I laughed, and she looked at me in amazement and fear. It was, then, just another stupid superstition of the river. Oh, I laughed! What nonsense! It did not require a degree from a technological institute to tell that there could be no possible physical connection, no gyroscopic relationship, between the poise of the spine and ribs of a tiny pan fish and that of an eighty-ton junk. What utter nonsense!…

Yet how many times, as we advanced farther up the river, and as the waters rose and rose and rose, did I think of that upset fish, and of the rabid head tracker, and of the gurgling offensive boy, and of the disconcerting wisdom of some “backward” Chinese, and of fate and luck, and of the absurdity of many of my own long-cherished hopes? Yes, how often—long before we reached Wind-Box Gorge?

Part Two: The Rapids

For several miles, as we approached the first of the bad rapids, at Hsintan, I was able to hear the dull roar of the water ahead, and I watched the owner become progressively keyed up; he walked the decks restlessly, his demeanor one of tight-stretched calm.

Many times the Old Big consulted the head tracker, as to which bank would be safer for the ascent at this time of year and at this level of water. He decided finally to use the north bank, on our right as we ascended. Soon afterward he disappeared in his cabin, where I heard him coughing often.

Out on the conning deck, that afternoon, Su-ling schooled me in more myths of the Great River, and in passing, to elaborate some point she was making about danger, she mentioned in her quiet murmur the time when her husband had lost his junk; it had been before she had married him, she said.

Her last sentence was scarce completed when the owner came bursting out of the cabin, buttoning a cotton gown in a hurry, offering to tell me about the accident.

So quietly had Su-ling been speaking that I concluded the Old Big must audit her instruction of me with an ear hard applied to a crack in the cabin door.

The owner squatted in the Chinese way and began. It had been, he said, at Kungling Rapids, just below Ox-Liver Horse-Lungs Gorge, a passage that is dangerous only at extreme low water. The whole disaster was the fault of a local rapids pilot. The Old Big spat over the rail, and a grimace seized his face, as if he were overexerting himself by hauling on a halyard or shoving on a capstan bar; he looked as if the mere thought of a river pilot made every agonized muscle in his body go tense.