the door of the prison, and realized he and his were doomed to starve!
Not a word did the prisoners exchange regarding their fate, although
all were aware of the suffering awaiting them. At the end of
twenty-four hours, beholding traces of hunger in the beloved faces of
his children, Ugolino gnawed his fists in pain. One of his grandsons,
interpreting this as a sign of unbearable hunger, then suggested that
he eat one of them, whereupon he realized how needful it was to
exercise self-control if he did not wish to increase the sufferings of
the rest. Ugolino then describes how they daily grew weaker, until his
grandsons died at the end of the fourth day, vainly begging him to
help them. Then his sons passed away, and, groping blindly among the
dead, he lingered on, until, famine becoming more potent than anything
else, he yielded to its demands. Having finished this grewsome tale,
Ugolino continued his feast upon the head of his foe!

"Thus having spoke,
Once more upon the wretched skull his teeth
He fasten'd like a mastiff's 'gainst the bone,
Firm and unyielding."

Dante, passing on, discovers many other victims encased in the ice,
and is so chilled by a glacial breeze that his face muscles stiffen.
He is about to ask Virgil whence this wind proceeds, when one of the
ice-encrusted victims implores him to remove its hard mask from his
face. Promising to do so in return for the man's story, Dante learns
he is a friar who, in order to rid himself of inconvenient kinsmen,
invited them all to dinner, where he suddenly uttered the fatal words
which served as a signal for hidden assassins to despatch them. When
Dante indignantly exclaims the perpetrator of this heinous deed is on
earth, the criminal admits that, although his shadow still lingers