The narrator continues reading Bruno Lacombe's emails to Le Moulin, which she accesses by guessing his wanadoo.fr password after finding his email exposed on a discussion board about Soviet cryptozoologist Boris Nevsky. Bruno muses on Prometheus and the Greek myth of fire, suggesting that Neanderthal (Thal) was the man of grace, while H. sapiens was a man without qualities who substituted violence for an inner emptiness.

The narrator reflects on Bruno's relationship to technology. Born in 1937 and not enmeshed in modern digital harnesses like the younger Le Moulin members, his fumbles with email, 24-point font, and accidental italics signal a freedom from the technological enslavement that grips others, even as they betray an old man's struggle with the medium.

Bruno describes himself as a crudivore who nonetheless keeps a small hearth, repeating that "only a fool makes a large fire." The narrator interprets this as a coded warning to Pascal and the group to stay subtle and discreet, perhaps regarding Tayssac. Bruno also explains how properly placed cave fires channel smoke upward, leaving the lower air breathable for sleeping, eating, and thinking.

Bruno frames fire as mystical because it enabled Neanderthals to sleep long, safe stretches, and sleep, he claims, is the engine of thought, dreams, and imagination. He practices twelve-hour sleep as a discipline, calling it revolutionary time travel. Imagination, sleep, and dreaming form a single braid leading to an earthly paradise. The narrator can only picture the braid as a rope, unable to see what it leads to.