"Well, I prefer," says Jurgen, "to deal directly with your principal, especially if he can explain the polity of this insane and murky country. Do some of you conduct me to him in such state as becomes an emperor!" So Cannagosta fetched a wheelbarrow, and Jurgen got into it, and Cannagosta trundled him away. Cannagosta was something like an ox, but rather more like a cat, and his hair was curly. And as they came through Chorasma, a very uncomfortable place where the damned abide in torment, whom should Jurgen see but his own father, Coth, the son of Smoit and Steinvor, standing there chewing his long moustaches in the midst of an especially tall flame. "Do you stop now for a moment!" says Jurgen, to his escort. "Oh, but this is the most vexatious person in all Hell!" cried Cannagosta; "and a person whom there is absolutely no pleasing!" "Nobody knows that better than I," says Jurgen. And Jurgen civilly bade his father good-day, but Coth did not recognize this spruce young Emperor of Noumaria, who went about Hell in a wheelbarrow. "You do not know me, then?" says Jurgen. "How should I know you when I never saw you before?" replied Coth, irritably. And Jurgen did not argue the point: for he knew that he and his father could never agree about anything. So Jurgen kept silent for that time, and Cannagosta wheeled him through the gray twilight, descending always deeper and yet deeper into the lowlands of Hell, until they had come to Barathum. 35. What Grandfather Satan Reported Next the tale tells how three inferior devils made a loud music with bagpipes as Jurgen went into the Black House of Barathum, to talk with Grandfather Satan. Satan was like a man of sixty, or it might be sixty-two, in all things save that he was covered with gray fur, and had horns like those of a stag. He wore a breech-clout of very dark gray, and he sat in a chair of black marble, on a daïs: his bushy tail, which was like that of a squirrel, waved restlessly over his head as he looked at Jurgen, without speaking, and without turning his mind from an ancient thought. And his eyes were like light shining upon little pools of ink, for they had no whites to them. "What is the meaning of this insane country?" says Jurgen, plunging at the heart of things. "There is no sense in it, and no fairness at all." "Ah," replied Satan, in his curious hoarse voice, "you may well say that: and it is what I was telling my wife only last night." "You have a wife, then!" says Jurgen, who was always interested in such matters. "Why, but to be sure! either as a Christian or as a married man, I should have comprehended this was Satan's due. And how do you get on with her?" "Pretty well," says Grandfather Satan: "but she does not understand me." "_Et tu, Brute!_" says Jurgen. "And what does that mean?"