The Leaden Copes

«Di fuor dorate son, sì ch’elli abbaglia» (Inf. XXIII 64): in the poem the gilding is the sin worn on the body, and in the game it is literally a coat of paint over lead. Thirteen of them walk the stretch you cross, at thirty-four centimetres a second, a third of your own pace: one cope alone never catches anybody.

What catches you is the number. The verb of this ditch is not strike, it is surround: three of them closing in press, and the pressing is their punishment taken at its word. They are not put down and they are not shoved aside, they are walked around, and to walk around them you have to head for the end of the ditch you cannot see.

Down here nothing sees you: it weighs you. A heavy step is felt by all thirteen, a slow one almost not at all, standing still not at all, and this is the one ditch in the chapter you cross by going slower instead of faster. The note the game shows on a cope reads: a friar’s cope, gilded outside and lead beneath, and whoever wears it walks at a mile an hour and cannot stop.