Set up with a disgusting image of charred human bones, this page opens up some questions about what really exactly was going on with Vévoda and his experiments.

First, however, we see an instance with S and Corbeau trying to lead the group together. If you look back to page 124, you will see that Durand used Corbeau as an alias when checking into a hotel in Prague, the day Valclav supposedly killed himself.  So their must have been some sort of connection between Straka and Durand in some way, assuming S is Straka.  Perhaps Straka, or Valcav as 124 suggests, and Durand led the group of S together, and this was a tribute to her.

Eric hits a very interesting point when he notes the “ambiguous use of bird detail” (158).  We see in the pit “mammalian and avian” charred bones, but this does not seem to have a ton of meaning.  Perhaps there is some idea of cannibalism here as vultures circle above the pit, but they are remaining far away from the bones.  Somebody also had to have burned these humans, and on the previous page, Straka describes the walls as “baked” (157).  Cannibalism could just be a greater expansion of the idea of how humans are hurting each other, which Straka touches on a lot.  When we are denying each other proper working condition, like Straka refers to in the Triangle Shirt Waist fire earlier in the novel, we are doing an injustice to humans, but when we eat each other, that metaphor becomes quite more obvious.

We finish off the page with the image of embedded “squares of honeycomb” in the wall (158).  For more information on this, refer to the next pages analysis, as much more will become clear.