his grave arguments pushed me to where silence seemed to me the worst, and I said, ‘Father, since thou washest me of that sin wherein I now must fall, long promise with short keeping will make thee triumph on the High Seat.’ Francis[5] came for me afterwards, when I was dead, but one of the Black Cherubim said to him, ‘Bear him not away; do me not wrong; he must come down among my drudges because he gave the fraudulent counsel, since which till now I have been at his hair; for he who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can repentance and will exist together, because of the contradiction that allows it not.’ O woeful me! how I shuddered when he took me, saying to me, ‘Perhaps thou didst not think that I was a logician.’ To Minos he bore me; and he twined his tail eight times round his hard back, and, after he had bitten it in great rage, he said, ‘This is one of the sinners of the thievish fire.’ Therefore I, where thou seest, am lost, and going thus robed I rankle.” When he had thus completed his speech the flame, sorrowing, departed, twisting and flapping its sharp horn. [1] Boniface VIII. [2] With the Colonna family, whose stronghold was Palestrina. [3] Not one had been a renegade, to help the Saracens at the siege of Acre in 1291. [4] It was for this service that Constantine was supposed to have made Sylvester “the first rich Father.” See Canto xiv. His predecessor, Celestine V., had renounced the papacy. [5] St. Francis came for his soul, as that of one of the brethren of his Order. We passed onward, I and my Leader, along the crag, far as upon the next arch that covers the ditch in which the fee is paid by those who, sowing discord, win their burden. CANTO XXVIII. Eighth Circle: ninth pit: sowers of discord and schism.—Mahomet and Ali.—Fra Dolcino.—Pier da Medicina.—Curio.—Mosca.—Bertrau de Born. Who, even with words unfettered,[1] could ever tell in full of the blood and of the wounds that I now saw, though many times narrating? Every tongue assuredly would come short, by reason of our speech and our memory that have small capacity to comprise so much. [1] In prose. If all the people were again assembled, that of old upon the fateful land of Apulia lamented for their blood shed by the Trojans,[1] and in the long war that made such high spoil of the rings,[2] as Livy writes, who erreth not; with those that, by resisting Robert Guiscard,[3] felt the pain of blows, and the rest whose bones are still heaped up at Ceperano,[4] where every Apullian was false, and there by Tagliacozzo,[5] where without arms the old Alardo conquered,—and one should show his limb pierced through, and one his lopped off, it would be nothing to equal the grisly mode of the ninth pit. [1] The Romans, descendants of the Trojans. [2] The spoils of the battle of Canon, in the second Punic War. [3] The Norman conqueror and Duke of Apulia. He died in 1085.