Purgatorio: Canto X
When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight,
Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?
We mounted upward through a rifted rock,
Which undulated to this side and that,
Even as a wave receding and advancing.
"Here it behoves us use a little art,"
Began my Leader, "to adapt ourselves
Now here, now there, to the receding side."
And this our footsteps so infrequent made,
That sooner had the moon's decreasing disk
Regained its bed to sink again to rest,
Than we were forth from out that needle's eye;
But when we free and in the open were,
There where the mountain backward piles itself,
When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight,
Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?
We mounted upward through a rifted rock,
Which undulated to this side and that,
Even as a wave receding and advancing.
"Here it behoves us use a little art,"
Began my Leader, "to adapt ourselves
Now here, now there, to the receding side."
And this our footsteps so infrequent made,
That sooner had the moon's decreasing disk
Regained its bed to sink again to rest,
Than we were forth from out that needle's eye;
But when we free and in the open were,
There where the mountain backward piles itself,
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