Inferno (Page 85)

I’m not sure I do either. Langdon studied the text that had materialized beneath the seven Ps—a single word emblazoned across the inside of Dante’s forehead.

possessed

“As in … possessed by the devil?” Sienna asked.

Possibly. Langdon turned his gaze overhead to the mosaic of Satan consuming the wretched souls who had never been able to purge themselves of sin. Dante … possessed? It didn’t seem to make much sense.

“There’s got to be more,” Sienna contended, taking the mask from Langdon’s hands and studying it more closely. After a moment she began nodding. “Yes, look at the ends of the word … there’s more text on either side.”

Langdon looked again, now seeing the faint shadow of additional text showing through the moist gesso at either end of the word possessed.

Eagerly, Sienna grabbed the cloth and continued dabbing around the word until more text materialized, written on a gentle curve.

O you possessed of sturdy intellect

Langdon let out a low whistle. “ ‘O, you possessed of sturdy intellect … observe the teachings hidden here … beneath the veil of verses so obscure.’ ”

Sienna stared at him. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s taken from one of the most famous stanzas of Dante’s Inferno,” Langdon said excitedly. “It’s Dante urging his smartest readers to seek the wisdom hidden within his cryptic verse.”

Langdon often cited this exact line when teaching literary symbolism; the line was as close an example as existed to an author waving his arms wildly and shouting: “Hey, readers! There is a symbolic double meaning here!”

Sienna began rubbing the back of the mask, more vigorously now.

“Careful with that!” Langdon urged.

“You’re right,” Sienna announced, zealously wiping away gesso. “The rest of Dante’s quote is here—just as you recalled it.” She paused to dip the cloth back in the font and rinse it out.

Langdon looked on in dismay as the water in the baptismal font turned cloudy with dissolved gesso. Our apologies to San Giovanni, he thought, uneasy that this sacred font was being used as a sink.

When Sienna raised the cloth from the water, it was dripping. She barely wrung it out before placing the soggy cloth in the center of the mask and swishing it around as if she were cleaning a soup bowl.

“Sienna!” Langdon admonished. “That’s an ancient—”

“The whole back side has text!” she announced as she scoured the inside of the mask. “And it’s written in …” She paused, cocking her head to the left and rotating the mask to the right, as if trying to read sideways.

“Written in what?” Langdon demanded, unable to see.

Sienna finished cleaning the mask and dried it off with a fresh cloth. Then she set it down in front of him so they could both study the result.

When Langdon saw the inside of the mask, he did a double take. The entire concave surface was covered in text, what had to be nearly a hundred words. Beginning at the top with the line O you possessed of sturdy intellect, the text continued in a single, unbroken line … curling down the right side of the mask to the bottom, where it turned upside down and continued back across the bottom, returning up the left side of the mask to the beginning, where it repeated a similar path in a slightly smaller loop.

The path of the text was eerily reminiscent of Mount Purgatory’s spiraling pathway to paradise. The symbologist in Langdon instantly identified the precise spiral. Symmetrical clockwise Archimedean. He had also noted that the number of revolutions from the first word, O, to the final period in the center was a familiar number.

Nine.

Barely breathing, Langdon turned the mask in slow circles, reading the text as it curled ever inward around the concave bowl, funneling toward the center.

“The first stanza is Dante, almost verbatim,” Langdon said. “ ‘O you possessed of sturdy intellect, observe the teaching that is hidden here … beneath the veil of verses so obscure.’ ”

“And the rest?” Sienna pressed.

Langdon shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s written in a similar verse pattern, but I don’t recognize the text as Dante’s. It looks like someone is imitating his style.”

“Zobrist,” Sienna whispered. “It has to be.”

Langdon nodded. It was as good a guess as any. Zobrist, after all, by altering Botticelli’s Mappa dell’Inferno, had already revealed his proclivity for collaborating with the masters and modifying great works of art to suit his needs.

“The rest of the text is very strange,” Langdon said, again rotating the mask and reading inward. “It talks about … severing the heads from horses … plucking up the bones of the blind.” He skimmed ahead to the final line, which was written in a tight circle at the very center of the mask. He drew a startled breath. “It also mentions ‘bloodred waters.’ ”

Sienna’s eyebrows arched. “Just like your visions of the silver-haired woman?”

Langdon nodded, puzzling over the text. The bloodred waters … of the lagoon that reflects no stars?

“Look,” she whispered, reading over his shoulder and pointing to a single word partway through the spiral. “A specific location.”

Langdon’s eyes found the word, which he had skimmed over on his first pass. It was the name of one of the most spectacular and unique cities in the world. Langdon felt a chill, knowing it also happened to be the city in which Dante Alighieri famously became infected with the deadly disease that killed him.