Chapter 38
Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me
And underfoot a lake, that from the frost
The semblance had of glass, and not of water.
Dante, Inferno, 32.22-24
Dante immediately felt how much colder it was at the top of the cliff, as strange as that seemed after such a short ascent. They again wrapped themselves in their blankets and began moving. The ground was frozen hard as stone, the frost on it crunching under their footsteps. As much as Dante had cursed the deathly stillness they had experienced on the previous plateau, here he quickly found himself longing for it, as howling, icy winds pummeled them. This assault seemed to have a special fury, for it swirled about them, constantly coming at them from a different side, rather than blowing steadily like a normal storm.
There were few trees this high up, so the wind was merciless and inescapable. After trudging for some time, they took shelter next to a boulder and a gnarled juniper tree, so they could get out of the wind and rest.
“I have never seen it this cold in the springtime,” Dante said. He rubbed his hands and face, trying to get warmth back into them. His teeth were chattering so much he could barely speak.
“It’s always colder in the mountains, and it’s still early in the spring,” Adam said. “But this does seem unnatural somehow, like a further blight and plague on this place.”
“Back there you seem to have gotten the hang of lying,” Dante said, stomping his feet before they became too numb.
“Yes, it was useful,” Adam said. “Shameful but useful. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to learn new vices than virtues, so this place corrupts everything and everyone in it.”
“Myra, that woman at the tent for the sick, did not seem wicked,” Radovan said. Dante glanced at him and was encouraged by his still noticing what little goodness could be detected in this pit.
“Yes. She was a rare and virtuous woman,” Adam agreed. “But so wounded by all the evil. We must pray she survives a bit longer, until someone can help her.”
They tightened their blankets around themselves and continued walking. Ahead of them, the ground was completely smooth and white. They had come to the edge of a frozen lake. Radovan stepped out on to the ice, and stomped on it with his foot to test it.
“Should we cross it?” he asked. “It seems solid enough.”
Adam looked to either side at the vast expanse of ice. “Yes, it’ll be much quicker than circling around it,” he replied. “We don’t have much daylight left. Let’s go.”
Once they were on the ice, it could be seen it was not perfectly smooth, but had many irregularities in it. Hunched over as he was, Dante could observe these closely. In places it looked like ripples in the water had frozen, and there were many shades of blue detectable in the ice. Here and there he could see what looked like strange, indistinct objects within the ice, but it was impossible to tell if these were real, or illusions made by various cracks and bubbles trapped deep underneath them. Ominous pops and groans came from underneath – sometimes right at their feet, sometimes from far away, sounding almost like thunder from a distant storm.
Although the lake was quite large, it was not wide in the direction they were moving, and they crossed it quickly. As they neared the other shore, Dante could see some motion ahead and to their right. As they got closer to it, he saw it was two human forms lying down, partly submerged in the frozen, marshy ground at the edge of the lake. Dante could barely hear their moans over the howling wind.
He looked more closely at them, since they seemed incapable of getting up or attacking. They were two dead men, both caked with frost over most of their bodies, though in some spots there were also smears of dark, frozen mud. Where their skin was visible, it was either covered with frost or a shade of white indistinguishable from the snow. Almost all the tears and gashes in their skin were bloodless and nearly invisible, for the frost had filled those in as well.
The way the two men were lying, it looked to Dante as though they had been grappling together when they fell into the swampy ground. Then they had frozen there in mid-fight. As Dante watched, they continued to wrestle. They didn’t really seem able to lift themselves up very much, so they clawed and bit at each other’s faces and necks. The one dead man forced the other down and partly climbed on top of him. Dante could now see a gaping hole in the skull of the one on the bottom. Unlike the rest of their bodies the brain appeared bright and pink, especially shocking and livid with no other color present anywhere around them. Inside the broken skull, it looked like part of the brain was missing. The dead man who had forced the other one down now tried gnawing away at the edge of the hole, apparently trying to widen it, since it was not big enough for him to tear out any more of the brain. As he gnawed, the dead man’s one clouded eye lit on Dante, but he made no move to leave his grisly feast. His jaw just worked slowly up and down as he stared.
“I didn’t think they attacked one another,” Dante said quietly, for the wind had suddenly died down.
“The dead remember,” Adam replied. “This man must have hated that one with some special, intimate venom. A loyalty betrayed? A promise broken? A special humiliation that could only be delivered by someone he loved and trusted? Whatever it was, that hate now consumes him forever.”
The man’s teeth scraped along the skull with a small, rasping sound, like someone using a file on wood.
“So hate is stronger than love?” It was almost a whisper when Dante said it.
“Never believe that, my son,” Adam said with a note of sternness. “You know not to. You know what hate is, and you know its limits.”
Dante drew himself up more, though he still stared into the dead man’s eye. Dante stepped closer to the struggling corpses. Still they did not react to him. “Hate is a kind of love,” he said as he slowly drew back his right foot. “A twisted, stunted kind of love.” He swung his foot forward. The thing’s head jerked to one side from the blow, then turned back to resume chewing. Dante kicked it again with the same effect. “A love of pain and hurt and ugliness.” Dante stepped away from the horrible, useless things on the ground.
“Yes,” Adam said. “And for some people, it is the only love they know. As a man you must look on these pathetic creatures and pity them. But you must also scorn them and spurn their cursed life. It is the only way.” The wind picked back up, whipping their blankets around and stinging their faces with sharp needles of snow and ice. “Now let us finish this journey.”
They stepped off the surface of the lake and back on to frozen earth. Ahead to the left, Dante could see where part of the mountain had been torn away, as though a bite had been taken out of the black rock. It was a huge quarry, the wasted contents of which had been discarded to the one side in a gigantic pile of dully glistening slag. Where they were walking, the ground was covered with the black, pulverized dregs of the mine work as well. Dante picked up a rock and examined it, noticing several shards of dark red in it. Garnets? Rubies? Dante didn’t know enough about gems to tell, but if even a castoff piece like this one had so many jewels embedded in it, the ground must be richer than anywhere else on earth.
As Dante considered such untold wealth, his attention was drawn away by the clink of metal striking rock. He slipped the stone into his pocket without thinking about it, focusing on what might be a new threat. The metallic clanking seemed to be in time to a low, rhythmic chant accompanying it. An explosion shook the ground, as a huge plume of black smoke and dust shot up from the quarry. The clinking and chanting became the only sounds they heard once more.
They were close enough now to see the hundreds of men swinging their picks in the dark pit. As more and more of the miners turned to notice them, Dante saw their eyes were as dead as the stone at which they were hacking.