And I saw a Centaur full of rage come crying out, “Where is, where is that obdurate one?” I do not think Maremma has so many snakes as he had upon his croup up to where our semblance begins. On his shoulders behind the nape a dragon with open wings was lying upon him, and it sets on fire whomsoever it encounters. My Master said, “This is Cacus, who beneath the rock of Mount Aventine made oftentimes a lake of blood. He goes not on one road with his brothers because of the fraudulent theft he committed of the great herd that was in his neighborhood; wherefor his crooked deeds ceased under the club of Hercules, who perhaps dealt him a hundred blows with it, and he felt not ten.” While he was so speaking, and that one had run by, lo! three spirits came below us, of whom neither I nor my Leader was aware till when they cried out, “Who are ye?” whereon our story stopped, and we then attended only unto them. I did not recognize them, but it happened, as it is wont to happen by chance, that one must needs name the other, saying, “Cianfa, where can he have stayed?” Whereupon I, in order that the Leader should attend, put my finger upward from my chin to my nose. If thou art now, Reader, slow to credit that which I shall tell, it will not be a marvel, for I who saw it hardly admit it to myself. As I was holding my brow raised upon them, lo! a serpent with six feet darts in front of one, and grapples close to him. With his middle feet he clasped his paunch, and with his forward took his arms, then struck his fangs in one and the other cheek. His hinder feet he stretched upon the thighs, and put his tail between the two, and behind bent it up along the reins. Ivy was never so bearded to a tree, as the horrible beast through the other’s limbs entwined his own. Then they stuck together as if they had been of hot wax, and mingled their color; nor one nor the other seemed now that which it was; even as before the flame, up along the paper a dark color proceeds which is not yet black, and the white dies away. The other two were looking on, and each cried, “O me! Agnello, how thou changest! Lo, now thou art neither two nor one! Now were the two heads become one, when there appeared to us two countenances mixed in one face wherein the two were lost. Of four[1] strips the two arms were made; the thighs with the legs, the belly and the chest became members that were never seen before. Each original aspect there was cancelled; both and neither the perverse image appeared, and such it went away with slow step. [1] The two fore feet of the dragon and the two arms of the man were melted into two strange arms.