The Frozen Lake of Betrayal — Divine Comedy

Dante opens by acknowledging the limit of language: describing the bottom of the universe is no jest, and he calls on the Muses who helped Amphion wall Thebes with music. Then the address to the sinners themselves: better you had been born as flocks or mountain goats. Antaeus has set them down in the dark; a voice from the ice warns Dante to watch where he steps, he is walking on the heads of his brothers. He looks down and sees a lake frozen harder than any winter river: the Austrian Danube, the distant Tanais, would not have borne the comparison. Faces peer up like frogs croaking above the water, teeth chattering like storks, locked to the neck in ice. This is Caina, traitors to their own kin. Two brothers are frozen so tightly together that their hair is mingled; when they try to lift their faces to answer Dante, their frozen tears re-seal them together like planks clamped by a carpenter. A nearby shade, Camiccione dei Pazzi, identifies them as the sons of Alberto of Mangona, who killed each other; names Focaccia and Mascheroni as other notable traitors in Caina; and says he is waiting for his kinsman Carlino, whose greater guilt will wash out Camiccione's own. Moving toward the centre, Dante's foot strikes a face in the ice. The spirit accuses him of vengeance for Montaperti. Dante demands a name; the spirit refuses; Dante grabs his hair and begins to pull. Another spirit betrays him anyway: this is Bocca degli Abati, the Florentine who at Montaperti cut off the standard-bearer's hand, triggering the Ghibelline rout of Florentine Guelphs. Bocca, furious, retaliates in kind, naming other traitors he can see from where he lies: Buoso da Duera who took French gold, Beccaria, Soldanieri, Ganelon, Tribaldello who opened Faenza at night. At the chapter's edge, two sinners are frozen in a single hollow, the upper one gnawing on the skull of the one below where the neck meets the spine, more furiously than Tydeus gnawed on Menalippus. Dante promises to carry their story back to the world if the upper shade will explain the cause. The chapter ends on that promise: the identification and the explanation are Chapter 33.