"
(VII, 19.)
The next is the circle of the wrathful and the sullen. Following is the
circle of the materialists and heretics, all covered with burning
sepulchres:
"Soon as I was within, I cast around
My eyes and saw extend on either hand
A spacious plain, that echoed to the sound
Of grief and torment sore; as o'er the land
At Aries where Rhone's vast waters stagnant stand
Or Pola, near Quarnero Bay, that bounds
And bathes the line of Italy, expand
Plains rough and heaving with supulchral mounds,
'Tis thus the plain, wherein I stood, with tombs abounds,
Save that the buried were more grimly treated.
For twixt the graves were scattered tongues of fire
By which to such a pitch the place was heated
That iron could no fiercer flame require
For art to mould it: lamentation dire
Issued from each unlidded vault, and seemed
The voice of those in torment."
From one of these fiery tombs, the Florentine freethinker, the haughty
Farinata, rises "with breast and brow erect, as holding Hell in great
contempt," and tells Dante that the souls of the lost have no knowledge
concerning things that are actually passing on earth, though they know
the past and see the future. He foretells the duration of the poet's
exile and boasts that he himself saved Florence from being razed to the
ground.
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