[10] Alberto della Scala, lord of Verona; he died in 1301. He had forced upon the monastery for its abbot his deformed and depraved illegitimate son. And he who was at every need my succor said: “Turn thee this way; see two of them coming, giving a bite to sloth.” In rear of all they were saying: “The people for whom the sea was opened were dead before their heirs beheld the Jordan;[1] and those who endured not the toil even to the end with the son of Anchises,[2] offered themselves to life without glory.” [1] Numbers, xiv. 28. [2] But left him, to remain with Acestes in Sicily—Aeneid, v. 751. Then when those shades were so far parted from us that they could no more be seen, a new thought set itself within me, from which many others and diverse were born; and I so strayed from one unto another that, thus wandering, I closed my eyes, and transmuted my meditation into dream. CANTO XIX. Fourth Ledge: the Slothful—Dante dreams of the Siren.—The Angel of the Pass.—Ascent to the Fifth Ledge.—Pope Adrian V. At the hour when the diurnal heat, vanquished by the Earth or sometimes by Saturn,[1] can warm no more the coldness of the moon,—when the geomancers see their Greater Fortune[2] in the east, rising before the dawn along a path which short while stays dark for it,—there came to me in dream[3] a woman stammering, with eyes asquint, and crooked on her feet, with hands lopped off, and pallid in her color. I gazed at her; and as the sun comforts the cold limbs which the night bennmbs, so my look made her tongue nimble, and then set her wholly straight in little while, and so colored her wan face as love requires. Then, when she had her speech thus unloosed, she began to sing, so that with difficulty should I have turned my attention from her. “I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet Siren, and the mariners in mid sea I bewitch, so full am I of pleasantness to hear. I turned Ulysses from his wandering way by my song; and whoso abides with me seldom departs, so wholly I content him.” [1] Toward dawn, when the warmth of the preceding day is exhausted, Saturn was supposed to exert a frigid influence. [2] “Geomancy is divination by points in the ground, or pebbles arranged in certain figures, which have peculiar names. Among these is the figure called the Fortuna Major, which by an effort of imagination can also be formed out of some of the last stars of Aquarius and some of the first of Pisces.” These are the signs that immediately precede Aries, in which the Sun now was, and the stars forming the figure of the Greater Fortune would be in the east about two hours before sunrise. [3] The hour when this dream comes to Dante is “post mediam noctem … cum somnia vera,”—the hour in which it was commonly believed that dreams have a true meaning. The woman seen by Dante is the deceitful Siren, who symbolizes the temptation to those sins of sense from which the spirits are purified in the three upper rounds of Purgatory.