In another quarter of the fiery shower the pilgrims met a crowd of Florentines, mostly churchmen, whose offence is not to be named; after which they beheld Usurers; and then arrived at a huge waterfall, which fell into the eighth circle, or that of the Fraudulent.  Here Virgil, by way of bait to the monster Geryon, or Fraud, let down over the side of the waterfall the cord of St. Francis, which Dante wore about his waist,[23] and presently the dreadful creature came up, and sate on the margin of the fall, with his serpent’s tail hanging behind him in the air, after the manner of a beaver; but the point of the tail was occasionally seen glancing upwards.  He was a gigantic reptile, with the face of a just man, very mild.  He had shaggy claws for arms, and a body variegated all over with colours that ran in knots and circles, each within the other, richer than any Eastern drapery.  Virgil spoke apart to him, and then mounted on his back, bidding his companion, who was speechless for terror, do the salve.  Geryon pushed back with them from the edge of the precipice, like a ship leaving harbour; and then, turning about, wheeled, like a sullen successless falcon, slowly down through the air in many a circuit.  Dante would not have known that he was going downward, but for the air that struck up wards on his face.  Presently they heard the crash of the waterfall on the circle below, and then distinguished flaming fires and the noises of suffering.  The monster Geryon, ever sullen as the falcon who seats himself at a distance from his dissatisfied master, shook his riders from off his back to the water’s side, and then shot away like an arrow.

This eighth circle of hell is called Evil-Budget,[24] and consists of ten compartments, or gulfs of torment, crossed and connected with one another by bridges of flint.  In the first were beheld Pimps and Seducers, scourged like children by horned devils; in the second, Flatterers, begrimed with ordure; in the third, Simonists, who were stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with their heads downwards, and their legs only discernible, the soles of their feet glowing with a fire which made them incessantly quiver.  Dante, going down the side of the gulf with Virgil, was allowed to address one of them who seemed in greater agony than the rest; and, doing so, the sufferer cried out in a malignant rapture, “Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface?[25] Thou hast come sooner than it was prophesied.”  It was the soul of Pope Nicholas the Third that spoke.  Dante undeceived and then sternly rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him that nothing but reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him from using harsher words, and that it was such as he that the Evangelist beheld in the vision, when he saw the woman with seven heads and ten horns, who committed whoredom with the kings of the earth.

“O Constantine!” exclaimed the poet, “of what a world of evil was that dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor of the church into a rich man!” [26] The feet of the guilty pope spun with fiercer agony at these words; and Virgil, looking pleased on Dante, returned with him the way he came, till they found themselves on the margin of the fourth gulf, the habitation of the souls of False Prophets.