Canto V of Hell

The innocent habitants of the Limbs.
They are foetuses and they did not have the time to sin.

Ruppemi l'alto sonno ne la testa
un greve truono, sì ch'io mi riscossi
come persona ch'è per forza desta;

  e l'occhio riposato intorno mossi,
dritto levato, e fiso riguardai
per conoscer lo loco dov'io fossi.

  Vero è che 'n su la proda mi trovai
de la valle d'abisso dolorosa
che 'ntrono accoglie d'infiniti guai.

  Oscura e profonda era e nebulosa
tanto che, per ficcar lo viso a fondo,
io non vi discernea alcuna cosa.

A noise broke my sleep as if one awoke me with force;
 I carried my rested eyes all around, to recognize the place where I was. 
I was on the edge of a valley of pain, along the river Chaudière*,
 which waters breaks their bed; it runs and floods the fertile lands of Bauce*,
up to the great river, where the Styx rests.
 I heard a rumour of infinite tears. 
The valley was deep and dark so that I saw nothing there. 

And the poet says to me: 

"Now, we go down in the world of darkness, I will walk first and you will follow me." 


And seeing that he turned pale, I say to him:  
"How will I go if you are afraid, you who always comfort me in my doubts?"

 And he made me enter in the first circle that surrounds the abyss. 
There, there were complaints, tears, cries and clamours, 
that came from children in pain, babies, foetuses, boys, little girls 
and fragments of children, cats and dogs, which were there having been tormented elsewhere than here, 
on earth before arriving here; they were abandonned or sacrificed, or tortured or treated with violence. 

The Master then, says to me:

 "These did not sin, but they are here, 
for not having received a name, refused as mortals or badly-loved. 
For such faults and not for their own crime but by that of other mortals, 
they are forfeited and their single sorrow is to live without history." 


We walked while speaking and crossed a place by the name of Jersey* where lay 
small tiny beings, inert and with gelatinous shapes and I was astonished, to my guide, 
of them to be so numerous and that they did not seem alive nor from a human source: 


"Know that they are foetuses, they comes in great number and, although they appear without life,
 they are made of man's matter, born from the fusion of male and female gametes. 

They were prevented from being what they  already where in the ovary,  Beings like you and me; 
for reasons that only ignorance explains, like objects or cumbersome things; 
or would they be too numerous so that the earth agrees not to support them! 
As you will see it in Hell, others are tormented in their place."


 We entered further in a wooded section that extends all along the country of Gog, 
there were children everywhere, over, around and under the trees, crying and calling their mothers. 
My Master says to me: 
 
"They are from everywhere and in an infinite number, they are Asian and black, 
white and yellow and of all races, orphans or rejected by their mother, or given up 
to the benefit of a brother, or sacrificed by the Welfare state, orphan children in infinite number
 and they still comes from everywhere, from the east as from the west, 
as well as from cities, rural areas and in an infinite number." 


Then we reached a marshy zone. There were small girls 
with their hair, black and buckled, their eyes were briddle such that they were pretty.
 "They come from Lachine*," 
tells me my guide: 
 
"and, to respect the laws of the country, one sacrifices them to the profit of the boy. 
Thus they are legions here, that the world could not save, and they still comes in too great number."


Then by approaching Lafamine and Etchemin*, these localities where water intermixed, 
I saw shredded bodies, members who lay intermixed and I was revolted and pained by this. 
Then my guide says to me:
 
 "These are children from Bogota, orphans and pilferers, they were assassinated, 
shredded and thrown to the dumps by soldiers engaged by the merchants of the city. 
And those whose arms were mangled by the butchers of Liberia so that 
their torturers obtains, from the puppets of the UNO, the paternity of the political power. 

Beyond this valley, in direction of Armagh* or the opposite side, to the borders 
of the hamlet of Inverness*, there are so many others, of which, old men fallen down in childhood 
that I will not show you, them also, euthanasiated, to make room 
for younger people better disposed towards the party of the blues."


 I was astonished, toward my Master, of the fact that beings, who had not sinned, 
were thus, suspended in the Limbs: 
"Does some beings, leave from here, who, by merit or by the merit of someone else, 
become happy and thus leave these places?" 
 
 Then my guide answered me:
  "One sees several leaving and, according to what I know, they leave for the Paradise, 
when justice is returned to them and that the torturer found reward for his crime!" 

Seeing my sorrow, my guide, then, asked me to leave; he led me by another way, 
out of the valley of pain and we arrived in a place where it is nothing that shines.