Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat and vapor, and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently.  The lurid light of the fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale, sunken features, his wild, haggard eyes, and his torn and disarranged garments.  In the awful solitude and silence of the night he felt his heart stand still, as if indeed he had touched with his very hand the gates of eternal woe, and felt its fiery breath upon his cheek.  He half-imagined that the seams and clefts which glowed in lurid lines between the dark billows would gape yet wider and show the blasting secrets of some world of fiery despair below.  He fancied that he heard behind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and that confused clamor of mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante describes as filling the dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope never enters.

“Ah, God,” he exclaimed, “for this vain life of man!  They eat, they drink, they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage, they have castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty of Paradise seems over it all,—­and yet how close by burns and roars the eternal fire!  Fools that we are, to clamor for indulgence and happiness in this life, when the question is, to escape everlasting burnings!  If I tremble at this outer court of God’s wrath and justice, what must be the fires of hell?  These are but earthly fires; they can but burn the body:  those are made to burn the soul; they are undying as the soul is.  What would it be to be dragged down, down, down, into an abyss of soul-fire hotter than this for ages on ages?  This might bring merciful death in time:  that will have no end.”

The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications.  Every nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer.  It was not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing for forgiveness, not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguish of him who shrieks in the immediate apprehension of an unendurable torture.  It was the cry of a man upon the rack, the despairing scream of him who feels himself sinking in a burning dwelling.  Such anguish has found an utterance in Stradella’s celebrated “Pieta, Signore,” which still tells to our ears, in its wild moans and piteous shrieks, the religious conceptions of his day; for there is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in its music.

When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too dreadful to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with difficulty up the steep sides of the crater, till he gained the summit above, where a comparatively free air revived him.  All night he wandered up and down in that dreary vicinity, now listening to the mournful roar and crackle of the fire, and now raising his voice in penitential psalms or the notes of that terrific “Dies Irae” which sums up all the intense fear and horror with which the religion of the Middle Ages clothed the idea of the final catastrophe of humanity.  Sometimes prostrating himself with his face towards the stifling soil, he prayed with agonized intensity till Nature would sink in a temporary collapse, and sleep, in spite of himself, would steal over him.