From here Eliot switches abruptly to a more prosaic mode, introducing Madame Sosostris, a "famous clairvoyante" alluded to in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. This fortune-teller is known across Europe for her skills with Tarot cards. The narrator remembers meeting her when she had "a bad cold." At that meeting she displayed to him the card of the drowned Phoenician Sailor: "Here, said she, is your card." Next comes "Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks," and then "the man with three staves," "the Wheel," and "the one-eyed merchant." It should be noted that only the man with three staves and the wheel are actual Tarot cards; Belladonna is often associated with da Vinci's "Madonna of the Rocks," and the one-eyed merchant is, as far as we can tell, an invention of Eliot's. Finally, Sosostris encounters a blank card representing something the one-eyed merchant is carrying on his back - something she is apparently "forbidden to see". She is likewise unable to find the Hanged Man among the cards she displays; from this she concludes that the narrator should "fear death by water". Sosostris also sees a vision of a mass of people "walking round in a ring." Her meeting with the narrator concludes when she asks him to tell Mrs. Equitone, if he sees her, that Sosostris will bring the horoscope herself.

The final scene of this first section of "The Waste Land" begins with the image of an "Unreal City" linked to Baudelaire's "fourmillante cite," in which a crowd of people - perhaps the same crowd Sosostris' vision - flows over London Bridge while a "brown fog" hangs like a cloud. Eliot twice quotes Dante in describing this phantasmagoric scene: "I had not thought death had undone so many" (from Canto 3 of the Inferno); "Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled" (from Canto 4). The first quote refers to the area just inside the Gates of Hell; the second refers to Limbo, the first circle of Hell.

Each member of the crowd keeps his eyes on his feet; the mass of men flow up a hill and down King William Street, in the financial district of London, beside the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth. The narrator sees a man he recognizes named Stetson. He cries out to him, and it appears that the two men fought together in a war. Logic would suggest World War I, but the narrator refers to Mylae, a battle that took place during the First Punic War. He then asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted last year in his garden has begun to sprout. Finally, Eliot quotes Webster and Baudelaire, back to back, ending the address to Stetson in French: "hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!".

Borrowing from Baudelaire's visions of Paris, Eliot paints a portrait of London as a haunted (or haunting) specter, where the only sound is "dead". When the narrator sees Stetson, we return to the prospect of history. World War I is replaced by the Punic War; with this choice, Eliot seems to be showing all wars are the same, just as he suggests that all men are the same in thescene's final line: "You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!": "Hypocrite reader! - my likeness - my brother!" We are all Stetson; Eliot is speaking directly to us. Individual faces come into the ill-defined mass of humanity as the burial procession inexorably proceeds.