Inferno

The Dark Wood

Good Friday, 1300, before dawn. You are thirty-five, halfway through the seventy years the Psalms allot, and you have woken in a forest so dense the path is simply gone. The air tastes of iron and wet bark. Far above, a hill catches the first light, and between you and it three beasts are waiting.

La Lonza

The Gate of Hell and Charon

A gate stands open in the rock with words cut above it in a colour like dried blood. Beyond it there are no stars. Sighs, wailing and a roar of mixed languages turn in the black air like sand in a whirlwind, and ahead a wide grey river slides past, with an old man poling a boat toward you, his eyes ringed with flame.

Caronte

Paolo and Francesca

The second circle. There is no light here at all, only a wind that never rests: it bellows like the sea in a storm and drives the souls of the lustful before it like starlings in winter. Two of them fly together, light on the gale, and at your call they come as doves come to the nest.

Minosse

Ulysses

The eighth pouch of Malebolge glitters like a summer valley full of fireflies, but each flame hides a sinner who counselled fraud. One flame is forked. From its taller horn, flickering as if the wind troubled it, comes the voice of Ulysses, telling how he died.

Ulisse

Lucifer and the Way Out

The bottom of the universe is ice. Lucifer stands frozen to the chest in it, three faces weeping, six wings beating out the wind that freezes Cocytus. You climb down his matted flank, turn where gravity turns, and begin to climb. A small round opening shows ahead, and through it, things you have not seen for a long time.

Lucifero