The sixth line closes the hexagram at the pit itself, the lowest and most literal point of the danger the upper trigram represents, yet the line text turns unexpectedly gentle here: three guests arrive unbidden, and treating them with respect brings a fortunate outcome. Every translation preserves this reversal, since it is the hexagram's final and most pointed lesson, that the trial waited for throughout the previous five lines does not end in disaster but in an encounter that rewards courtesy rather than defense. Legge's rendering keeps the guests unnamed and their arrival unexplained, and later commentary generally reads them as help arriving from an unlooked for quarter precisely because the one at the pit has waited rather than forced the crossing earlier.
Read as the last station in the hexagram's progression from meadow to pit, this line completes the argument that patience sustained to its true end, rather than abandoned partway, converts what looks like the worst position, the very bottom of the danger, into an occasion for hospitality and fortunate help rather than for further struggle. Three is a recurring number in this hexagram's own imagery, echoed again in the neighboring reading of Hexagram 8, Holding Together, where the king's hunt is said to drive game from three sides only, leaving the fourth open, a shared preference in these older line texts for using three to mean a bounded, incomplete totality rather than an exact headcount.