“Thus having spoke,
  Once more upon the wretched skull his teeth
  He fasten’d like a mastiff’s ’gainst the bone,
  Firm and unyielding.”

Dante, passing on, discovers many other victims encased in the ice, and is so chilled by a glacial breeze that his face muscles stiffen.  He is about to ask Virgil whence this wind proceeds, when one of the ice-encrusted victims implores him to remove its hard mask from his face.  Promising to do so in return for the man’s story, Dante learns he is a friar who, in order to rid himself of inconvenient kinsmen, invited them all to dinner, where he suddenly uttered the fatal words which served as a signal for hidden assassins to despatch them.  When Dante indignantly exclaims the perpetrator of this heinous deed is on earth, the criminal admits that, although his shadow still lingers above ground, his soul is down here in Ptolomea, undergoing the penalty for his sins.  Hearing this, Dante refuses to clear away the ice, and excuses himself to his readers by stating “ill manners were best courtesy to him.” Canto XXXIV. Virgil now directs Dante’s glance ahead, until our poet dimly descries what looks like an immense windmill.  Placing Dante behind him to shield him a little from the cruel blast, Virgil leads him past countless culprits, declaring they have reached Judecca, a place where it behooves him to arm his heart with strength.  So stiff with cold that he is hovering between life and death, Dante now beholds Dis or Satan,—­Emperor of the Infernal Regions,—­sunk in ice down to his waist, and discovers that the wind is caused by the constant flutter of his bat-like wings.  He also perceives that Satan is as much larger than the giants just seen, as they surpass mankind, and states that, were the father of evil as fair as he is foul, one might understand his daring to defy God.

              “If he were beautiful
  As he is hideous now, and yet did dare
  To scowl upon his Maker, well from him
  May all our misery flow.”

Then Dante describes Satan’s three heads, one red, one yellow and white, and one green, declaring that the arch-fiend munches in each mouth the sinners Judas, Cassius, and Brutus.  After allowing Dante to gaze a while at this appalling sight, Virgil informs his charge that, having seen all, it behooves them to depart.  With a brief order to Dante to cling tightly around his neck, Virgil, seizing a moment when Satan’s wings are raised, darts beneath them, and clutching the demon’s shaggy sides painfully descends toward the centre of the earth.  Down, down they go until they reach the evil spirit’s thighs, where, the centre of earth’s gravity being reached, Virgil suddenly turns around and begins an upward climb with his burden.  Although Dante fully expects soon to behold Satan’s head once more, he is amazed to discover they are climbing up his leg.  Then, through a chimney-like ascent, where the climbing demands all their strength, Dante and Virgil ascend toward the upper air.