“Turn round,” said Virgil, “and hide thy face; for if thou beholdest the Gorgon, never again wilt thou see the light of day.”  And with these words he seized Dante and turned him round himself, clapping his hands over his companion’s eyes.

And now was heard coming over the water a terrible crashing noise, that made the banks on either side of it tremble.  It was like a hurricane which comes roaring through the vain shelter of the woods, splitting and hurling away the boughs, sweeping along proudly in a huge cloud of dust, and making herds and herdsmen fly before it.  “Now stretch your eyesight across the water,” said Virgil, letting loose his hands;—­“there, where the smoke of the foam is thickest.”  Dante looked; and saw a thousand of the rebel angels, like frogs before a serpent, swept away into a heap before the coming of a single spirit, who flew over the tops of the billows with unwet feet.  The spirit frequently pushed the gross air from before his face, as if tired of the base obstacle; and as he came nearer, Dante, who saw it was a messenger from heaven, looked anxiously at Virgil.  Virgil motioned him to be silent and bow down.

The angel, with a face full of scorn, as soon as he arrived at the gate, touched it with a wand that he had in his hand, and it flew open.

“Outcasts of heaven,” said he; “despicable race! whence this fantastical arrogance?  Do ye forget that your torments are laid oil thicker every time ye kick against the Fates?  Do ye forget how your Cerberus was bound and chained till he lost the hair off his neck like a common dog?”

So saying he turned swiftly and departed the way he came, not addressing a word to the travellers.  His countenance had suddenly a look of some other business, totally different from the one he had terminated.

The companions passed in, and beheld a place full of tombs red-hot.  It was the region of Arch heretics and their followers.  Dante and his guide passed round betwixt the walls and the sepulchres as in a churchyard, and came to the quarter which held Epicurus and his sect, who denied the existence of spirit apart from matter.  The lids of the tombs remaining unclosed till the day of judgment, the soul of a noble Florentine, Farinata degli Uberti, hearing Dante speak, addressed him as a countryman, asking him to stop.[20] Dante, alarmed, beheld him rise half out of his sepulchre, looking as lofty as if he scorned hell itself.  Finding who Dante was, he boasted of having three times expelled the Guelphs.  “Perhaps so,” said the poet; “but they came back again each time; an art which their enemies have not yet acquired.”

A visage then appeared from out another tomb, looking eagerly, as if it expected to see some one else.  Being disappointed, the tears came into its eyes, and the sufferer said, “If it is thy genius that conducts thee hither, where is my son, and why is he not with thee?”

“It is not my genius that conducts me,” said Dante, “but that of one, whom perhaps thy son held in contempt.”