poisonous thorns. On the branches sit hideous harpies, half woman, half bird. Each of these trees contains the soul of a suicide. Dante, breaking off a small branch, is horrified to see human blood slowly ooze from the break, and a hissing noise like escaping steam, which resolves itself finally into words. From these he learns that the soul contained in this tree is that of Pier delle Vigne, prime minister of Frederick II., who tells his sad and pathetic story, how he became the victim of slander and court intrigue, and how, being unjustly imprisoned by his master, he committed suicide.
Beyond this gruesome forest the wanderers come out upon a vast sandy desert, utterly treeless, where they see many wretched souls, some lying supine, some crouching down in a sitting posture, some walking incessantly about, all, however, forever trying, but in vain, to ward off from their naked bodies countless flakes of flame which fall slowly and steadily like snow
"On Alpine summits, when the wind is hushed."
Here are punished the blasphemers, violent against God; usurers, violent against art; and sodomites, violent against nature. Among the latter Dante recognizes and converses with his old friend, Brunetto Latini, who prophesies to him his future fame and his exile from Florence:
"'If thou,' he answer'd, 'follow but thy star,
Thou canst not miss at last a glorious haven;
Unless in fairer days my judgment erred.
And if my fate so early had not chanced,
Seeing the heavens thus bounteous to thee, I
Had gladly given thee comfort in thy work.
But that ungrateful and malignant race,
Who in old times came down from Fiesole,[12]
Ay and still smack of their rough mountain-flint,
Will for thy good deeds show thee enmity.'"
To which the poet answers with noble courage:
"This only would I have thee clearly note:
That, so my conscience have no plea against me,
Do Fortune as she list, I stand prepared,
Not new or strange such earnest to my ear.
Speed Fortune then her wheel, as likes her best;
The clown his mattock; all things have their course."
The poets then descend the tremendous cliff leading to circle eight, on the back of Geryon, a fantastic monster, with face of a good man, but body of a beast, many-colored and covered over with complicated figures, being a symbol of the fraud punished in the next circle. This is subdivided into ten concentric rings, or ditches, with the floor gradually descending to a well in the center, thus resembling the circular rows of seats in an amphitheater, converging to the arena. In these ten malebolge, as Dante calls them—i. e., evil pits—are ten different kinds of fraudulent, panderers, flatterers, those guilty of simony, false prophets, magicians, thieves, barterers (those who sell public offices), evil counselors, schismatics, and hypocrites, all punished with diabolic ingenuity, hewn asunder by the sword, boiled in lakes of burning pitch, bitten by poisonous snakes, wasted by dire and hideous disease. As an example of the horrors seen in these evil pits we give one vivid picture, that of the famous Troubadour Bertrand de Born, who, having incited the young son of Henry II., of England, to rebel against his father, is punished in hell by having his head cut off and carrying it in his hand:
"But I there
Still lingered to behold the troop, and saw
Thing, such as I may fear without more proof
To tell of, but that conscience makes me firm,
The boon companion, who her strong breastplate
Buckles on him, that feels no guilt within,
And bids him on and fear not. Without doubt
I saw, and yet it seems to pass before me,
A headless trunk, that even as the rest
Of the sad flock paced onward. By the hair
It bore the severed member, lantern-wise
Pendent in hand, which look'd at us and said,
'Woe's me!' The spirit lighted thus himself;
And two there were in one, and one in two.
How that may be, he knows who ordereth so.
"When at the bridge's foot direct he stood,
His arm aloft he reared, thrusting the head
Full in our view, that nearer we might hear
The words, which thus it utter'd: 'Now behold
This grievous torment, thou, who breathing go'st
To spy the dead: behold, if any else
Be terrible as this. And, that on earth
Thou mayst bear tidings of me, know that I
Am Bertrand, he of Born, who gave King John
The counsel mischievous. Father and son
I set at mutual war. For Absalom
And David more did not Ahitophel,
Spurring them on maliciously to strife.
For parting those so closely knit, my brain
Parted, alas! I carry from its source,
That in this trunk inhabits. Thus the law
Of retribution fiercely works in me.'"
In the eighth pit are the souls of evil counselors, so completely swathed in flames that their forms cannot be seen. Dante's attention is especially attracted to one of these moving flames, with a double-tipped point, which proves to contain the souls of Diomede and Ulysses, who, as they were together in fraud, are now inseparable in punishment. The story of his last voyage and final shipwreck, told by Ulysses, how in his old age, weary of the monotony of home life and longing to know the secret of the great Western ocean, he set sail with his old companions, is full of imaginative grandeur: