Further on, in traversing a luminous region, he heard, as he was passing, the shrill voice of a female speaking in verse, who presided over the time Thespesius should die. His genius told him that it was the voice of the Sibyl, who, turning on the orbit of the moon, foretold the future. Thespesius would willingly have heard more, but, driven off by a rapid whirlwind, he could make out but little of her predictions. In another place he remarked several parallel lakes, one filled with melted and boiling gold, another with lead colder than ice, and a third with very rough iron. They were kept by genii, who, armed with tongs like those used in forges, plunged into these lakes, and then withdrew by turns, the souls of those whom avarice or an insatiable cupidity had led into crime; after they had been plunged into the lake of gold, where the fire made them red and transparent, they were thrown into the lake of lead. Then, frozen by the cold, and made as hard as hail, they were put into the lake of iron, where they became horribly black. Broken and bruised on account of their hardness, they changed their form, and passed once more into the lake of gold, and suffered in these changes inexpressible pain. In another place he saw the souls of those who had to return to life and be violently forced to take the form of all sorts of animals. Among the number he saw the soul of Nero, which had already suffered many torments, and was bound with red-hot chains of iron. The workmen were seizing him to give him the form of a viper, under which he was destined to live, after having devoured the womb that bore him. The locality of these infernal regions was never exactly determined. The ancients were divided upon the point. In the poems of Homer the infernal regions appear under two different forms: thus, in the _Iliad_, it is a vast subterranean cavity; while in the _Odyssey_, it is a distant and mysterious country at the extremity of the earth, beyond the ocean, in the neighbourhood of the Cimmerians. The description which Homer gives of the infernal region proves that in his time the Greeks imagined it to be a copy of the terrestrial world, but one which had a special character. According to the philosophers it was equally remote from all parts of the earth. Thus Cicero, in order to show that it was of no consequence where one died, said, wherever we die there is just as long a journey to be made to reach the "infernal regions." The poets fixed upon certain localities as the entrance to this dismal empire: such was the river Lethe, on the borders of the Scythians; the cavern Acherusia in Epirus, the mouth of Pluto, in Laodicoea, the cave of Zenarus near Lacedaemon. In the map of the world in the _Polychronicon_ of Ranulphus Uygden, now in the British Museum, it is stated: "The Island of Sicily was once a part of Italy. There is Mount Etna, containing the infernal regions and purgatory, and it has Scylla and Charybdis, two whirlpools."