Canto XXIV/1 The mention of both snakes and ladders in this Canto and the discussion of transitory things at the mercy of chance and change which opens it, suggested, as life and man's haphazard progress must have suggested to the anonymous deviser of the game, Snakes and Ladders (with which I was so familiar as a child). When I looked in toyshops to find such a board they seemed to have so declined in quality of drawing that I started to look instead in junk shops for a model, eventually finding one in a London hotel on a Sunday at the 'Postcards and Ephemera Fair 1982.' It still seems to be a potent and edifying metaphor, more jumpy, episodic, and therefore more lifelike than the Wheel of Fortune. I adapted this version from the colour scheme of the above-mentioned board and increased the number of snakes, making some of them remove the 'player' from the board altogether. I also changed the proportions to fit my modular format and recast the numbers to make a magic rectangle more Dantesque in its numerological ramifications (numbers run in coherent sequences along all verticals, horizontals and diagonals, both in themselves and in their additions, starting with a row of vertical nines on the left). The snake-pit that Dante describes is hinted at nearer the bottom of the board where only the convolutions of reptiles are present. Thus Volume Three of the original edition opens with a reminder that retribution and reward are part of a fixed system of Fortune and Justice, and that ladders are in short supply. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.