The Abysmal opens by going further down. Legge's translation describes the subject in the double defile entering a cavern within it, and gives evil, while the commentary on the image observes that he has lost his way. The hexagram is the trigram of water and peril set on top of itself, so danger here is not an incident but a condition already doubled before the first line speaks. What this line adds is depth. A pit is bad, and a cavern opening off the floor of a pit is where somebody stops being able to see the sky at all.
The stroke is yielding in an odd place, which the ordinary rule counts as incorrect, and it stands at the very bottom of the lower trigram Kan with nothing firm beneath it. In the trigram itself the single strong line lies in the middle, held between two soft ones, which is the classical picture of a firm heart inside a yielding situation. This line is not that strong stroke. It is the soft ground under it, and the reading is that the position has no resource of its own and has not yet reached the one line that does.
The Great Symbolism reads the doubled trigram as water flowing on without pause, and draws from it the counsel that a person maintain constancy of heart and integrity of conduct and go on with the work of teaching. None of that has begun here. This opening line describes the entry into difficulty made before any of it is in place, which is why the verdict comes without qualification.