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So we went down to the second ledge alone; a smaller circle of so much greater pain the voice of the damned rose in a bestial moan. There Minos sits, grinning, grotesque, and hale. He examines each lost souls as it arrives and delivers his verdict with his coiling tail. That is to say, when the ill-fated soul appears before him it confesses all, and that grim sorter of the dark and foul decides which place in Hell shall be its end, then wraps his twitching tail about himself one coil for each degree it must descend. The soul descends and others take its place: each crowds in its turn to judgment, each confesses, each hears its doom and falls away through space. "O you who come into this camp of woe," cried Minos when he saw me turn away without awaiting his judgment, "watch where you go once you have entered here, and to whom you turn! Do not be misled by that wide and easy passage!" And my Guide to him: "That is not your concern; it is his fate to enter every door. This has been willed where what is willed must be, and it is not yours to question. Say no more." Now the choir of anguish, like a wound, strikes through the tortured air. Now I have come to Hell's full lamentation, sound beyond sound. I came to a place stripped bare of every light and roaring on the naked dark like seas wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight of storm and counterstorm through time forgone, sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge. Whirling and battering it drives them on, and when they pass the ruined gap of Hell through which we had come, their shrieks begin anew. There they blaspheme the power of God eternal. And this, I learned, was the never ending flight of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty who betrayed reason to their appetite. As the wings of wintering starlings bear them on in their great wheeling flights, just so the blast wherries these evil souls through time forgone. Here, there, up, down, they whirl and, whirling, strain with never a hope of hope to comfort them, not of release, but even of less pain. As cranes go over sounding their harsh cry, leaving the long streak of their flight in air, so come these spirits, wailing as they fly. And watching their shadows lashed by wind, I cried: "Master, what souls are these the very air lashes with its black whips from side to side?" "The first of these whose history you would know," he answered me, "was Empress of many tongues. Mad sensuality corrupted her so that to hide the guilt of her debauchery she licensed all depravity alike, and lust and law were one in her decree. She is Semiramis of whom the tale is told how she married Ninus and succeeded him to the throne of that wide land the Sultans hold. The other is Dido; faithless to the ashes of Sichaeus, she killed herself for love. The next whom the eternal tempest lashes is sense-drugged Cleopatra. See Helen there, from whom such ill arose. And great Achilles, who fought at last with love in the house of prayer. And Paris. And Tristan." As they whirled above he pointed out more than a thousand shades of those torn from the mortal life by love. I stood there while my Teacher one by one named the great knights and ladies of dim time; and I was swept by pity and confusion. At last I spoke: "Poet, I should be glad to speak a word with those two swept together so lightly on the wind and still so sad." And he to me: "Watch them. When next they pass, call to them in the name of love that drives and damns them here. In that name they will pause." Thus, as soon as the wind in its wild course brought them around, I called: "O wearied souls! if none forbid it, pause and speak to us." As mating doves that love calls to their nest glide through the air with motionless raised wings, borne by the sweet desire that fills each breast-- Just so those spirits turned on the torn sky from the band where Dido whirls across the air; such was the power of pity in my cry. "O living creature, gracious, kind, and good, going this pilgrimage through the sick night, visiting us who stained the earth with blood, were the King of Time our friend, we would pray His peace on you who have pitied us. As long as the wind will let us pause, ask of us what you please. The town where I was born lies by the shore where the Po descends into its ocean rest with its attendant streams in one long murmur. Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom seized my lover with passion for that sweet body from which I was torn unshriven to my doom. Love, which permits no loved one not to love, took me so strongly with delight in him that we are as one in Hell, as we were above. Love led us to one death. In the depths of Hell Caina waits for him who took our lives." This was the piteous tale they stopped to tell. And when I had heard those world-offended lovers I bowed my head. At last the poet spoke: "What painful thoughts are these your lowered brow covers?" When at length I answered, I began: "Alas! What sweetest thoughts, what green and young desire led these two lovers to this sorry pass." Then turning to those spirits once again, I said: "Francesca, what you suffer here melts me to tears of pity and of pain. But tell me: in the time of your sweet sighs by what appearances found love the way to lure you to his perilous paradise?" And she: "The double grief of a lost bliss is to recall its happy hour in pain. Your Guide and Teacher knows the truth of this. But if there is indeed a soul in Hell to ask of the beginning of our love out of his pity, I will weep and tell: On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme of Lancelot, how love had mastered him. We were alone with innocence and dim time. Pause after pause that high old story drew our eyes together while we blushed and paled; but it was one soft passage overthrew our caution and our hearts. For when we read how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he who is one with me alive and dead breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss. That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander. That day we read no further." As she said this, the other spirit, who stood by her, wept so piteously, I felt my senses reel and faint away with anguish. I was swept by such a swoon as death is, and I fell, as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell. |
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