This latter had in the upper part of it the empyreal, or heaven of pure light. Below that, was the _Primum mobile_, the greatest body in the heavens, as Dante calls it, because it surrounds all the rest of the circle, and bounds the material world. Then came the heaven of the fixed stars; then, continuing to descend, the heavens of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon, and lastly, the earth, whose solid and compact nucleus is surrounded by the spheres of water, air, and fire. As the choirs of angels turn about a fixed point, so the nine material circles turn also about another fixed point, and are moved by the pure spirits. Let us now descend to the geography of the interior of the earth. Within the earth is a large cone, whose layers are the frightful abodes of the condemned, and which ends in the centre, where the divine Justice keeps bound up to his chest in ice the prince of the rebellious angels, the emperor of the kingdom of woe. Such are the infernal regions which Dante describes according to ideas generally admitted in the middle ages. The form of the infernal regions was that of a funnel or reversed cone. All its circles were concentric, and continually diminished; the principal ones were nine in number. Virgil also admitted nine divisions--three times three, a number sacred _par excellence_. The seventh, eighth, and ninth circles were divided into several regions; and the space between the entrance to the infernal regions and the river Acheron, where the resting-place of the damned really commenced, was divided into two parts. Dante, guided by Virgil, traversed all these circles. It was in 1300 that the poet, "in the midst of the course of life," at the age of thirty-five, passed in spirit through the three regions of the dead. Lost in a lonely, wild, and dismal forest, he reached the base of a hill, which he attempted to climb. But three animals, a panther, a lion, and a thin and famished wolf, prevented his passage; so, returning again where the sun was powerless, into the shades of the depths of the valley, there met him a shadow of the dead. This human form, whom a long silence had deprived of speech, was Virgil, who was sent to guide and succour him by a celestial dame, Beatrice, the object of his love, who was at the same time a real and a mystically ideal being. Virgil and Dante arrived at the gate of the infernal regions; they read the terrible inscription placed over the gate; they entered and found first those unhappy souls who had lived without virtue and without vice. They reached the banks of Acheron and saw Charon, who carried over the souls in his bark to the other side; and Dante was surprised by a profound sleep. He woke beyond the river, and he descended into the Limbo which is the first circle of the infernal regions. He found there the souls of those who had died without baptism, or who had been indifferent to religion.