Suddenly I was ashamed of myself for asking such a question, and I was struck by Su-ling’s generosity in having talked to me as freely as she had of her circumstances. How far we had come in openness toward each other! I felt tender toward her; I wanted to show this surprising girl that I was not entirely foreign to her. But I thought of the head tracker and of what I had seen in her eyes the day before, after the towline had snagged underwater. I was, I must say, in a melancholy state of mind. I remember the strange misty rain still floating in the air outside. “Ayah!…Ayah!…” Those sad cries!

—

AT ABOUT this point (I remember that it was just before we reached the first of the rapids) the head tracker one noontime gave me reason to wish, and the wish soon became lively, that we could make a better pace.

Our progress was unusually slow, for there were strong winds against us. The owner told me, as I could have observed for myself, that though storms might veer with the compass in the sky overhead, only two kinds of wind ever blew on the surface of the water in the great Yangtze gorges; there were “up-wind” and “down-wind” and no other winds, and we were getting more than our share of the contrary one. A queer thing I did observe in certain deeps of the gorges was this: However strong the gale and however open the reach, no waves ever formed on the surface in those places. All the water there had an ugly slickness, laced with froth, and the wind slid over it as if it were molten metal.

The effect of these slick places was indescribably eerie; it was as strange as if one were to stand on a hill and feel wind on his face but not on his hands.

This smoothness of the water, together with the awesome cliffs of the gorges, gave certain passages of the channel on which we rode a supernatural and malevolent atmosphere, at least in my mind.