The Black Hounds

In canto XIII two squanderers run naked through the wood and behind them the forest is full of black hounds, Dante’s cagne, which catch them and tear them apart. In the game there are four hounds, two behind each of the two damned souls, running a lopsided circuit inside the wood a little under three quarters of its radius wide, each out of phase with the others. They never touch you and never look for you: this is the one thing in the chapter that moves with nothing to do with the player, and that is why it is there, because it says that down here everyone minds their own business.

The game parts from the poem in one thing, and it shows: in the canto the pack smashes through the thickets as it goes and the wood cries out at the damage, while here the circuit is a written curve that knows nothing about the wood, and whoever runs swerves round the trunks by a good half metre, just enough not to end up inside one. While the trunks were thin it worked anyway; once they were thickened, two figures in ten were running inside a bramble. The only ones who cry out, now and then, are the two men: the hounds run silent.

The hounds are sculpted by hand, out of tubes, in the same idiom as the three beasts of the first canto: seven pieces, and a greyhound is known by three things only, all three of them here, the high chest with the tucked belly, the long thin muzzle, the low tail. The legs are not animated, because at that speed and in that dark what reads is the line of the run and not the step, which is the same reason the file of the indifferent in the antechamber has no walk. The measurement is taken on the length and not on the height, because a greyhound is twice as long as it is tall. Before this they were not sculpted at all: the code asked for the she wolf’s model, that model is not in the folder, and for months the scene held four hounds without a single triangle, which is to say two damned souls running from nothing.