er. 'O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said
proudly; and he advanced with his eyes fixed only on this modest woman."
Virgil (Reason called by Conscience) comes to the rescue of the
entranced poet and reveals the Siren in all her foul ugliness. At that
Dante awakes from his dream more than ever convinced of the evil of sin
and its hideousness. (Purg., XIX, 9.)

Our poet, as we said, is firmly convinced that sin will be punished in
Hell. But where is Hell? Popular tradition attributing an infernal
connection with volcanic phenomena and moved by those passages in Holy
Scripture which describe Hell as a place to which the reprobate descend,
locates Hell in the interior of the earth. Dante not only follows this
tradition for his Hell, but he does what no other writer before or after
him ever did--he constructs a Hell with such rare architectural skill
that the awful structure stands forth in startling reality, visualized
easily as to form an atmosphere, and with a finish of detail that is
amazing. Covered by a crust of earth it is situated under Jerusalem and
extends in funnel shape to the very center of the earth.

How it got this shape is told by the poet. When Lucifer was hurled from
Heaven by the justice of God, he kept falling until he reached the
center of earth, whence further motion downward was impossible. At the
approach of Lucifer the earth is represented as recoiling and so making
the cavity of Hell. The earth dislodged by the cataclysm was forced
through an opening, a kind of nozzle of the funnel of Hell, to the
antipodes and it there emerged, forming a mountain, which became the
site of the Garden of Eden and Purgatory. The phenomenon made land in
the northern and water in the southern hemisphere. Here is the
description:

"Upon this side he fell down out of heaven
And all the land, that whilom here emerged
For fear of him made of the sea a veil
And came to our hemisphere; and peradventure
To flee from him, what on this side
Left the place vacant here and back recoiled."
(Inf., XXXIV, 121.)

The material structure of the Inferno is a series of nine concentric
circles--darkness brooding over the whole region,--with ledges, chasms,
pits, swamps and rivers. The rivers, though different in name and
aspect, appear to be one and the same stream winding its way through the
various circles. We see it first as the boundary of Hell proper and it
is known as the Acheron. It comes again to vie