Yet the slickness was easy enough to explain; the Yangtze’s waters, I could see, moved not only seawards but also up and around and down, stirred by rocks beneath, and none of the water was ever on the surface long enough to be moved by mere wind. It fought stone, not the plastic sky. It was sheer power, and should have lifted the heart of a young engineer—but instead the sight of it made me uneasy. I began to be exaggeratedly sensitive to the creaking, twisting, shrugging, and shivering of our big junk. There was a freakishness about the power of the Great River that I did not like. We would see sudden eddies of apparently still water right in midstream, with tons of fury all around. Here and there whirlpools traveled upstream! Su-ling told me one day of a shallow near Fengtu, where, one winter at low water, centuries ago, a famous warrior placed eight rows of cairns of small stones and pebbles along the river bed, to bring about some occult military result; they were called the Stones of the Strategy of Eight Ranks. “When the spring rains fall,” Su-ling said with her eyes widened, “and when the snows on the mountains have melted, and the floods come down, big trees and rocks are carried down with the current a thousand miles. The water is high on the cliffs and the noise of the pebbles rolling on the bottom is like thunder. But for hundreds of years, when the waters subsided, the small piles of stones were still there. Then one year they went away.”

It seemed one could not tell what this mountain-slicing river would do.

I had known in theory how savage the river could be. In its angriest year, since records had been kept, the river had risen no less than two hundred and seventy-five feet in one of the gorges in a few weeks of springtime. In an ordinary spring, it would rise easily half that much….But only now, when Su-ling talked this way and I saw how very far the flood line was above the masthead of our junk, did the threat of the Great River’s potential power come home to me.

I had been making friends with the cook. This was easy. I simply told him the truth—that his food was good.