This chapter notes the author's impressions of the intimacies of Sakhalin life. It explains that robbery and theft existed to a high degree, and murder seemed to be too frequent. Inspecting the mines meant being intimate with the conditions of the prisoners with penal labor which ruined a person as people got brutalized and numbed. The chapter also notes that the author met Korsakovsk Post's intelligentsia, whom he had poor impressions of due to the conflicting opinions about the penal laborers. The author's wished to be away from the terrible island where thousands of living people were decomposing, physically and morally.