The fifth bolgia: a lake of boiling pitch, black and opaque. The barrators (corrupt public officials who sold their offices and decisions) are submerged in it, invisible, surfacing only to be hooked back under by the demons — the Malebranche, the Evil Claws — who patrol the banks with grappling hooks. A demon comes flying across the cliff, a sinner of Lucca draped over his shoulder like a workman carrying a beam, and flings the shade into the pitch. Other demons leap for the soul with their hooks; Virgil tells Dante to hide behind a rock and goes ahead to negotiate.
The leader of this squad of Malebranche — Malacoda, Evil Tail — learns from Virgil that they are on a divinely commissioned journey and cannot be obstructed. He calls off his demons and offers an escort to the next bridge, which he claims is intact (it is not — the bridges were broken in the earthquake of the Crucifixion). The squad of ten demons lines up with comic military ceremony: their chief gives the signal by breaking wind like a trumpet blast. The scene is deliberately grotesque and comic — a parody of military order, of civic authority, of bureaucratic process, with flatulence as the commanding gesture. Dante is appropriately terrified.