a ray of light fell upon us through the window of our sad prison, and I beheld in those four little faces the likeness of my own face, and then I began to gnaw my hands for misery.  My children, thinking I did it for hunger, raised themselves on the floor, and said, ’Father, we should be less miserable if you would eat our own flesh.  It was you that gave it us.  Take it again.’  Then I sat still, in order not to make them unhappier:  and that day and the next we all remained without speaking.  On the fourth day, Gaddo stretched himself at my feet, and said, ‘Father, why won’t you help me?’ and there he died.  And as surely as thou lookest on me, so surely I beheld the whole three die in the same manner.  So I began in my misery to grope about in the dark for them, for I had become blind; and three days I kept calling on them by name, though they were dead; till famine did for me what grief had been unable to do.”

With these words, the miserable man, his eyes starting from his head, seized that other wretch again with his teeth, and ground them against the skull as a dog does with a bone.

O Pisa! scandal of the nations! since thy neighbours are so slow to punish thee, may the very islands tear themselves up from their roots in the sea, and come and block up the mouth of thy river, and drown every soul within thee.  What if this Count Ugolino did, as report says he did, betray thy castles to the enemy? his children had not betrayed them; nor ought they to have been put to an agony like this.  Their age was their innocence; and their deaths have given thee the infamy of a second Thebes.[49]

The pilgrims passed on, and beheld other traitors frozen up in swathes of ice, with their heads upside down.  Their very tears had hindered them from shedding more; for their eyes were encrusted with the first they shed, so as to be enclosed with them as in a crystal visor, which forced back the others into an accumulation of anguish.  One of the sufferers begged Dante to relieve him of this ice, in order that he might vent a little of the burden which it repressed.  The poet said he would do so, provided he would disclose who he was.  The man said he was the friar Alberigo, who invited some of his brotherhood to a banquet in order to slay them.

“What!” exclaimed Dante, “art thou no longer, then, among the living?”

“Perhaps I appear to be,” answered the friar; “for the moment any one commits a treachery like mine, his soul gives up his body to a demon, who thenceforward inhabits it in the man’s likeness.  Thou knowest Branca Doria, who murdered his father-in-law, Zanche?  He seems to be walking the earth still, and yet he has been in this place many years.” [50]

“Impossible!” cried Dante; “Branca Doria is still alive; he eats, drinks, and sleeps, like any other man.”

“I tell thee,” returned the friar, “that the soul of the man he slew had not reached that lake of boiling pitch in which thou sawest him, ere the soul of his slayer was in this place, and his body occupied by a demon in its stead.  But now stretch forth thy hand, and relieve mine eyes.”