It’s dark here, as many have remarked. ‘Dark Death’ they used to say. ‘The gloomy halls of Hades’, and so forth. Well, yes, it is dark, but there are advantages—for instance, if you see someone you’d rather not speak to you can always pretend you haven’t recognised them.

There are of course the fields of asphodel. Yoo can walk around in them if you want. It’s brighter there, and a certain amount of vapid dancing goes on, though the region sounds better than it is. The fields of asphodel has a poetic lilt to it. But just consider. Asphodel, asphodel, asphodel. Pretty enough white flowers, but a person gets tired them after a while. It would have been better to supply some variety—an assortment of colours, a few winding paths and vistas and stone benches and fountains. I would have preferred a few hyacinths at least, and would a sprinkling of crocuses have been too much to expect? Though we never get spring here, or any other seasons. You do have to wonder who designed the place.

Have I mentioned the fact that there’s nothing to eat except asphodel?

But I shouldn’t complain.

The darker grottoes are more interesting—the conversation there is better, if you can find a minor rascal of some sort—a pickpocket, a stockbroker, a small-time pimp. Like a lot of goody-goody girls, I was always secretly attracted to men of that kind.

I don’t frequent the really deep levels much, though. That’s where the punishments are dealt out to the truly villainous, those who were not sufficiently punished while alive. It’s hard to put up with the screams. The torture is mental torture, however, since we don’t have bodies any more. What the gods really like is to conjure up banquets—big platters of meat, heaps of bread, bunches of grapes—and then snatch them away. Making people roll heavy stones up steep hills is another of their favourite jests. I sometimes have a yen to go down there: it might help me to remember what it was like to have real hunger, what it was like to have real fatigue.