The Gates and the Phases

Malebolge is a funnel crossed by ten bridges set out like spokes, and until this version the chapter had no way of saying what done meant: every trial in it marked itself finished by being walked past, that is by arriving somewhere, and ten of the notebook’s thirteen steps closed on approach. The road from the third bank to the last bridge was measured a point every half metre: two hundred and fifty four metres of unbroken floor, not one gap and not one wall. You walked, the list ticked itself off, and nothing had been asked of you.

Now every trial declares three things, which ditch it closes, whether it has been solved, and what to say to whoever has not solved it, and solved means done. Where the stone is not enough, the end of the bridge is shut by a gate. It is not a wall in the middle of nowhere: it stands at the last step of a bridge, where you expect something to be, it stops the body and lets sight and arrows through, because the bank is over there and looking at it while you cannot reach it is half the point. Walk into it and it does not go quiet: it says what is missing, and repeats it every four seconds for as long as you stand there. And it can always be attempted again, because a gate that does not reopen is not a gate, it is a walled door.

Where the stone is already the gate there is none, which is the case of the broken bridges: the third and the eighth were snapped on purpose, because the jump in this game reaches four metres and sixty four, and a gap that holds needs more than six. One stretch alone is left ungated by declared choice, the last bank before the pit, because closing it would mean shutting out whoever arrives there with nothing left to shoot.