INFERNO XXV
INFERNO XXV
Then, making the figs with both his thumbs, →
the thief raised up his fists and cried:
3 ‘Take that, God! It’s aimed at you!’
From that time on the serpents were my friends, →
for one of them coiled itself around his neck →
6 as if to say, ‘Now you shall speak no more,’
while another enmeshed his arms and held him fast,
knotting itself so tight around his front
9 he could not even twitch his arms.
Ah, Pistoia, Pistoia, why won’t you resolve →
to burn yourself to ashes, cease to be,
12 since you exceed your ancestors in evil?
Through all the gloomy rounds of Hell →
I saw no soul so prideful against God,
15 not even him who toppled from the walls at Thebes.
He ran away without another word.
And then I saw a centaur full of rage →
18 come shouting: ‘Where, where is that unripe soul?’
Maremma does not have as many snakes, →
I think, as he had on his back,
21 from where the human part begins down to the rump.
On his shoulders, at the nape of his neck,
crouched a dragon with its wings spread wide
24 that sets on fire whatever it encounters.
My master said: ‘That is Cacus,
who in the cave beneath the Aventine
27 many times over has made a lake of blood.
‘His road is different from his brothers’
because he stole, with wicked cunning,
30 the herd of cattle he found near at hand.
‘For that his wily ways were ended
beneath the club of Hercules, who struck perhaps
33 a hundred blows, though he felt not the tenth.’
While my master spoke the centaur had run past. →
Below where we were standing, three new souls
36 had neared, although we did not see them
until we heard their shouts: ‘You,
who are you?’ At that he stopped his tale
39 and we gave heed to them alone.
I knew none of them, and yet it happened—
as often happens by some chance—
42 that one had cause to speak another’s name,
asking: ‘What’s become of Cianfa?’ →
And then, to catch my guide’s attention, →
45 I held my finger up from chin to nose.
If, reader, you are slow to credit
what I’m about to tell you, it’s no wonder:
48 I saw it, and I myself can scarce believe it.
While I stood staring, with eyebrows raised, →
a reptile with six legs propelled itself
51 at one of them, and fastened itself to him.
It grabbed his belly with its middle claws,
then with its forepaws held his arms
54 and bit through both his cheeks.
It stretched its hind feet down the other’s thighs,
thrusting its tail between them
57 and curled it up behind, above the buttocks.
Never did clinging ivy fix itself
so tight upon a tree as did that fearsome beast
60 entwine itself around the other’s limbs.
Then they fused together, as if made
of molten wax, mixing their colors
63 so that neither seemed what it had been before,
as over the surface of a scrap of parchment, →
before the advancing flame, a brownish color comes
66 that is not black, yet makes the white die out.
The other two were looking on and each
was shouting: ‘Oh my, Agnello, how you change! →
69 Look, now you are neither two nor one!’ →
The two heads had already been united,
two sets of features blending,
72 both lost in a single face.
Four separate limbs combined to form two arms.
The thighs and calves, the stomach and the chest
75 turned into members never seen before.
All trace of their first aspect was erased
and the unnatural figure seemed both two
78 and none and lumbered off at its slow pace.
As the green lizard beneath the scorching lash →
of dog-day heat, between one hedge and the next,
81 seems lightning as it streaks across the road,
just so appeared—darting toward the bellies →
of the other two—a little fiery reptile,
84 black and livid as a peppercorn.
That part where first we are nourished
it transfixed in one of them
87 and then fell prone before him.
The one transfixed just stared, said nothing.
Indeed, with his feet stock-still, he yawned,
90 as if deep sleep or fever had assailed him.
He and the reptile stared at one another.
Both gave out dense smoke, one from its wound,
93 the other from its mouth. Then their smoke merged.
Let Lucan now fall silent where he tells →
of poor Sabellus and Nasidius,
96 and let him wait to hear what comes forth now!
Let Ovid not speak of Cadmus or Arethusa,
for if his poem turns him into a serpent
99 and her into a fountain, I grudge it not,
for never did he change two natures, face to face,
in such a way that both their forms
102 were quite so quick exchanging substance.
Their corresponding changes went like this: →
the reptile split its tail into a fork
105 and he that was wounded drew his feet together.
First his calves and then his thighs began
to knit so that in but a moment
108 no sign of a division could be seen.
The cloven tail assumed the shapes
the other one was losing, and his skin
111 was turning soft while the other’s hardened.
I saw the man’s arms shrinking toward the armpits
and the brute’s forepaws, which had been short,
114 lengthen, precisely as the other’s dwindled.
Then the hind-paws, twisting together,
became the member that a man conceals,
117 and from his own the wretch had grown two paws.
While the smoke veils one and now the other
with new color and grows hair here
120 and elsewhere strips it off,
one of them rose to his feet, the other fell,
but neither turned aside his baleful glare
123 under which each muzzle changed its shape.
In the one erect it shrank in to the temples,
and, from the excess flesh absorbed,
126 two ears extruded from smooth cheeks.
That which did not recede, the remnant
of that excess, made a nose for the face
129 and gave the lips a proper thickness.
The one prone on the ground shoves out his snout
and draws his ears into his head
132 as a snail draws in its horns,
and his tongue, till now a single thing
and fit for speech, divides, and the other’s
135 forked tongue joins, and the smoke stops.
The soul just now become a brute takes flight,
hissing through the hollow, and the other,
138 by way of speaking, spits after him.
Then he turned his new-made shoulders and he said →
to the third: ‘I want Buoso to run, as I have done,
141 down on all fours along this road.’
Thus I saw the seventh rabble change
and change again, and let the newness of it
144 be my excuse if my pen has gone astray. →
And though my eyes were dazed
and my mind somewhat bewildered,
147 these sinners could not flee so stealthily
but I with ease discerned that Puccio Lameshanks, →
and he alone, of the three companions
in that group, remained unchanged.