We laughed together. I was animated now, trying very hard to be agreeable. We laughed, and when I had finished my absurd rendering, our eyes met, and hers sparkled, and I guess mine must have, too, and just then a man arrived with some handleless cups and a teapot. We sat down and were gay and easy.

Thus a translation of a translation brought us together, but I can see now that we were still very far apart, farther apart indeed than languages, even though we had laughed together, for our laughter was cruel, as laughter so often is. I was laughing at the awkwardness of a Chinese mind, the translator’s; Su-ling at the awkwardness of a Western mind, mine. And now that I think back, I realize that the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.

—

LATER we stood again at the window, and we saw our junk appear next to the bank off to the left, being tracked into the approach to the lowest rapid.

Su-ling drew in her breath with surprise when she looked at the junk.

“He is going to do it,” she said. “He will be in trouble with the guild.”

Then I saw Old Pebble. He stood on the foredeck in a shiny black gown that had come from long repose in some boat-locker and that was much too big for him, with its sleeves folded back, showing a lining of bright blue silk, and he wore a black skullcap, and he looked like a ridiculous clown. His arms were raised. He stood motionless, perfectly poised, pretending to be a pilot. We could not see his face, but his bearing was one of contempt for the millions of hurly-burly tons of water before him. With the oversize gown flapping in the strong up-wind, even this contempt seemed, like so many of Old Pebble’s moods, to be exaggerated, almost satirized.

Somehow word spread of our owner’s audacity, or madness, and before long the big tearoom on the street side of the Scholar’s Restaurant emptied itself, and the River Guild office across the street was vacated, and all the pilots gathered in their black gowns and black skullcaps on the steep slope between the river and the tracking bund of the uppermost, and most hazardous, of the three rapids of Hsintan, and they stood there chattering like a flock of clerics, evidently hoping for disaster and a chance to laugh at a fool of a junk owner and a head tracker with ideas above his station.