Using the above table as a guide, we may now see how Dante uses the movements of the heavenly bodies both for time and direction, and we shall discover how long his journey takes.
Dante has spent a night in a dark forest. The moon was then full; but we only learn this later, when Virgil reminds him of it, and he himself mentions it to Forese, when talking in the Purgatorio. At dawn he finds himself at the foot of a hill on which are already shining the first rays of the morning sun—the planet which leads all aright by every path. The sun rises: it is in Aries, consequently the moon, being full, must be in Libra, and must have set as the sun rose, i.e. at about 6 a.m. Virgil appears, rescues the poet from three terrible beasts, and announces that he has come to conduct him through Hell and Purgatory, and to lead him to Beatrice, who will guide him to Paradise.
On the evening of the same day, at twilight, the poets enter the Inferno. This great subterranean cavity, shaped like an inverted cone (see fig. 45), is divided into nine circles, in which the different classes of sinners are punished. In this blind world of eternal darkness no star shines, and the sun is never once mentioned as timegiver; when Virgil wishes to remind Dante that they must hasten, he refers to the position of moon or stars, and the former is called “La Donna che qui regge.”[455]
After passing through four circles, Virgil says that every star is now sinking which was ascending when he started, indicating that it is now six hours since they entered the Inferno, or soon after midnight. He does not mean that all these stars are setting, but that they have crossed the meridian, and are at some point of their descent towards the west. Strictly speaking this does not apply to stars north of the equator, since they take more than six hours to reach the meridian, being above the horizon for more than twelve. Perhaps Virgil is thinking chiefly of the constellations of the zodiac.
The poets cross the fifth circle, enter the “basso Inferno”[456] or city of Dis, and on the edge of the precipice which borders the circle of the Heretics they sit while Virgil explains the system of the several circles. Then he expresses a wish to continue the journey, for the Fishes (of the zodiac) are quivering on the horizon, and the Wain lies to the north-west. As it is the time of the Vernal Equinox, and the sun is in Aries, Pisces is the zodiacal sign immediately preceding the sun, and begins to rise about four in the morning. The part of Ursa Major called the Wain is somewhat less than 180° distant from Pisces; hence when the latter appears on the eastern horizon the former will be in the west (and of course always in the north). The “Caurus” of the Latins was the wind from the north-west.
They descend a cliff over loose stones which roll under the unaccustomed weight of Dante’s living feet. Virgil tells him that both here and elsewhere in Hell the ancient rocks were riven by an earthquake which immediately preceded the triumphant descent of Christ after His crucifixion. So mighty was the shock that he thought the universe was dissolving into chaos by the force of love, as Empedocles had said must happen periodically. At the base of the cliff they cross the river Phlegethon, then pass through the wood of the Harpies, and walk along the stone banks of a conduit which afterwards falls with thunderous roar down a steep precipice. On the burning sand through which the conduit runs, Dante sees Brunetto Latini, and tells him that it was only yesterday that he escaped from the Forest. The monster Geryon carries them down the precipice, and they reach the ten Pits of Malebolge, which like so many moats surround the central Depth.
When looking down upon the astrologers in the fourth Pit, Virgil again hastens Dante on, telling him that now Cain and the thorns—by which he means the moon, alluding to the legend[457]—is on the boundary of the two hemispheres, and already touching the waves below Seville. The two hemispheres are those of the habitable earth whose centre is Jerusalem, and the uninhabitable with Purgatory at its centre: the moon, therefore, is just setting as seen from Jerusalem, and in the Inferno the time is Jerusalem time. It is here that Virgil adds, “And yesternight the moon was full:” did we not know this, the fact that she was setting would give no clue to the time. When full, she set as the sun rose, that was at 6 a.m.; now, therefore, she is setting after sunrise, between six and seven in the morning;[458] and this is how Virgil tells Dante, without mentioning the sun, that a new day has begun.
The poets accordingly hasten on to the bridge above the next Pit, the fifth, and here the demons treacherously mislead them by assuring them that the next bridge directly on their way is broken down, but the one to the left is standing. The anniversary of the catastrophe is precisely determined by Malacoda, the chief demon of the band, as five hours later than the present hour on the preceding day. There can be no doubt that he refers to the same earthquake as Virgil described when descending the stony cliff, and all commentators are agreed to this. The time now, therefore, is five hours before midday, i.e. 7 a.m., since it was at midday that Dante believed Christ to have died.[459]
The scenes with the demons follow, the breathless escape into the next Pit, of the Hypocrites, and the horrors of the Pit of the Thieves.
Then for a short space, when the suffering and the murk of Hell is becoming almost intolerable, we are suddenly lifted into the upper air by the narrative of Ulysses—into the pure air and the vast spaces of the southern ocean, and we see once more the skies. We follow the adventurers to the regions beyond the sun, the world where no one lives; we see all the stars of the other pole, and the moon shines down upon us. Too soon comes the tragic end of the story, and the waters close over the ship; the shade of Ulysses passes on, and we are once more in the “buio d’ inferno.”[460]
At the next Pit, that of the Schismatics, as Dante stands ready to weep for pity on the bridge above it, Virgil reproaches him for delaying, for little remains now of the time permitted for seeing the Inferno, and already the moon is beneath their feet. This is about an hour after midday; for if the moon were full she would be just opposite the sun, hence under our feet when the sun is on the meridian, i.e. at noon; but this is one day after Full Moon, and therefore she does not reach the position till about an hour later.
The tenth and last Pit is traversed, and when the giant Antæus has lifted them down into the sorrowful pit towards which all the rest of Hell converges, the poets have nearly reached the centre of the earth. For they have been descending continually, finding a slight fall between each circle, and between the great divisions of different classes of sin, three sharp steep falls—the cliff descending to the River of blood and other circles of the violent, the precipice down which Geryon carried them to the Malebolge of Fraud, and the Dark Pit to the bottom of which Antæus conveyed them, where in the Frozen Lake treachery was punished. Last of all, at the very centre and bottom of the whole “dolorous kingdom” of Lucifer, they see its King, and Virgil says all has been seen, and it is time to depart, for Night is rising again.
Thus we see that the journey through the Inferno has taken exactly the time from one sunset to another, twenty-four hours.
Now Virgil seizes the shaggy side of the fiend, while the monstrous wings are raised, and with Dante clinging to him climbs down the side, as far as the hip; here with difficulty and labour the master turns round, so that his head is where his feet were, and climbs up, panting, so that Dante thinks they are returning. But when the ascent has been made, and both poets sit down to rest, Dante sees to his astonishment that the frozen lake is gone, the head and wings of Lucifer are gone, they are looking down upon him, and see only his legs which are directed upwards! To add to Dante’s bewilderment, Virgil now says, “Rise, for the way is long and the road is bad, and the sun has already returned to middle-tierce,” which, as we have seen, means at the time of the equinox 7.30 in the morning. Night was just beginning in the dreadful place they have so recently left, but now for the first time Virgil mentions the sun as giving them the time, and it is early morning.
The explanation is that the point which they passed with so great an effort is the exact centre of the world; they are now on its further side, and above them is the other hemisphere, where all is ocean save the island of Purgatory. Virgil explains how it was through the fall of Lucifer from Heaven that all the land except Purgatory is in one hemisphere, and that there is a cavity through which they may now climb to the opposite hemisphere. When Lucifer fell, all the land which then existed in the unknown hemisphere fled for fear of him, sinking under the sea, and then escaping round the globe settled in the inhabited hemisphere. It may be, he adds, that then the earth in the interior fled away from him upwards to form land in this hemisphere (Purgatory) and thus an empty space is left here. Up this, which is the same length as the tunnel of the Inferno, they climb, guided through the darkness by the sound of a little brook which has worn its winding way down the rock. On this route there is nothing to detain them, for they are alone in the darkness, but it presumably takes much longer to ascend than it did to descend, for climbing without a pause it takes about twenty-three hours (from the centre) to reach that round hole in the rocks through which at last they once more see the stars, just before the dawn of a new day.