The Walls of Dis

The iron walls, the Furies on the tower, and the name they call down. Past them the burning tombs of the heretics, the river of blood, the wood of the suicides, the burning sand. Here the lower Hell begins, and so does what the poem calls malice.

The chapter begins by arriving, not by appearing: the last arm of the Styx, the same boat and the same boatman, and the red towers growing ahead of you. In the poem that landing is still canto VIII, while the name in the menu counts this chapter from the ninth. Then the wall, and it is not stone: «Le mura mi parean che ferro fosse» (Inf. VIII 78), and the gate is shut in your face.

Four places, crossed in four ways that do not resemble each other: a built city, a field of opened tombs, a wood with no landmarks where you steer by ear, and an open stretch where you stand exposed. What holds them together is not a ring but the Phlegethon, and the only vertical wound is the Minotaur’s landslide, which stays open on the way up as well.