The Fourth Ditch, the Diviners

The diviners have had the face turned round onto the back and must come backwards, because seeing ahead has been taken from them (Inf. XX 13-15); in the game they are twenty bodies packed into twenty six degrees of arc, all of them under the span, which is where you look down from. They used to be eleven over fifty four degrees, and from the bridge you saw black with two shapes in it.

It is the fourth of the ten districts of the pit, crossed on its own spoke of a bridge like the rest, and it is the one the chapter rests on: the soul who can no longer look ahead is also the only one down here who says what lies ahead. A wind comes up out of the central well and crosses the ditch, and the lamp feels it; and one of them walks the span the opposite way from you, so the footsteps you hear are not the echo of your own.