I was watching the trackers. These laborers fascinated me, and I had the habit of sitting by the hour observing them, while they scrambled from rock to rock on the riverbank, straining frightfully at their halters and dividing their heavy work evenly between them; or while they moved slowly, step by chanted step, along a level towing bund; or while they crept lynx-footed along a ledge on the wall of one of the gorges, hauling the clumsy junk against the powerful current. Their work had a long tradition behind it, as the fluted places on obstructing boulders proved, where tow ropes had dragged across the rocks for so many centuries that they had worn grooves—stone filed away by braided bamboo! The trackers, doing the work of animals, sustained their hard hours by listening to antique melodies and fantasies which the head tracker constantly sang as he, too, tugged at the top end of the towline. They marked time for his songs with a repeated unison cry at the moment when all of them together planted each footstep: “Ayah!…Ayah!…” This rhythmic work-cry had an indescribably poignant sound. The head tracker’s formal title as a crewman was Noise Suppressor. With a thread of sweet song he was supposed to suppress the groan-shout that marked each painful step. He sang songs of an incongruous beauty, that were like dreams—of palaces and of roasted doves’ wings and of the daughter of the mist laying her cheek and her love on a prince’s pillow; while they, hauling, protested: “Ayah!…Ayah!…”

Old Pebble’s voice was amazing; its range was as wide as that of the strange songs he sang—from a full-throated bass bellow to a delicate falsetto. The voice sounded the zest of the man, for delight seemed to be his main trait. His senses were obviously all at work, and he seemed to be forever on the search for new feelings, for new things to do, for new ways to lighten the endless work of his fellow men.

In those moments of which I am thinking, I was watching and listening. The cook was monotonously humming; he had been drunk the night before. On the foredeck, the bow steersman, between grunted commands to the dozen men fighting the huge flattened treetrunk of the bow sweep which steered the junk in the twisting currents, had been loudly telling the cook stories of heroic cheaters and frauds among river pilots.

Suddenly the trackers’ drum aboard the boat, just forward of the mast, uttered some kind of warning. I could feel the junk sway sluggishly. I peered over the gunwale. The trackers had halted. The tow rope seemed to be snagged on a rock under the water.

In an instant Old Pebble slipped out of his harness, stripped off his clothes, and plunged into the terrible brown water. He vanished.

“He crawls on the rocks on the bottom,” Su-ling softly said to me.