Entering the city, Dante sees a vast cemetery covered with tombs, whence issue flames, and in which are shut up the souls of those who denied the immortality of the soul. Here occurs the celebrated scene between Dante and Farinata degli Uberti, who alone, after the battle of Montaperti, in 1260 (when the victorious Ghibellines seriously contemplated razing Florence to the ground), opposed the motion, and thus saved his native city from destruction. Here also Dante sees the father of his friend, Guido Cavalcanti. In the center of the cemetery yawns a tremendous abyss, which leads to the lower regions of hell. Before they descend this, however, Vergil explains to Dante the various kinds of sins which are punished in hell. Those he has seen hitherto (gluttony, licentiousness, avarice, wrath, and melancholy) all belong to the category of incontinence; those which are to come are due to malice, and harm not only oneself but others. The sixth circle, that of the heretics, in which they now are, forms a transition between the above two general divisions. In circle seven, the next one below them, are punished the violent, subdivided into three classes: 1, those who were violent against their fellow-men,--tyrants, murderers, and robbers; 2, those who were violent against themselves,--suicides and gamblers; 3, those who were violent against God, nature, and art,--blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers. In circles eight and nine are the fraudulent and traitors, the various classes of which are given later. After this explanation, the two poets descend the rocky cliff, and find at the bottom a blood-red river, where, guarded by centaurs, are plunged the souls of murderers and robbers, in various depths according to the heinousness of their cruelty and crimes. Crossing this stream they come to a dark and gloomy wood, composed of trees gnarled and twisted into all sorts of fantastic shapes, grimly recalling the contortions of a human body in pain, and covered with poisonous thorns. On the branches sit hideous harpies, half woman, half bird. Each of these trees contains the soul of a suicide. Dante, breaking off a small branch, is horrified to see human blood slowly ooze from the break, and a hissing noise like escaping steam, which resolves itself finally into words. From these he learns that the soul contained in this tree is that of Pier delle Vigne, prime minister of Frederick II., who tells his sad and pathetic story, how he became the victim of slander and court intrigue, and how, being unjustly imprisoned by his master, he committed suicide. Beyond this gruesome forest the wanderers come out upon a vast sandy desert, utterly treeless, where they see many wretched souls, some lying supine, some crouching down in a sitting posture, some walking incessantly about, all, however, forever trying, but in vain, to ward off from their naked bodies countless flakes of flame which fall slowly and steadily like snow