The Divine Comedy Volume I Part 16

[2] Three powerful Ghibelline families of Pisa.

"When I awoke before the morrow, I heard my sons, who were with me, wailing in their sleep, and asking for bread. Truly thou art cruel if already thou grievest not, thinking on what my heart foretold; and if thou weepest not, at what art thou wont to weep?

Now they were awake, and the hour drew near when food was wont to be brought to us, and because of his dream each one was apprehensive. And I heard the door below of the horrible tower locking up; whereat I looked on the faces of my sons without saying a word. I wept not, I was so turned to stone within. They wept; and my poor little Anselm said, 'Thou lookest so, father, what aileth thee?' Yet I did not weep; nor did I answer all that day, nor the night after, until the next sun came out upon the world. When a little ray entered the woeful prison, and I discerned by their four faces my own very aspect, both my hands I bit for woe; and they, thinking I did it through desire of eating, of a sudden rose, and said, 'Father, it will be far less pain to us if thou eat of us; thou didst clothe us with this wretched flesh, and do thou strip it off.' I quieted me then, not to make them more sad: that day and the next we all stayed dumb.

Ah, thou hard earth! why didst thou not open? After we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself stretched out at my feet, saying, 'My father, why dost thou not help me?' Here he died: and, even as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth; then I betook me, already blind, to groping over each, and two days I called them after they were dead: then fasting had more power than grief."

When he had said this, with his eyes distorted, he seized again the wretched skull with his teeth, that were strong as a dog's upon the bone.

Ah Pisa! reproach of the people of the fair country where the si doth sound,[1] since thy neighbors are slow to punish thee, let Caprara and Gorgona [2] move and make a hedge for Arno at its mouth, so that it drown every person in thee; for if Count Ugolino had repute of having betrayed thee in thy towns, thou oughtest not to have set his sons on such a cross. Their young age, thou modern Thebes! made Uguccione and the Brigata innocent, and the other two that the song names above.

[1] Italy, whose language Dante calls il volgare di ci. (Convito, i. 10.)

[2] Two little islands not far from the mouth of the Arno, on whose banks Pisa lies.

We pa.s.sed onward to where the ice roughly enswathes another folk, not turned downward, but all upon their backs. Their very weeping lets them not weep, and the pain that finds a barrier on the eyes turns inward to increase the anguish; for the first tears form a block, and like a visor of crystal fill all the cup beneath the eyebrow.

And although, because of the cold, as from a callus, all feeling had left its abode in my face, it now seemed to me I felt some wind, wherefore I, "My Master, who moves this? Is not every vapor[1] quenched here below?" Whereon he to me, "Speedily shalt thou be where thine eye shall make answer to thee of this, beholding the cause that rains down the blast."

[1] Wind being supposed to be cansed by the action of the sun on the vapors of the atmosphere.

And one of the wretches of the cold crust cried out to us, "O souls so cruel that the last station is given to you, lift from my eyes the hard veils, so that I may vent the grief that swells my heart, a little ere the weeping re-congeal!" Wherefore I to him, "If thou wilt that I relieve thee, tell me who thou art, and if I rid thee not, may it be mine to go to the bottom of the ice." He replied then, "I am friar Alberigo;[1] I am he of the fruits of the bad garden, and here I receive a date for a fig."

[2] "Oh!" said I to him; "art thou now already dead?" And he to me, "How it may go with my body in the world above I bear no knowledge. Such vantage hath this Ptolomaea[3] that oftentime the soul falls. .h.i.ther ere Atropos hath given motion to it.[4] And that thou may the more willingly sc.r.a.pe the gla.s.sy tears from my face, know that soon as the soul betrays, as I did, its body is taken from it by a demon, who thereafter governs it until its time be all revolved. The soul falls headlong into this cistern, and perchance the body of the shade that here behind me winters still appears above; thou oughtest to know him if thou comest down but now. He is Ser Branca d' Oria,[5] and many years have pa.s.sed since he was thus shut up." "I think," said I to him, "that thou deceivest me, for Branca d' Oria is not yet dead, and he eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and puts on clothes." "In the ditch of the Malebranche above," he said, "there where the tenacious pitch is boiling, Michel Zanche had not yet arrived when this one left in his own stead a devil in his body, and in that of one of his near kin, who committed the treachery together with him. But now stretch out hither thy hand; open my eyes for me." And I opened them not for him, and to be rude to him was courtesy.

[1] Alberigo de' Manfredi, of Faenza; one of the Jovial Friars (see Canto xxiii). Having received a blow from one of his kinsmen, he pretended to forgive it, and invited him and his son to a feast. Toward the end of the meal he gave a preconcerted signal by calling out, "Bring the fruit," upon which his emissaries rushed in and killed the two guests. The "fruit of Brother Alberigo" became a proverb.

[2] A fig is the cheapest of Tuscan fruits; the imported date is more costly.

[3] The third ring of ice, named for that Ptolemy of Jericho who slew his father-in-law, the high-priest Simon, and his sons (1 Maccabees wi. 11-16).

[4] That is, before its life on earth is ended.

[5] Murderer, in 1275, of his father-in-law, Michel Zanche.

Already heard of in the fifth pit (Canto xxii. 88).

Ah Genoese! men strange to all morality and full of all corruption, why are ye not scattered from the world? For with the worst spirit of Romagna I found one of you such that for his deeds in soul he is bathed in Cocytus, and in body he seems still alive on earth.

CANTO x.x.xIV. Ninth Circle: traitors. Fourth ring: Judecca.-- Lucifer.--Judas, Brutus and Ca.s.sius.--Centre of the universe.-- Pa.s.sage from h.e.l.l.--Ascent to the surface of the Southern Hemisphere.

"Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni,[1] toward us; therefore look in front," said my Master; "if thou discernest him." As a mill that the wind turns seems from afar when a thick fog breathes, or when our hemisphere grows dark with night, such a structure then it seemed to me I saw.

[1] "The banners of the King of h.e.l.l advance." Vexilla Regis prodeunt are the first words of a hymn in honor of the Cross, sung at vespers on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and on Monday of Holy Week.

Then, because of the wind, I drew me behind my Leader; for there was no other shelter. I was now, and with fear I put it in verse, there[1] where the shades were wholly covered, and showed through like a straw in gla.s.s. Some are lying; some stand erect, this on his head, and that on his soles; another like a bow inverts his face to his feet.

[1] In the fourth, innermost ring of ice of the ninth circle, the Judecca.

When we had gone so far forward that it pleased my Master to show me the creature that had the fair semblance, from before me he took himself and made me stop, saying, "Behold Dis, and behold the place where it is needful that with fort.i.tude thou arm thee."

How I became then chilled and hoa.r.s.e, ask it not, Reader, for I write it not, because all speech would be little. I did not die, and I did not remain alive. Think now for thyself, if thou hast grain of wit, what I became, deprived of one and the other.

The emperor of the woeful realm from his midbreast issued forth from the ice; and I match better with a giant, than the giants do with his arms. See now how great must be that whole which corresponds to such parts. If he was as fair as he now is foul, and against his Maker lifted up his brow, surely may all tribulation proceed from him. Oh how great a marvel it seemed to me, when I saw three faces on his head! one in front, and that was red; the others were two that were joined to this above the very middle of each shoulder, and they were joined together at the place of the crest; and the right seemed between white and yellow, the left was such to sight as those who come from where the Nile flows valleyward. Beneath each came forth two great wings, of size befitting so huge a bird. Sails of the sea never saw I such. They had no feathers, but their fas.h.i.+on was of a bat; and he was flapping them so that three winds went forth from him, whereby Cocytus was all congealed. With six eyes he was weeping, and over three chins trickled the tears and b.l.o.o.d.y drivel. With each mouth he was crus.h.i.+ng a sinner with his teeth, in manner of a brake, so that he thus was making three of them woeful. To the one in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, so that sometimes his spine remained all stripped of skin.

"That soul up there which has the greatest punishment," said the Master, "is Judas Iscariot, who has his head within, and plies his legs outside. Of the other two who have their heads down, he who hangs from the black muzzle is Brutus; see how he writhes and says no word; and the other is Ca.s.sius, who seems so large-limbed. But the night is rising again, and now we must depart, for we have seen the whole."

As was his pleasure, I clasped his neck, and he took opportunity of time and place, and when the wings were opened wide he caught hold on the s.h.a.ggy flanks; from s.h.a.g to s.h.a.g he then descended between the bushy hair and the frozen crusts. When we were just where the thigh turns on the thick of the haunch, my Leader, with effort and stress of breath, turned his head where he had his shanks, and clambered by the hair as a man that ascends, so that I thought to return again to h.e.l.l.

"Cling fast hold," said the Master, panting like one weary, "for by such stairs it behoves to depart from so much evil." Then he came forth through the opening of a rock, and placed me upon its edge to sit; then stretched toward me his cautious step.

I raised my eyes, and thought to see Lucifer as I had left him, and I saw him holding his legs upward. And if I then became perplexed, let the dull folk think it that see not what that point is that I had pa.s.sed.[1]

[1] This point is the centre of the universe; when Virgil had turned upon the haunch of Lucifer, the pa.s.sage had been made from one hemisphere of the earth--the inhabited and known hemisphere-- to the other where no living men dwell, and where the only land is the mountain of Purgatory. In changing one hemisphere for the other there is a change of time of twelve hours. A second Sat.u.r.day morning begins for the poets, and they pa.s.s nearly as long a time as they have been in h.e.l.l, that is, twenty-four hours, in traversing the long and hard way that leads through the new hemisphere on which they have just entered.

"Rise up," said the Master, "on thy feet; the way is long and the road is difficult, and already the sun unto mid-tierce[1]

returns."

[2] Tierce is the church office sung at the third hour of the day, and the name is given to the first three hours after sunrise. Midtierce consequently here means about half-past seven o'clock. In h.e.l.l Dante never mentions the sun to mark division of time, but now, having issued from h.e.l.l, Virgil marks the hour by a reference to the sun.

It was no hallway of a palace where we were, but a natural dungeon that had a bad floor, and lack of light. "Before I tear me from the abyss," said I when I had risen up, "my Master, speak a little to me to draw me out of error. Where is the ice? and this one, how is he fixed thus upside down? and how in such short while has the sun from eve to morn made transit?" And he to me, "Thou imaginest that thou still art on the other side of the centre where I laid hold on the hair of the guilty Worm that pierces the world. On that side wast thou so long as I descended; when I turned thou didst pa.s.s the point to which from all parts whatever has weight is drawn; and thou art now arrived beneath the hemisphere opposite to that which the great dry land covers, and beneath whose zenith the Man was slain who was born and lived without sin. Thou hast thy feet upon the little sphere which forms the other face of the Judecca. Here it is morning when there it is evening; and he who made for us a stairway with his hair is still fixed even as he was before. Upon this side he fell down from heaven, and the earth, which before was spread out here, through fear of him made of the sea a veil, and came to your hemisphere; and perchance to flee from him that land[1]

which on this side appears left here this empty s.p.a.ce and upward ran back."

[1] The Mount of Purgatory.

A place is there below, stretching as far from Beelzebub as his tomb extends,[1] which not by sight is known, but by the sound of a rivulet that here descends along the hollow of a rock that it has gnawed with its course that winds and little falls. My Leader and I entered through that hidden way, to return to the bright world. And without care, to have any repose, we mounted up, he first and I second, till through a round opening I saw of those beauteous things which heaven bears, and thence we came forth to see again the stars.

[1] h.e.l.l is his tomb; this vacant dark pa.s.sage through the opposite hemisphere is, of course, of the same depth as h.e.l.l from surface to centre.