We begin and end with new revelations:

First, we find out that the biologist has a personal connection to the eleventh expedition, that her late husband was a member of it. A medic, or possibly “the medic,” before returning to his life outside of Area X changed. It seems as if he’s been lobotomized in a way, pieces of his previous psyche locked away from him, no longer passionate nor playful but now mournful of something he can’t express. The biologist says she hasn’t mentioned this up to yet because she wants us (the reader) to think of her has a “credible, objective witness,” but can we trust her if we know that she’s aware of us (the reader) and willing to keep things from us?

Next we have the body of the anthropologist. It seems like the psychologist used hypnosis to bring her down in the middle of the night and influenced her to attempt to take a sample from the creature in the Tower, what the biologist later terms the Crawler. The Crawler appears to have turned on the anthropologist and crushed her against the wall, leaving parts of her burnt and melted.

The pictures of the writing on the wall in the tower come out blurry and unreadable. The biologist speculates it’s because the tower is a living thing and moving in subtle ways, but given the description of the anthropologists body, the blurriness of the writing, and the fact that the members of the eleventh expedition quickly contracted cancer upon returning, it seems like there may be some kind of cosmic radiation at play here.

I want to note the sample of the Crawler apparently being brain matter, though I don’t remember if that’s paid off later or not.

The biologist and the surveyor return to the surface to find the psychologist missing. The surveyor wants to head back to the border and extract, if such a thing is even possible. The biologist wants to go on. They end up splitting up, leaving the biologist alone now.

The biologist finds the village, now dilapidated. Inside she finds moss in the shapes of people. Are these the previous residents now replaced with moss statues? She later sees a pair of dolphins jump out of the water and one of them appears to have a human eye that stares at her with a strange intelligence, similar to the boar from the trip to base camp before. Are the boar and the dolphin former people now transformed by Area X?

Finally we come to the light house. The biologist saw a light in the lighthouse window while keeping watch, and assumes the psychologist must be waiting there in ambush, but she does not find the psychologist yet. She does find what appears to be the scene of a siege, the doors blown open, bullet holes in makeshift barricades, and glass and razor wire lining the outside. Who were the aggressors here? Searching for the psychologist, the biologist finds the psychologist’s camp in a trap door, as well as a mountain of journals similar to the one she’s keeping for us. She realizes that there are far too many journals for only twelve expeditions. How many expeditions have been lost in Area X?

One of the themes I picked up on this time was the idea of language as a means of control. The psychologist literally using spoken words to control the expedition, the writing creature in the tower bringing life through the written word, the Southern Reach stripping the expeditioners of their names. We haven’t gotten to my favorite line yet, but thinking about language as a means of colonization.

For next week try to get through the next 50ish pages. In my copy there’s a break right after “If I could have reached my gun…”