120 Terror of falling now oppressed me sore; Hearing laments, and seeing fires that burned, My thighs I tightened, trembling more and more. Earlier I had not by the eye discerned That we swept downward; scenes of torment now Seemed drawing nearer wheresoe'er we turned. And as a falcon (which long time doth go Upon the wing, not finding lure[514] or prey), While 'Ha!' the falconer cries, 'descending so!' Comes wearied back whence swift it soared away; 130 Wheeling a hundred times upon the road, Then, from its master far, sulks angrily: So we, by Geryon in the deep bestowed, Were 'neath the sheer-hewn precipice set down: He, suddenly delivered from our load, Like arrow from the string was swiftly gone. FOOTNOTES: [496] _The monster_: Geryon, a mythical king of Spain, converted here into the symbol of fraud, and set as the guardian demon of the Eighth Circle, where the fraudulent are punished. There is nothing in the mythology to justify this account of Geryon; and it seems that Dante has created a monster to serve his purpose. Boccaccio, in his _Genealogy of the Gods_ (Lib. i.), repeats the description of Geryon given by 'Dante the Florentine, in his poem written in the Florentine tongue, one certainly of no little importance among poems;' and adds that Geryon reigned in the Balearic Isles, and was used to decoy travellers with his benignant countenance, caressing words, and every kind of friendly lure, and then to murder them when asleep. [497] _Who passes mountains, etc._: Neither art nor nature affords any defence against fraud. [498] _The bank_: Not that which confines the brook but the inner limit of the Seventh Circle, from which the precipice sinks sheer into the Eighth, and to which the embankment by which the travellers have crossed the sand joins itself on. Virgil has beckoned Geryon to come to that part of the bank which adjoins the end of the causeway. [499] _Knot and rounded shield_: Emblems of subtle devices and subterfuges. [500]_ Varied dye_: Denoting the various colours of deceit. [501] _Arachne_: The Lydian weaver changed into a spider by Minerva. See _Purg._ xii. 43. [502] _Gluttonous Germany_: The habits of the German men-at-arms in Italy, odious to the temperate Italians, explains this gibe. [503] _The right_: This is the second and last time that, in their course through Inferno, they turn to the right. See _Inf._ ix. 132. The action may possibly have a symbolical meaning, and refer to the protection against fraud which is obtained by keeping to a righteous course. But here, in fact, they have no choice, for, traversing the Inferno as they do to the left hand, they came to the right bank of the stream which traverses the fiery sands, followed it, and now, when they would leave its edge, it is from the right embankment that they have to step down, and necessarily to the right hand.