Robert Langdon must travel down the earth’s surface into the cisterns of Istanbul where he meets the ‘evil’ which changed” who we are, who we’ve always been, at the most fundamental level” (Brown, 439). The evil that erupted out of the water completely changed the face of humankind in the novel. Now, the plague in Brown’s novel has made one third of the entire human population become infertile. 

Dante traveled to the center of the Earth where he encounters sin and the devil itself. Both of these underground caverns in each of the works have a body of water, let it be  man-made or god-made. At the center of the frozen lake in Dante’s poem, Satan is stuck gnawing at the other sinners. Just as in Brown’s novel, the plague changed the nature of humankind, Satan, in Dante’s poem, also completely changed the nature of humankind.  Satan manages to cause the fall of man by convincing Eve and Adam to eat the apple leading to the original sin for every human born.

 

 

 

By the time both Langdons and Dante return back to the surface of the Earth, both stop and stare up to the skies to reflect upon the horror they saw. In fact the final word of both Dante’s Divine Comedy and of Brown’s novel is “stars”.