263. While I was meditating on these things, an angel from the Lord said
to me, "You shall presently see, and be convinced by ocular
demonstration, what is the nature and quality of that infernal love."
Then suddenly the earth opened on the left, and I saw a devil ascending
from hell, with a square cap on his head let down over his forehead even
to his eyes: his face was full of pimples as of a burning fever, his
eyes fierce and firy, his breast swelling immensely; from his mouth he
belched smoke like a furnace, his loins seemed all in a blaze, instead
of feet he had bony ankles without flesh, and from his body exhaled a
stinking and filthy heat. On seeing him I was alarmed, and cried out,
"Approach no nearer; tell me, whence are you?" He replied in a hoarse
tone of voice, "I am from below, where I am with two hundred in the most
supereminent of all societies. We are all emperors of emperors, king of
kings, dukes of dukes, and princes of princes; no one in our society is
barely an emperor, a king, a duke, or a prince. We sit there on thrones
of thrones, and despatch thence mandates through the whole world and
beyond it.
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