As the narrator walks through the underworld, he muses that poverty is the "original sin" of humankind. He wonders if he should go back to the night shift or not. He fears that he will put himself in danger if he goes. He is worried that the group of four people he saw on the boat the night before are actually a group, and he wonders if they will be able to cross the lake undetected. He also fears that they will not know each other. He notices that the strange noises he heard the last time he was in the underworld have returned. He worries that if this continues, he will get infected with syphilis. He thinks that those strange noises were made by a monster, and that the monster was making the corpse of a young man seem like an unusual human corpse. He speculates that the dead man might have been an "awakened" man.