Inferno: Canto XXIX

The many people and the diverse wounds had made my eyes so drunken that they longed to stay and weep;

but Virgil said to me: “Why art thou gazing still? wherefore does thy sight still rest, down there, among the dismal mutilated shadows?

Thou hast not done so at the other chasms; consider, if thou thinkest to number them, that the valley goes round two-and-twenty miles;

and the Moon already is beneath our feet; the time is now short, that is conceded to us; and other things are to be seen than thou dost see.”

“Hadst thou,” I thereupon replied, “attended to the cause for which I looked, perhaps thou mightest have vouchsafed me yet to stay.”

Meantime the Guide was going on; and I went behind him, now making my reply, and adding: “Within that cavern

where I kept my eyes so fixed, I believe that a spirit of my own blood laments the guilt which costs so much down there.”

Then the Master said: “Let not thy thought henceforth distract itself on him; attend to somewhat else, and let him stay there:

for I saw him, at the foot of the little bridge, point to thee, and vehemently threaten with his finger; and heard them call him Geri del Bello.

Thou wast then so totally entangled upon him who once held Altaforte, that thou didst not look that way; so he departed.”

“O my Guide! his violent death, which is not yet avenged for him,” said I, “by any that is a partner of his shame,

made him indignant: therefore, as I suppose, he went away without speaking to me; and in that has made me pity him the more.”

Thus we spake, up to the first place of the cliff, which shows the other valley, if more light were there, quite to the bottom.

When we were above the last cloister of Malebolge, so that its lay-brethren could appear to our view,

lamentations pierced me, manifold, which had their arrows barbed with pity: whereat I covered my ears with my hands.

Such [pain] as there would be, if the diseases in the hospitals of Valdichiana, between July and September, and of Maremma and Sardinia,

were all together in one ditch: such was there here; and such stench issued thence, as is wont to issue from putrid limbs.

We descended on the last bank of the long cliff, again to the left hand; and then my sight was more vivid,

down towards the depth in which the ministress of the Great Sire, infallible Justice, punishes the falsifiers that she here registers.

I do not think it was a greater sorrow to see the people in Ægina all infirm; when the air was so malignant,

that every animal, even to the little worm, dropt down; and afterwards, as Poets hold for sure, the ancient peoples

were restored from seed of ants: than it was to see, through that dim valley, the spirits languishing in diverse heaps.

This upon the belly, and that upon the shoulders of the other lay; and some were crawling on along the dismal path.

Step by step we went, without speech, looking at and listening to the sick who could not raise their bodies.

I saw two sit leaning on each other, as pan is leant on pan to warm, from head to foot spotted with scabs;

and never did I see currycomb plied by stable-boy for whom his master waits, nor by one who stays unwillingly awake,

as each of these plied thick the clawing of his nails upon himself, for the great fury of their itch which has no other succour.

And so the nails drew down the scurf, as does a knife the scales from bream or other fish that has them larger.

“O thou!” began my Guide to one of them, “who with thy fingers dismailest thyself, and sometimes makest pincers of them;

tell [us] if there be any Latian among these who are here within; so may thy nails eternally suffice thee for that work.”

“Latians are we, whom thou seest so disfigured here, both of us,” replied the one weeping;

“but who art thou that hast inquired of us?” And the Guide said: “I am one, who with this living man descend from steep to steep, and mean to show him Hell.”

Then the mutual propping broke, and each turned trembling towards me, with others that by echo heard him.

The kind Master to me directed himself wholly, saying: “Tell them what thou wishest.” And I began, as he desired:

“So may your memory not fade away from human minds in the first world, but may it live under many suns,

tell me who ye are, and of what people; let not your ugly and disgusting punishment frighten you from revealing yourselves to me.”

“I was of Arezzo,” replied the one, “and of Siena had me burned; but what I died for does not bring me here.

’Tis true, I said to him, speaking in jest: ‘I could raise myself through the air in flight’; and he, who had a fond desire and little wit,

willed that I should shew him the art; and only because I made him not a Daedalus, he made me be burned by one who had him for a son.

But to the last budget of the ten, for the alchemy that I practised in the world, Minos, who may not err, condemned me.”

And I said to the Poet: “Now was there ever people so vain as the Sienese? certainly the French not so by far.”

Whereat the other leper, who heard me, responded to my words: “Except Stricca who contrived to spend so moderately;

and Niccolò, who first discovered the costly usage of the clove, in the garden where such seed takes root;

and except the company in which Caccia of Asciano squandered his vineyard and his great forest, and the Abbagliato shewed his wit.

But that thou mayest know who thus seconds thee against the Sienese, sharpen thine eye towards me, that my face may give thee right response;

so shalt thou see I am the shadow of Capocchio, who falsified the metals by alchemy; and thou must recollect, if I rightly eye thee, how good an ape I was of Nature.”