The Faces on the Passes

The landslides are folded ground: they have no object, no key to press and no way of saying no, so the five circles could be walked down one after another with nothing accomplished. Each pass opens when the step of its own circle is closed, and from then on it never closes again. It has two pieces and both are needed: a body across the doorway, which you see and touch and which says why you cannot go through, and a guard covering the whole trench of the ramp, because the bank can also be taken from the side, around the body.

There are four faces, one per rim, and each comes from a line of the poem. On the mouth of the first circle lies the tail of Minos, wound across it and buried in the stone at both ends. On the one below the lustful there is the whirl: the storm empties down the landslide as down a flue and spits the bodies back. On the one below gluttony there is hail packed into the narrows, hard as rock. On the one below avarice there is the jam of weights wedged into the opening.

They all live in a single file, and the code says why: the five circles had been filled in parallel and every warden stood on its own, with nobody looking at the descent as a whole. No face has colliders of its own, because the pass itself does the stopping and two solid bodies laid over each other only snag. Each face is a child of the pass node and leaves with it: once the circle is done, the thing that explained the refusal disappears too, and what is left is the ramp.