“All the rapids pilots are turtles and turtle dung,” he said. “Your rapids pilot cannot do things the safe way; he has to find a new and more dangerous course each time he goes through. He wants to show the world something. The rapids are like opium for him: the more he takes, the more he needs. He dreams he is a discoverer, and he looks for new ways, and it is not his junk that hits the rock. Ayah, he is a turtle.”

“But how,” I asked, “could there be a ‘new way’ when Su-ling tells me that junks have hardly changed since the time of Huang-ti, and the river has changed so little?”

“There is a new way every forty years,” the Old Big bitterly said. “It is an old way but it is called new. River pilots wait only for their grandfathers, who know better, to die before they claim they have found a new way.”

“There are many rocks in the river,” Su-ling said, “so there are many ways.”

“Maybe it is worth finding a new way,” I said, thinking of my dam.

“Yes, it is worth it if the junk belongs to someone else,” the owner said.

In Kungling race, the owner said, the classical descending channel for junks is between Big Rock and the reef called Hsitang and, farther down, between the three rocks called the Pearls and the left shore. But here was a rapids pilot—the Old Big spat again—who thought he would find a way between Head Pearl and Second Pearl; he would make some other man’s junk dance among the whirlpools and he would be the man to have found a new way.

The pilot, it seems, had not told the Old Big beforehand that he intended to shoot the flume between the Pearls, and only after the junk had passed the foot of Big Rock, and was making fierce speed, with the trackers all on deck rowing and stamping rhythmically on the planks at a frantic rate to keep steerageway—only then did the pilot indicate by the manipulation of his fingers that the great bow sweep and stern rudder should drive the craft away from the shore; and the owner, standing by the mast, had, he said, believed the pilot had simply made a mistake, and he had rushed forward shouting to those manning the bow sweep to swing it back and fetch the junk into its normal course.

Not knowing whom to obey, the bow sweepers had pushed and pulled against each other, so that the indecisive junk swung into a whirlpool and broached broadside to the current and threw itself on Head Pearl and broke its back.

The junk was lost, and its cargo; twenty-three men drowned; the red lifeboats of the guild below the rapids picked only the pilot out of the water; the owner kept afloat for three long li and perched then on a rock, to be saved at dusk.