“Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,
took hold of him because of the fair body
taken from me—how that was done still wounds me.
Love, that releases no beloved from loving,
took hold of me so strongly through his beauty
that, as you see, it has not left me yet.
Love led the two of us unto one death.
Caina waits for him who took our life.”
These words were borne across from them to us.

Canto XXVI

  ‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.

Canto XXXIV

"Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni¹
toward us; and therefore keep your eyes ahead,
my master said, "to see if you can spy him."
Just as, when night falls on our hemisphere
or when a heavy fog is blowing thick,
a windmill seems to wheel when seen far off,
so then I seemed to see that sort of structure.
And next, because the wind was strong, I shrank
behind my guide; there was not other shelter.
And now--with fear I set it down in meter--
I was where all the shades were fully covered
but visible as wisps of straw in glass.
There some lie flat and others stand erect,
one on his head, and one upon his soles;
and some bend face to feet, just like a bow.
But after we had made our way ahead,
my master felt he now should have me see
that creature who was once a handsome presence;
he stepped aside and made me stop, and said:
"Look! Here is Dis, and this the place where you
will have to arm yourself with fortitude."
O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then--I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.
The emperor of the despondent kingdom
so towered from the ice, up from midchest,
that I match better with a giant's breadth
than the giants match the measure of his arms;
now you can gauge the size of all of him
if it is in proportion to such parts.
If he was once as handsome as he now
is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows
against his Maker, one can understand
how every sorrow has its source in him!
I marveled when I saw that, on his heat,
he had three faces: one--in front--bloodred;
and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
and at the crown, all three were reattached;
the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
the left in its appearance was like those
who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.
Beneath each face of his, two wings spread out,
as broad as suited so immense a bird:
I've never seen a ship with sails so wide.
They had no feathers, but were fashioned like
a bat's; and he was agitating them,
so that three winds made their way out from him--
and all Cocytus froze before those winds.
He wept out of six eyes; and down three chins,
tears gushed together with a bloody froth.
  Within each mouth—he used it like a grinder—
with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner,
so that he brought much pain to three at once.
The forward sinner found that biting nothing
when matched against the clawing, for at times
his back was stripped completely off its hide.
“That soul up there who has to suffer most,”
my master said: “Judas Iscariot--²
his head inside, he jerks his legs without.
Of those two others, with their heads beneath,
the one who hangs from that black snout is Brutus--³
see how he writhes and does not say a word!
That other, who seems so robust, is Cassius.⁴
But night is come again, and it is time
for us to leave; we have seen everything."