The poets went on their way; and Dante was still listening to the others, when they heard behind them a mingled sound of chanting and weeping, which produced an effect at once sad and delightful. It was the psalm, "O Lord, open thou our lips!" and the chanters were expiators of the sin of Intemperance in Meats and Drinks. They were condemned to circuit the mountain, famished, and to long for the fruit and waters of the tree in vain. They soon came up with the poets--a pallid multitude, with hollow eyes, and bones staring through the skin. The sockets of their eyes looked like rings from which the gems had dropped.[43] One of them knew and accosted Dante, who could not recognise him till he heard him speak. It was Forese Donati, one of the poet's most intimate connexions. Dante, who had wept over his face when dead, could as little forbear weeping to see him thus hungering and thirsting, though he had expected to find him in the outskirts of the place, among the delayers of repentance. He asked his friend how he had so quickly got higher. Forese said it was owing to the prayers and tears of his good wife Nella; and then he burst into a strain of indignation against the contrast exhibited to her virtue by the general depravity of the Florentine women, whom he described as less modest than the half-naked savages in the mountains of Sardinia.
"What is to be said of such creatures?" continued he. "O my dear cousin! I see a day at hand, when these impudent women shall be for bidden from the pulpit to go exposing their naked bosoms. What savages or what infidels ever needed that? Oh! if they could see what Heaven has in store for them, their mouths would be this instant opened wide for howling."[44]
Forese then asked Dante to explain to himself and his astonished fellow-sufferers how it was that he stood there, a living body of flesh and blood, casting a shadow with his substance.
"If thou callest to mind," said Dante, "what sort of life thou and I led together, the recollection may still grieve thee sorely. He that walks here before us took me out of that life; and through his guidance it is that I have visited in the body the world of the dead, and am now traversing the mountain which leads us to the right path."[45]