CANTO XIII. Second round of the Seventh Circle: of those who have done violence to themselves and to their goods.—The Wood of Self-murderers.—The Harpies.—Pier delle Vigne.—Lano of Siena and others. Nessus had not yet reached the yonder bank when we set forward through a wood which was marked by no path. Not green leaves but of a dusky color, not smooth boughs but knotty and gnarled, not fruits were there but thorns with poison. Those savage beasts that hold in hate the tilled places between Cecina and Corneto have no thickets so rough or so dense. Here the foul Harpies make their nests, who chased the Trojans from the Strophades with dismal announcement of future calamity. They have broad wings, and human necks and faces, feet with claws, and a great feathered belly. They make lament upon the strange trees. And the good Master, “Before thou enter farther know that thou art in the second round,” he began to say to me, “and wilt be, till thou shalt come unto the horrible sand. Therefore look well around, and so thou shalt see things that would take credence from my speech.”[1] [1] Things which if told would seem incredible. I heard wailings uttered on every side, and I saw no one who might make them, wherefore, I, all bewildered, stopped. I believe that he believed that I believed that all these voices issued amid those stumps from people who because of us had hidden themselves. Therefore said the Master, “If thou break off a twig from one of these plants, the thoughts thou hast will all be cut short.” Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn-bush, and its trunk cried out, “Why dost thou rend me?” When it had become dark with blood it began again to cry, “Why dost thou tear me? hast thou not any spirit of pity? Men we were, and now we are become stocks; truly thy hand ought to be more pitiful had we been the souls of serpents.” As from a green log that is burning at one of its ends, and from the other drips, and hisses with the air that is escaping, so from that broken splinter came out words and blood together; whereon I let the tip fall, and stood like a man who is afraid. “If he had been able to believe before,” replied my Sage, “O wounded soul, what he has seen only in my verse,[1] he would not upon thee have stretched his hand. But the incredible thing made me prompt him to an act which grieves my very self. But tell him who thou wast, so that, by way of some amends, he may refresh thy fame in the world above, whereto it is allowed him to return.” [1] In the story of Polydorus, in the third book of the Aeneid.