The Enemies' Camp

During a part of his present journey, Franchezzo sees the city he is about to visit―

He climbs to the top of a tall tower, which appears to be built of black rocks. 

He is surrounded by a dark midnight sky and heavy smoky atmosphere somewhat like a black fog yet different and not quite so dense since it is possible to see through it. 

Below him lies a wide stretch of dark country. 

Heavy night clouds hang on the horizon.  

A great city lies near to him, a strange mixture of magnificence and ruin, such as characterising all the cities he has seen in this dark land. 

Here and there this darkness is lighted up in some places by a strange phosphorescent light and elsewhere by the lurid flames kindled by the fierce passions of the spiritual inhabitants.

A treeless, blackened waste surrounds this city of sorrow and crime and great masses of dark blood-tinged vapour hang brooding over it. 

Mighty castles, lofty palaces, handsome buildings, all stamped with ruin and decay―all bleared and blotched with the stains of the sinful lives lived within them. 

Crumbling into decay, yet held together by the magnetism of their spiritual inhabitants―buildings that will last while the links woven by their spiritual occupants' earthly lives hold them in this place; and which will crumble into the dust of decay whenever the soul's repentance should sever those links and suffer it to wander free; crumble into decay, however, only to be reconstructed by another sinful soul in the shape into which his earthly life of pleasure should form it. 

Here there is a palace; there beside it, a hovel. 

Even as the lives and ambitions of the indwelling spirits have been interwoven and blended on earth, so are their dwellings constructed here side by side. 

Have you ever thought about how the associates of your earthly life may become that of your spirit? How the ties of magnetism, which are formed on earth, may link your spirit and your fate together in the spirit land so that you can only sever them with great difficulty and much suffering?

Franchezzo sees in these buildings before him the proud patrician's palace, built of his ambitions and disfigured by his crimes, joined to the humble abodes of his slaves and his parasites and panderers of the earth, which have been as surely formed by their desires and disfigured by their crimes; and between which, and his palace, there are the same links of spiritual magnetism as between himself and those who have been the sharers and instruments of his evil ambitions. 

He is no more able to free himself from them and their importunities than they are able to free themselves from his tyranny until a higher and purer desire should awaken in the souls of one set or the other and thus raise them above their present level. 

So it is that they still repeat over again their lives of the earth in hideous mockery of the past, impelled to it by that past, their memories presenting to them over and over again, as in a moving panorama, their past acts and the actors, so that by no plunge into wild excess in that dark land can they escape the grinding of memory's millstones until at length the last lust of sin and wickedness should be ground out of their souls.