is
feet, Dante then becomes aware that he is standing on a frozen lake,
wherein stick fast innumerable sinners, whose heads alone emerge,
eased in ice owing to the tears constantly flowing down their cheeks.

Seeing two so close together that their very hair seems to mingle,
Dante, on inquiring, learns they are two brothers who slew each other
in an inheritance quarrel, for this is Caina, the region where the
worst murderers are punished, and, like every other part of the
Inferno, it is crowded with figures.

"A thousand visages
Then mark'd, I, which the keen and eager cold
Had shaped into a doggish grin; whence creeps
A shivering horror o'er me, at the thought
Of those frore shallows."

It happens that, while following his guide over the ice, Dante's foot
strikes a projecting head. Permission being granted him to question
its owner, Dante, because he at first refuses to speak, threatens to
pull every hair out of his head, and actually gives him a few hard
tugs. Then the man admits he is a traitor and that there are many
others of his ilk in Antenora, the second division of the lowest
circle.

_Canto XXXIII._ Beholding another culprit greedily gnawing the head of
a companion, Dante learns that while on earth this culprit was Count
Ugolino de'Gherardeschi, whom his political opponents, headed by the
Archbishop Ruggiero, seized by treachery and locked up in the
Famine-tower at Pisa, with two sons and two grandsons. Ugolino
feelingly describes his horror when one morning he heard them nail up
the door of the prison, and realized he and his were doomed to starve!
Not a word did the prisoners exchange regarding their fate, although
all were aware of the suffering awaiting them. At the end of
twenty-four hours, beholding traces of hunger in the beloved faces of
his children, Ugolino gnawed his fists in pain. One of his grandsons,
interpreting this as a sign of unbearable hunger, then suggested that
he eat one of them, whereupon he realized how needful it was to
exercise self-control if he did not wish to increase the sufferings of
the rest. Ugolino then describes how they daily grew weaker, until his
grandsons died at the end of the fourth day, vainly begging him to
help them. Then his sons passed away, and, groping blindly among the
dead, he lingered on, until, famine becoming more potent than anything
else, he yielded to its demands. Having finished this grewsome tale,
Ugolino continued h