What are these great mountains of misery?

In his wanderings, Spirit Franchezzo describes his arrival at a vast range of mountains whose bleak summits tower into the night sky overhead. 

There are no regular pathways at the foot of these great dark mountains, and its rocks are very steep. 

After a toilsome ascent of one of the lower ranges of these mountains, Spirit Franchezzo sees on either side of him vast deep chasms in the rocks, gloomy precipices and awful-looking black pits. 

Spirit Franchezzo and his companion make a rope from some of the great rank, withered-looking weeds and grass that grow in small crevices of these otherwise barren rocks, and they attempt to rescue the spirit-lives that are down in these depths of misery.

These spirit-livess have been caught in their own traps and pitfalls until that time when repentance, and a desire to atone should draw rescuers to help and free them from the prisons they have themselves made.  

Many are imprisoned in these mountains who may not yet be helped out by any, for they would only be a danger to others were they free. 

The ruin and evil they would shed around them make their longer imprisonment a necessity.  

Yet their prisons are of their own creating, for these great mountains of misery are the outcome and product of their earthly lives, and these precipices are the spiritual counterparts of those precipices of despair over which they have driven their unhappy victims.

It is not until their hearts soften, and they learn to long for liberty that they may do good instead of evil―only then will their prisons be opened and they will be drawn forth from the living death in which their own frightful cruelties to others have entombed them.