It was a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent and weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies.  Their faces were turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their heads came foremost, and their tears fell on their loins.  Dante was so overcome at the sight, that he leant against a rock and wept; but Virgil rebuked him, telling him that no pity at all was the only pity fit for that place.[27] There was Amphiaraus, whom the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes; and Tiresias, who was transformed from sex to sex; and Aruns, who lived in a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking out on the stars and ocean; and Manto, daughter of Tiresias (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence afterwards arose the city of Mantua; and Michael Scot, the magician, with his slender loins;[28] and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the cables for home.  He came stooping along, projecting his face over his swarthy shoulders.  Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer of Forli; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he had stuck to his last; and the wretched women who quit the needle and the distaff to wreak their malice with herbs and images.  Such was the punishment of those who, desiring to see too far before them, now looked only behind them, and walked the reverse way of their looking.

The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving and subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those within it.  They were Public Peculators.  Winged black devils were busy about the lake, pronging the sinners when they occasionally darted up their backs for relief like dolphins, or thrust out their jaws like frogs.  Dante at first looked eagerly down into the gulf, like one who feels that he shall turn away instantly out of the very horror that attracts him.  “See—­look behind thee!” said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from the place where he stood, to a covert behind a crag.  Dante looked round, and beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down after him, like a mastiff let loose on a thief.  It was a man from Lucca, where every soul was a false dealer except Bonturo.[29] The devil called out to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon the wretch with hooks as he rose to the surface; telling him, that he must practise there in secret, if he practised at all; and thrusting him back into the boiling pitch, as cooks thrust back flesh into the pot.  The devils were of the lowest and most revolting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and parade.

Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and were going to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy rebuke.  For a while they let him alone; and Dante saw one of them haul a sinner out of the pitch by the clotted locks, and hold him up sprawling like an otter.  The rest then fell upon him and flayed him.