They led him forth quickly until they came to a hall whose like he had
never seen before; out of the hall came such heat that the knight began
to sweat. He saw so foul a smoke that he stopped, and when the fiends
perceived it they were pleased. "Turn again," they began to cry, "thou
shalt die, unless thou dost withdraw." When he came to the hall door
he saw misery, a half of which he had never imagined. The hall was a
place of torments; those folk who were in that prison were stripped of
all happiness, for the floor of the hall was full of pits, round and
filled to the top with brimstone, brass, copper, and other metals all
molten. Men and women stood in these, screaming and crying as if they
were mad; some stood up to the waist, others to the breast, and some to
the chin. Each man according to his guilt was fixed in that torment,
to suffer that great heat. Some bore around their necks bags full of
pennies glowing with fire, and such meat they ate. These were usurers
in this life. Beware, men and women, lest such sin hinder you. And many
souls there walked upright, bearing false measures and false weights,
which fiends sat upon. The fiends said to the knight, "Thou must bathe
in this lead before thou go hence; because of thy usury and thy sin,
thou must wash thyself somewhat." Owain feared that torment, and called
upon God Omnipotent and His mother Mary. He was borne out of the hall,
from the pains and all the fiends, when he made that outcry.
Soon he was frightened by seeing a flame of fire, mighty and thick,
spring out of the earth, like coal and pitch. Of seven colors was this
fire, and some of the souls burning in it were yellow, some green, some
black, some blue, and some like adders. They were woful indeed. The
fiends took the knight to the pit, and said, "Now, Owain, thou mayst
find solace, for thou shalt shake with our fellows in the pit of hell.
These are our birds in our cage, and this is our court and our castle
tower. Dost thou think, Sir Knight, that to those who are brought here
anything is sharp? Now turn again, ere it be too late, before we thrust
thee into hell gate, for thou shalt never issue out of it by means of
any crying or calling upon Mary, or by any other trick." The knight was
firm, so the fiends seized and bound him, and cast him far down into
that dark, evil, reeking prison. The farther down they thrust him the
hotter it was, and he suffered cruelly. With good will and steadfast
heart he called upon God Omnipotent to help him out of that torment,
and he was borne up out of the pit, otherwise he would have been lost
until the day of his death. That suffering, which lasts forever, is for
the foul sin of pride.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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