Malebolge

Gathering yourselves and setting up.

It's about another hour, almost hour and a half walk to make your way to the Mine of Malebolge.

One of the layers of the eighth circle of hell, if we're going by Dante's Inferno.

The bad place.

I think it might be the one where the beach and the raining fire, I can't remember.

I mean, you had me in the first half.

Malebolge, okay.

A bad bulge.

End of Canto XX Canto XXI

From bridge to bridge thus, speaking other things of which my comedy cares not to sing, we came along and held the summit, when we halted to behold another fissure of Malebolge and other vain laments, and I beheld it marvellously dark.

As in the arsenal of the Venetians boils in the winter the tenacious pitch to smear their unsound vessels o'er again, for sail they cannot, and instead thereof one makes his vessel new, one recauls the ribs of that which many a voyage has made, one hammers at the prow, one at the stern, this one makes oar, and that one cordage twists, another mends the mainsail and the mizzen.

Thus, not by fire, but by the art divine, was boiling down below there a dense pitch which upon every side the bank blind.

This was no way for one clothed with a cloak, for hardly we, he light, and I pushed upward, were able to ascend from jag to jag.

And had it not been that upon that precinct shorter was the ascent than on the other, he I know not, but I had been dead beat.

But because Malebolge towards the mouth of the profoundest well is all inclining, the structure of each valley doth import that one bank rises and the other sinks.

Still we arrived at length upon the point wherefrom the last stone breaks itself asunder.

And one other thing I should just say about submerged.

There's another, mm, very well-known instance where the verb submerged or to submerge comes up, and that's at the opening of Inferno, Canto twenty, where among the fortune tellers, the soothsayers in the Malebolge.

When that opens, that opening of Canto twenty, there's this line about the damned being the submerged, that Dante is among the submerged.

And that's an interesting twist here to th- if you think about this passage tying a little bit back to Inferno and maybe more than you might think, because she's gonna correct his fallacy, which fallacy is part of Inferno after all.

We came along from one bridge to another talking of things my comedy is not concerned to sing.

We held fast to the summit then stayed our steps to spy the other cleft of Malebolge and other vain laments.

I saw that it was wonderfully dark.

As in the arsenal of the Venetians all winter long, a stew of sticky pitch boils up to patch their sick and tattered ship that cannot sail.

You did not notice Geri.

He moved off." "My guide, it was his death by violence for which he still is not avenged," I said, "by anyone who shares his shame, that made him so distasteful now, and I suppose for this he left without a word to me, and this has made me pity him the more." And so we talked until we found the first point of the ridge that, if there were more light, would show the other valley to the bottom.

When we had climbed above the final cloister of Malebolge, so that its lay brothers were able to appear before our eyes, I felt the force of strange laments, like arrows whose shafts are barbed with pit- pity, and at this I had to place my hands across my ears.

Just like the sufferings that all the sick of Valdichiana's hospitals, Maremma's, Sardina's, from July until September, would muster if assembled in one ditch, so was it here; and such a stench rose up as usually comes from festering limbs.