One of my favourite parts of Dante’s Commedia is the end of Inferno, canto 34. Having surveyed all nine circles, the two poets reached the abode of Lucifer, lo ’mperador del doloroso regno. They went down Satan’s fur and out of Hell, but, as Dante soon learned, they crossed the centre of the Earth and experienced a reversal in gravity, causing Satan to appear upside down.
Medieval iconoography found a nice way to deal with this in the famous Yates Thompson manuscript 36. The verticality of the egress (di vello in vello giù discese poscia […] e aggrappossi al pel com’om che sale) is rendered horizontally, yet the passage of time is clearly visible in the posture of Satan, before and after, the descent, giving a sense of movement that creates unexpected realism on the manuscript leaf.
Dante was puzzled, thinking that they had made a volte-face and returned to Hell. The narrative representation of this infernal topography is something I always come back to in awe and fascination. In Henry Cary’s translation: (emphasis is mine)
Turn’d round his head where his feet stood before,
And grappled at the fell as one who mounts;
That into Hell methought we turn’d again.
“Expect that by such stairs as these,” thus spake
The teacher, panting like a man forespent,
“We must depart from evil so extreme:”
Then at a rocky opening issued forth,
And placed me on the brink to sit, next join’d
With wary step my side. I raised mine eyes,
Believing that I Lucifer should see
Where he was lately left, but saw him now
With legs help upward. Let the grosser sort,
Who see not what the point was I had past,
Bethink them if sore toil oppress’d me then.
“Arise,” my master cried, “upon thy feet.
The way is long, and much uncouth the road;
And now within one hour and a half of noon
The sun returns.” It was no palace-hall
Lofty and luminous wherein we stood,
But natural dungeon where ill-footing was
And scant supply of light. “Ere from the abyss
I separate,” thus when risen I began:
“My guide! vouchsafe few words to set me free
From error’s thraldom. Where is now the ice?
How standeth he in posture thus reversed?
And how from eve to morn in space so brief
Hath the sun made his transit?” He in few
Thus answering spake: “Thou deemest thou art still
On the other side the centre, where I grasp’d
The abhorred worm that boreth through the world.
Thou wast on the other side, so long as I
Descended; when I turn’d, thou didst o’erpass
That point, to which from every part is dragg’d
All heavy substance. Thou art now arrived
Under the hemisphere opposed to that,
Which the great continent doth overspread,
And underneath whose canopy expired
The Man, that was born sinless and so lived.
Thy feet are planted on the smallest sphere,
Whose other aspect is Judecca. Morn
Here rises, when there evening sets: and he,
Whose shaggy pile we scaled, yet standeth fix’d,
As at the first. On this part he fell down
From Heaven; and th’ earth here prominent before,
Through fear of him did veil her with the sea,
And to our hemisphere retired. Perchance,
To shun him, was the vacant space left here,
By what of firm land on this side appears,
That sprang aloof.”
biblonia 
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