This chapter's epigraph comes from the famous poem "The Ballad of the Unconquered Urchin" by Victor Hugo. It is a poem about a man who is overcome with fear of thunder and is unable to escape. The poem tells the story of a man trapped in a cliff for 60 years. The man who breaks the formation and lets the men escape is an idiot, but the man is not an expert in the natural world. He must have had his purpose in breaking the formation, but he wouldn't have thought of it as having had a purpose. The men decide to make a new formation to catch Gu Santong.