Content Warning: The source material and this section of the guide contain references to suicidal ideation. The source material uses an outdated, offensive term to refer to Roma people. This language has been preserved only in quotation.

At the very beginning, the unnamed narrator announces the surprising arrival of summer. The intense heat, however, is less troubling to him than the sudden arrival of unknown visitors, who wake him up by playing a phonograph. He escapes down the ravine to avoid detection and watches them, suspicious that they might be part of a plot to capture him.

The narrator is on Villings Island, which an Italian rug merchant in Calcutta recommended to him as a place to hide from the authorities who are pursuing him for an unnamed crime. The rug seller hid him on a ship that docked in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, where a contact gave him a compass and a stolen rowboat. The narrator is experiencing lingering exhaustion from the oppressive heat and sun. The Italian told him that a group of white men came to the island in 1924 to build a chapel, museum, and swimming pool, but they abandoned it. No one has visited since because a Japanese cruiser found a ship that had docked there, and all the crew were dead.