The Blind Man in the Pass

The poem gives the narrows a single line, and it puts it in the past: it is «lo passo che non lasciò già mai persona viva» (Inf. I 26-27). Whoever did not come out did not go anywhere, because there is nowhere to go from in there: he is still inside. The game fills in what the line implies, and the note it prints says that it has filled it in.

He is not a fourth beast, and that is deliberate: the worst thing you can put in a narrow gorge is not another animal, it is somebody who tried before you and failed. The three bodies at the far mouth are his companions. He cannot see and does not know that eyes exist; he reads the air, and in the air there is only you, because the dead do not breathe. He has two thresholds and not one: above the first he stops searching and lunges, below the second he goes back to groping, and between the two lies the time of somebody who has just stopped breathing.

He cannot be killed, because nothing dies down here: the arrow pins him, the censer scatters him, and it is all bought time, because he comes back. The breathing you hear coming in the dark is his and not the beasts’, and that too is deliberate: he is not a monster. The note the game prints says it plainly: he did not get out of the pass alive, he is not in the poem, he does not see, he hears the air.