The view from the glassless windows was another of the astounding, shock-like spectacles the Great River grants a stranger at every new turning. Off to the left were the ghastly riven mountains at the head of Ox-Liver Horse-Lungs Gorge, and at the right the vast, gloomy vee of the Gorge of the Military Code and Precious Blade; and between these amazing extremes, before us, as in a great bright amphitheater of a round valley, was the center of drama, the river in a frenzy.

We were looking down on the uppermost of the three rapids of Hsintan. This was made by a huge fan-shaped moraine of rocks lying athwart the river and forming, at that season of the year, a kind of low dam, in which there were several gapways, like sluices, and through these openings the water poured, that day, with terrible haste.

Waiting only for me to pay formal compliments to this staggering outlook, the cook excused himself, to return, he said, to the pack of walking rags in the street, and to go forward with them to the loading rock near the river gauge by the still water above the race.

These rapids, said Su-ling, standing at the window, had mainly been formed by a landslide in the second year of the reign of the Emperor Chia Ching of the Ming dynasty. Having been made so recently—only about three centuries ago—they were known, she said, as the New Rapids.

As we watched, three down-bound junks ran the rapids, and on the foredeck of each a river pilot stood like a black enormous bird on wide-planted feet, with arms raised and hands outspread, his huge sleeves and long gown flapping wildly in the turbulent air, but his head steady on his ramrod neck, transmitting signals to the frantic oarsmen by the lift of a finger on one hand, the folding of two fingers on the other hand, and so by sure economical movements of tiny sinews controlling the huge, awkward vessels in the fearfully entangling waters. No wonder they were such dominant, confident men as we had seen in the tearoom!

When I saw the first of them on deck there, I could not help thinking of our Old Big’s expressions of contempt for all pilots on the Great River, and of his tale of his wreck, and of his boast that he would climb Hsintan without a pilot, with Old Pebble in charge.

But, Su-ling said, why had I not seen the surprising thing in this room in the Scholar’s eating place?

I turned toward the girl to see what she meant, and she swept a leaf-like hand pointing at the walls. I looked round and saw that the room was entirely papered with pages from English-language textbooks, mostly of arithmetic and rhetoric. I came to life and laughed.