The strangers were most reluctant to advance, insisting that they were on the wrong road; still, onward they went, up to the bank of a wide, dark torrent, whilst we followed in their wake and crossed over with them, my companion, meanwhile, holding the water to my nostrils to protect me from the stench rising out of the river. When I beheld some of the inhabitants (for till now I had not seen a single devil, though I had heard their voices) I asked: “What, pray, my Guide, is the name of this death-like stream?” “The river of the Evil One,” answered he, “wherein all his subjects are immersed to render them accustomed to the country; its cursed waters changed their countenance, washing away every relic of goodness, every shadow of hope and happiness.” And on seeing the horde pass through, I could perceive no difference in loathsomeness between the devils and the damned. Some wished to crouch at the bottom of the river, there to remain in suffocation to all eternity, rather than find further on a worse dwelling; but as the proverb says: “He whom the devil urges must run,” so these damned beings, thrust on by the demons, were swiftly borne along the stream of destruction to their eternal ruin; where I too saw at the first glimpse more tortures and torments than man’s heart can imagine, far less a tongue repeat; to see one of which was enough to cause one’s hair to stand on an end, his blood to freeze, his flesh to melt, his bones to give way, yea and his spirit to swoon within him. Why speak I of such deeds as the impaling or sawing of men alive, the tearing of the flesh in pieces with iron pincers or the broiling of it, chop by chop, with candles, or the jambing of skulls as flat as a slate, in a press, and all the most frightful degradation the earth ever witnessed? All such are but pleasures compared with one of these. Here, a million shrieks, harsh groans and deep sighs; there, fierce lamentations and loud cries in answer: the howling of dogs were sweet, delightful music compared with these voices. Before we had gone far from the shores of that accursed river into wild Perdition, we could see by the light of their own fire, here and there, men and women without number, whom a countless host of devils unceasingly and with all their might kept always torturing; and as the devils were shrieking from the intensity of their own suffering, they made the damned give response to the utmost. I observed the part nearest me more minutely: there, the devils with pitchforks hurled them head foremost upon poisonous hatchels formed of terrible, barbed darts, thereon to struggle by their brains; then shortly, they threw them together, layer on layer, upon the summit of one of the burning crags, there to blaze like a bonfire. Thence they were snatched away up the ravines amidst the eternal ice and snow; {73} then plunged again into an enormous flood of seething brimstone to be parched, stifled, and choked by the direful stench; thence to a quagmire of