“Then it was really your fault,” I had the temerity to say to the owner, “for changing the pilot’s order.”

“Why look for a new way when you know the old way has usually been safe?” he asked, and he was disgusted with me and went back into his cabin.

A few minutes later he thrust his head out of the cabin, and the veins stood out on his forehead, and he looked wild and furious. “You!” he said, jerking his face at me. “Listen. We can take our boat through any of the rapids on the river without a rapids pilot. We are going to take our boat through Hsintan without a pilot. Old Pebble knows more than ten river pilots. He’ll take us through. You will see.”

“You’ve been saying that at each of the rapids for years,” Su-ling very softly rebuked him.

The owner ignored his wife and almost spat at me, “You will see.”

All the rest of that day the owner remained in his cabin. We moored late in the evening on the upper edge of a rocky beach a few hundred yards below the last of the three rapids of Hsintan, which lay in a wide, open valley between gorges. On that spit we spent a restless night. Downgoing junkmen, having run the rapids, their tension released, celebrated late and noisily in the temporary mat sheds of wine-venders above our beach; trying to sleep, I heard their occasional shouts, as well as the thin whine of a Chinese two-stringed fiddle. To my ears, which were used to the orderly mathematics of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, this Chinese music sounded like complaints against the moon by a maddened tomcat. Nearby, in the after cabin, I heard a constant nervous cough from the owner. And underlying all, seeming almost to make the stony beach beneath us vibrate, was the rumble of the river in its own restless bed.

—

EARLY in the morning the head tracker and the cook propitiated the river-guarding god.

It was not long after dawn, and the day’s hard work had not begun. The cook, having distributed bowls of rice to the trackers and the specialists, hurried ashore and half-ran with comical waddling steps toward the mat sheds at the top of the spit. Remembering his errand at Ichang, I resigned myself to a wasted day—or rather, tried to contrive good uses for an idle day, for my attitude toward time had somewhat loosened on the river, especially since my watch had stopped. But in a very few minutes the cook reappeared, carrying a flame-red rooster and grinning like a bridegroom.

Everything seemed to be understood. As soon as the cook came aboard with the proud red jealous-eyed bird under his arm, the trackers disposed themselves on their haunches here and there, and conversation, though it did not cease, became subdued.