Virgil describes Geryon while Dante goes to look at the usurers who crouch on the burning sand at the cliff's edge — unable even here to stop fingering the purses hanging from their necks, each one blazoned with a heraldic device identifying their family. They are barely human: they squint at Dante and then turn back to their purses, unable to hold attention to anything else. Dante recognizes the Gianfigliazzi and Obriachi devices; he won't name the Paduan among them who jeers and sticks out his tongue. The contrapasso is economic: they made their wealth from money without working; here they work endlessly for nothing, tending pouches that are empty of everything except the emblem of their earthly identity.
Dante climbs onto Geryon's back, behind Virgil. The descent is one of the most viscerally terrifying passages in the poem: Geryon wheels and descends in great circles into the darkness, and Dante, riding the neck of a monster into the abyss, feels what Phaethon felt when he lost the reins of the sun's chariot, what Icarus felt as the wax softened. The air roars. The void yawns below. He can only close his eyes and hold on. They land. Geryon launches himself away the moment they step off, like an arrow leaving a bow.