[plates 17-20]
An angel came to me and said: 'O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O
dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for
thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career. 'I said:
'Perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will
contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most
desirable. ' So he took me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into the
church vault. At the end of which was a mill: thro' the mill we went, and
came to a cave: down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a
void boundless as a nether sky appear'd beneath us.& we held by the roots
of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: 'If you please we will
commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also: if
you will not, I will? ' But he answered: 'Do not presume, o young-man, but
as we here remain, behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darkness
passes away. ' So I remain'd with him, sitting in a twisted root of an
oak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward into
the deep. By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a
burning city; beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but
shinning; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders,
crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite
deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption;& the
air was full of them,& seem'd composed of them: these are devils, and are
called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal
lot? He said: 'Between the black & white spiders' but now, from between
the black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro' the
deep. Black'ning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a
sea,& rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen
but a black tempest, till looking ea
