divisions in the church
were punished in like manner upon all the schismatics in the place. They
all walked round the circle, their gashes closing as they went; and on
their reaching a certain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a
sword. The Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims
warn Friar Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his
mountain-hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish
speedily to follow him.[35]

Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of
dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and
Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Caesar to cross
the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and
one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up
the bleeding stumps of his arms, which dripped on his face. "Remember
Mosca," cried he; "remember him, alas! who said, 'A deed done is a thing
ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation."

"And death to thy family," cried Dante.

The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief upon grief;
and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, he says, for the
testimony of a good conscience--that best of friends, which gives a
man assurance of himself under the breastplate of a spotless
innocence[36]--he should be afraid to relate without further proof. He
saw--and while he was writing the account of it he still appeared to
see--a headless trunk about to come past him with the others. It held
its severed head by the hair, like a lantern; and the head looked up
at the two pilgrims, and said, "Woe is me!" The head was, in fact, a
lantern to the paths of the trunk; and thus there were two separated
things in one, and one in two; and how that could be, he only can tell
who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted the head aloft,
that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. "Behold," it said,
"behold, thou that walkest living among the dead, and say if there be
any punishment like this. I am Bertrand de Born, he that incited John
of England to rebel against his father. Father and son I set at
variance--closest affections I set at variance--and hence do I bear my
brain severed from the body on which it grew. In me behold the work of
retribution." [37]

The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of bleeding
wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide p