WE STARTED up the river at dawn the next day.

I carried over into the journey’s first morning, like an aching muscle strained the day before, the painful knot of impatience that I had built up while waiting for the cook. These Chinese aboard the junk did everything so slowly and carelessly!—and with such infuriating cheerfulness. Though they had begun the noisy work of weighing moorings just as the first incendiary hints of sunrise had lit up the mists around the strange pyramidal hill across from Ichang, it was nearly ten o’clock by my watch before we finally cleared the pack of moored junks on the city’s lap and began to move upstream. I was outraged by the deliberation of the owner. He was setting out on a nearly two-hundred-mile voyage with a cargo worth two hundred taels, perhaps more; surely upstream speed would mean downriver profit for him. Yet he seemed not to care whether he made twenty miles or one in his first day’s progress. Once in a while he would rise up in a fury of shouting at his crew; then he would subside to his tea and his game of “stones”with his young wife, and it seemed that his outbursts were a matter of form, almost of ceremony.

I noticed the owner’s wife more closely than I had the day before, when she had seemed just a rather shabby, though somehow bright and even coarsely pretty young woman of the river. Now I saw that the brightness came from her eyes; when her husband stood up in his formal rampages, her large black-pupiled eyes took in more than his exaggerated presiding gestures and shouting rushes. She looked in the faces of the crew. She saw the men. Her eyes were wide open, figuratively as well as actually, it seemed to me, and they looked wiser than the rest of her young face seemed to warrant.

By mid-morning my irritability, like the mists on the river which were gradually burnt off by the April sun, was dissipated by the all-melting view into the heart of which we were being carried on a fine breeze by our big bamboo-ribbed lugsail. All the way from Shanghai, a thousand miles by river, the terrain had been flat and brown. Now, in a soft spring morning laden with the fragrance of dewy grass and numberless violets, we moved in a northerly direction across what seemed an inland lake nearly three quarters of a mile wide, with sun-washed mountains along the west bank and low purple hills to the east.

Then all at once, on the left, a cleft in the massif showed itself, and there, narrowed to two hundred yards, flowing between rounded limestone mountains, was the Great River in the first of its wondrous gorges. The surprise was overwhelming.