had been in the eddies of a whirlpool, so that he heard very little
more, only a prophecy about Mt. Vesuvius and that Dicaearchia[872] would
be destroyed by fire, and a short piece about the Emperor then
reigning,[873] that "though he was good he would lose his empire through
sickness."

After this Thespesius and his guide turned to see those that were
undergoing punishment. And at first they saw only distressing and
pitiable sights, but after that, Thespesius, little expecting it, found
himself among his friends and acquaintances and kinsfolk who were being
punished, and undergoing dreadful sufferings and hideous and bitter
tortures, and who wept and wailed to him. And at last he descried his
father coming up out of a certain gulf covered with marks and scars,
stretching out his hands, and not allowed to keep silence, but compelled
by those that presided over his torture to confess that he had been an
accursed wretch and poisoned some strangers that had gold, and during
his lifetime had escaped the detection of everybody; but had been found
out here, and his guilt brought home to him, for which he had already
suffered much, and was being dragged on to suffer more. So great was his
consternation and fear that he did not dare to intercede or beg for his
father's release, but wishing to turn and flee he could no longer see
his gentle and kind guide, but he was thrust forward by some persons
horrible to look at, as if some dire necessity compelled him to go
through with the business, and saw that the shades of those that had
been notorious criminals and punished in their life-time were not so
severely tortured here or like the others, but had an incomplete[874]
though toilsome punishment for their irrational passions.[875] Whereas
those who under the mask and show of virtue had lived all their lives in
undetected vice were forced by their torturers with labour and pain to
turn their souls inside out, unnaturally wriggling and writhing about,
like the sea-scolopendras who, when they have swallowed the hook, turn
themselves inside out; but some of them their torturers flayed and
crimped so as to show their various inward vices which were only skinned
over, which were deep in their soul the principal part of man. And he
said he saw other souls, like snakes two or three or even more twined
together, devouring one another in malignity and malevolence for what
they had suffered or done in life. He said also that there were severa