I thought of him as some kind of glistening crustacean down in that turbulence. He almost seemed to belong underwater; he was a riverman. The water slid along. I smelled boiling vegetable oil. The trackers leaned forward on their halters. The drum kept up a steady slow beat, seeming to say: wait, wait, wait, wait, wait….What was it like in those depths, for a pebble on the bottom? I was not anxious. A very long time seemed to pass. I felt the gracious warmth of the sun on my face. I was close to Su-ling. For an instant I saw a flashing shiny something at: the edge of a patch of froth. The junk shuddered. The bow steersman shrieked and with a groan the men on the big sweep shoved it hard over, and the nose of the junk swung out into the stream, and the tow rope broke water with a long, sighing swish, and Old Pebble was lifted waist-high out of the water, hanging from the bamboo line; he swung along it hand over hand to the rocky beach, shouting a wild exultant melody. I felt inexpressibly happy. The cook brought a pot of tea aft to us. I looked at the magical landscape. The naked man on the rocks, sweeping the water off his skin with the flats of his hands, was shouting abuse at the bow steersman; the cook cried out from beside us, with a beaming face, that the head tracker was an unmentionable horror of a turtle. I glanced at Su-ling. Her eyes were on me, and she smiled and shrugged, as if, it seemed, to acknowledge grudgingly the marvelousness of human existence.

Was ever anyone so happy as I at that moment?

I was young then, and the world I lived in was small and easy.

I looked again at Su-ling. She was gazing at the shore. The head tracker was already in his clothes and back on the line and was singing a tragic song. And I saw in Su-ling’s eyes unmistakable signs that she loved him.

—

PROBABLY this discovery should not have surprised me. What did surprise me most was my own reaction to it.

I remember that the following day was rainy. The rain was misty and vague, yet penetrating and bothersome, like the murmuring of a restless crowd all around when one is caught in it and cannot move. The drizzle did not seem to fall but rather to hang about us, as if the gorge had been filled to the brim with a cool and almost weightless liquid.

I lay melancholy under the great mat arch of the fore cabinway, waiting with fierce concentration for the door of the owner’s cabin, at the very stern, to open, whence, I imagined, Su-ling would finally emerge and come to tell me stories of the river.