Above the flood line the path moved through cultivated terraces lined with dusty cypresses, poplars, and peach trees proud with blossoms; once in a while I glanced at the river, which seemed, the farther we moved away from it and above it, increasingly benign and pure, the froth of its faraway anger sparkling under the sun like a billion of the suds of the West I missed so much in those days.

Still, though, the rapids roared.

I heard Su-ling and the cook talking and laughing, and at last she announced that they would take me to what she called the Scholar’s Restaurant—an establishment, she explained, that was run by the grandson of a man who had brought acclaim to the whole province by having passed the imperial examinations in early years and had gone all the way to Peking to become a court scholar; then he had come home and had been a great official—that is to say, a man absolutely without honor. His descendants had honor and no cash; they ran an eating place. I would get a surprise there, she told me.

We walked through the hanging village of Hsintan, high on a bluff above the rapids, through shop-lined alleys that were so precipitous that they were mostly paved with stone stairs. The cook said the whole village had been built from the wreckage of junks that had come to grief in the rapids. A large crowd of gay, scabrous children pressed along beside and behind us, cheering my nose.

The restaurant was an odd heap of bamboo poles, split-bamboo matting, cypress planks, straw-reinforced clay, and a few bricks, and it stood out from the cliff on long bamboo stilts.

The proprietor, who with folded hands and nodding head maintained the manners of a scholar in his family’s tradition, but who had a very dull eye, greeted Su-ling, the cook, and me at the door with a low bow, as if we were ambassadors from a distant kingdom.

He led us first through a large tearoom near the street in which were seated the most prosperous-looking and complacent-seeming collection of men I had seen on the river. They were rapids pilots, Su-ling told me. They wore fine long gowns and black silk skullcaps, and they tucked their hands into their voluminous sleeves, and they seemed to be taciturn, stiff-necked men.

The owner took us to a small private room on the river side, containing nothing but a round table and half a dozen chairs.