Safe inside the secret room, S takes in his surroundings. The room is surprisingly enormous and “the vaulted ceiling is thirty feet high and intricately etched with shapes and images.” On the right of the room is an archway hanging over a flight of stairs that leads to a balcony. Trunks, cabinets and cases surround  the walls which covered with shelves of materials. Fifty to sixty people dressed in kaftans are collectively emptying the shelves and filling the boxes with the materials. Similar to an assembly line in a factory, people are teaming together to empty the shelves, place the materials in the cases and push the cases to the back of the room.

Jen asks a question about Alexandria’s journal entry on birdwatching: “Did you remember to ask Filomela about this?” referring to the names from Prague. Eric responds, “She corresponded with all of them at one point or another. But she still says she never knew which one was Straka.” Eric questions whether Straka is even real or whether he is a “composite made up of everyone from the S- a name they could use for radical work.”

Again, Eric’s note about Filomela coincides to a much later time than the beginning of Jen and Eric’s conversations. Filomela and Eric seem to be in touch frequently. Filomela’s insistent idea that Straka must be a single man rather than an organization of many writers suggests that she may have had romantic feelings for Straka.