The Second Ditch, the Flatterers

The flatterers stand sunk in a dung that looks as though it came out of human privies, and Dante watches them from the bridge holding his nose (Inf. XVIII 112-114); in the game the bridge is missing in the middle and the ditch is filled almost to the rim, so there is no ford and nothing to be looked at from above. You get in, you go under, and under you cannot see a metre and a half.

It is the second of the ten districts of the pit, one of the ten crossed on the bridges that run out like spokes, and here the game departs from the poem openly: where Dante passes over it holding his nose, you pass underneath. The ditch runs on the same diving system as the Styx and the Phlegethon, and the ones inside do not wish you harm: they want out, and to get out they pull themselves up on whatever goes past.