Dante: The Divine Comedy — Purgatorio

While on the brink thus one before the other / We went upon our way, oft the good Master / Said: “Take thou heed! suffice it that I warn thee.”

On the right shoulder smote me now the sun, / That, raying out, already the whole west / Changed from its azure aspect into white.

And with my shadow did I make the flame / Appear more red; and even to such a sign / Shades saw I many, as they went, give heed.

This was the cause that gave them a beginning / To speak of me; and to themselves began they / To say: “That seems not a factitious body!”

Then towards me, as far as they could come, / Came certain of them, always with regard / Not to step forth where they would not be burned.

“O thou who goest, not from being slower / But reverent perhaps, behind the others, / Answer me, who in thirst and fire am burning.

Nor to me only is thine answer needful; / For all of these have greater thirst for it / Than for cold water Ethiop or Indian.

Tell us how is it that thou makest thyself / A wall unto the sun, as if thou hadst not / Entered as yet into the net of death.”

Thus one of them addressed me, and I straight / Should have revealed myself, were I not bent / On other novelty that then appeared.

For through the middle of the burning road / There came a people face to face with these, / Which held me in suspense with gazing at them.

There see I hastening upon either side / Each of the shades, and kissing one another / Without a pause, content with brief salute.

Thus in the middle of their brown battalions / Muzzle to muzzle one ant meets another / Perchance to spy their journey or their fortune.

No sooner is the friendly greeting ended, / Or ever the first footstep passes onward, / Each one endeavours to outcry the other;

The new-come people: “Sodom and Gomorrah!” / The rest: “Into the cow Pasiphae enters, / So that the bull unto her lust may run!”

Then as the cranes, that to Riphaean mountains / Might fly in part, and part towards the sands, / These of the frost, those of the sun avoidant,

One folk is going, and the other coming, / And weeping they return to their first songs, / And to the cry that most befitteth them;

And close to me approached, even as before, / The very same who had entreated me, / Attent to listen in their countenance.

I, who their inclination twice had seen, / Began: “O souls secure in the possession, / Whene’er it may be, of a state of peace,