The Keeper at the Gate

more than two hours after sunset at the end of his first long day in Purgatory, exhausted by the events and emotions described in Chapter 1, Dante the pilgrim falls asleep in the Valley of the Princes in the company of Virgil, Sordello, Nino Visconti and Currado Malaspina. Nearly twelve hours later he wakes in a state of alarm. He has been dreaming that he was seized by an eagle who carried him up – like Ganymede before him – into the fiery region of the sky, where he and the eagle seemed to burst into flames; and it is the ‘imagined blaze’ that wakens the dreamer.

His fear and bewilderment are increased as he finds himself in a strange place accompanied only by Virgil. But his mentor is quick to reassure and explain. The dream had reflected real events, for, while he was sleeping, Dante had in fact been carried high up the mountain by St Lucy. The imaginato incendio was his veiled perception of her radiance, or perhaps simply a consequence of the sun's rays falling on his eyelids, since it is now more than two hours after sunrise. Dante has been brought from the lower slopes to Purgatory itself; and Virgil urges him to look at the rocky cliff that surrounds it, and to see the entrance at a point where there is a break in its wall: