Hi, I was recently reading through Dante's Inferno, and in the last canto XXXIV, after Dante and Virgil encounter the Beast, they past though the inferno into the light of a new dawn. "Rise up," the Master said, "upon thy feet; The way is long, and difficult the road, And now the sun to middle-tierce returns." It was not any palace corridor There where we were, but dungeon natural, With floor uneven and unease of light. "Ere from the abyss I tear myself away, My Master," said I when I had arisen, "To draw me from an error speak a little; Where is the ice? and how is this one fixed Thus upside down? and how in such short time From eve to morn has the sun made his transit?" And he to me: "Thou still imaginest Thou art beyond the centre, where I grasped The hair of the fell worm, who mines the world. That side thou wast, so long as I descended; When round I turned me, thou didst pass the point To which things heavy draw from every side, And now beneath the hemisphere art come Opposite that which overhangs the vast Dry-land, and 'neath whose cope was put to death The Man who without sin was born and lived. Thou hast thy feet upon the little sphere Which makes the other face of the Judecca. Here it is morn when it is evening there; And he who with his hair a stairway made us Still fixed remaineth as he was before. Upon this side he fell down out of heaven; And all the land, that whilom here emerged, For fear of him made of the sea a veil, And came to our hemisphere; and peradventure To flee from him, what on this side appears Left the place vacant here, and back recoiled." A place there is below, from Beelzebub As far receding as the tomb extends, Which not by sight is known, but by the sound Of a small rivulet, that there descendeth Through chasm within the stone, which it has gnawed With course that winds about and slightly falls. The Guide and I into that hidden road Now entered, to return to the bright world; And without care of having any rest We mounted up, he first and I the second, Till I beheld through a round aperture Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear; Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars. The gravity reversal of the Inferno reminded me of Corran's return from his sortof fake death inthe Lusankya. "Beyond it lay a cylindrical corridor roughly three meters in diameter. A red stripe of tiles spiraled down through it, starting at the center of Corran's side and ending up on the ceiling fifteen feet away. [...] Waves of dizziness slammed through Corran as he tried to walk the corridor straight through. He finally lost his balance and fell, ending up with his spine pressed to the red line about a meter into the corridor. [...] Of course! This has to be a transitional corridor Gravity is directly oriented on the red strip. It takes you from upside-down to rightside-up. With reason thus injected back into his world, Corran scrambled to his feet [...]. Any thoughts? Disagreements? Agreements? I thought I might just share this observation. I do know that Traitor has also been compared to Dante's Inferno, what with Jacen descending (dying sortof) and being reborn while guided by a character called Vergere (Virgil).
This is a great find! I definitely think Stackpole may have gotten inspiration from this as Corran is seen as dead throughout the whole novel. Now that you mention it, there is a movie called As Above, So Below. It came out a couple years ago, a horror movie set in the Parisian Catacombs and there is a similar aspect in that. I highly recommend As Above, So Below, I thought it was a great movie and I don't really enjoy horror all that much.
What lies at the deepest level of Dante's Hell is Satan's top half; beneath that, his shaggy butt plugging up a frozen hole. It lacks the poetry of Dante, but... ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO POSTETH THREADS
