We arrived at length in Ichang. I went immediately, as I had been told to do, to our consul in that city, and because bandits and revolutionaries were said to be harassing the few flat-bottomed steamboats then trading in the gorges above Ichang, he urged me to go upriver not by steamer but by junk, as he thought I would travel unnoticed that way and would have more leisure for my study. And so with his help I arranged a passage with a thin, gaunt junk owner whose Chinese I could understand quite well, for he was a Szechuan man, from Wanhsien, and the Szechuanese dialect is not too far from pure Mandarin.

I was eager indeed to go aboard his boat.

—

IT WAS the junk’s cook who first colored my whole new view of China.

When I made my deal with the owner, he warned me that he wished to start away early the next morning, and I boarded his vessel, with my bedroll and a single Gladstone bag, just after dawn of the following day.

The boat was a ma-yang-tzǔ, one of the great upriver junks, a hundred and two feet in length over all, nineteen feet in beam, made entirely of the tough cypress of the Wanhsien district, with a turret-built hull divided by strong bulkheads into fourteen cargo compartments, and carrying on deck abaft the mast its living quarters, a big shelter for the crew and a cabin for the owner on the stern: a craft well designed forty centuries ago.

All appeared to be ready. The cargo of cotton bales was in the watertight compartments below the loose-planked decks; the crew was fully hired on; lines were clear and all that was needed was handy.

But at the very moment when the owner gave the order to cast off from our spar moorings in the foul muck at the riverbank, the cook cried out that he had yet to take delivery of a supply of pai-ts’ai, fresh white Chinese cabbage, at the market place. Amid shouts and laughter he jumped from the junk and rushed along the staked-up plank bridge to dry ground, holding in his hand a bag of the owner’s coppers. He was a stocky man, with a clean-shaven head, a round face, black eyes very close together, and skin like buffed candlewax. He glanced back at us, grinning, when he reached the shore, and waved the bag of coppers and made the coins tinkle. He looked a rogue.

I thought the errand would take fifteen minutes. But all the crew, I saw, sat down or lay down, and the men occupied themselves, as if for all the day, with gossip, lice-picking, gambling, and snoozing.

A quarter of an hour passed, and a half, and a whole. I was alert; I kept watching the riverbank and the rows of mat huts that crowded to the verge of the muck at the bank. I grew weary, tensely waiting for the cook.