When it was over, and the junk was pulled up to the loading platform, Old Pebble was streaming sweat, but he looked very happy.

I walked down to the river’s edge to see what he would say. He jumped ashore and bent down to the river and scooped up double handfuls of the brown water and washed his face, sloshing and snorting like a small boy. I moved near him. He looked up. All he said was, “Ayah, this river is a turtle.”

—

AFTERWARDS Su-ling and I returned to the Scholar’s Restaurant.

The cook told us he would bring the owner and the head tracker up there as soon as the junk was moored; there would not be time for reloading in the remainder of that day.

When first we sat down again, in the room overlooking the rapids, I wanted to talk about what we had just seen, and I had a feeling that Su-ling wanted to talk about it, too, but instead she began babbling about the unfortunate fêng-shui, or “wind-water,” of the New Rapids. This was part of a pseudo-science of geomancy, which holds that the exposure of a house or a town to certain fluxes and counter-fluxes of air and moisture, above and below ground, controls the fortunes of the place, and of the people who live in it, or who pass through it, and that only the judicious placing of walls, trees, ditches, or pagodas can favorably alter them.

Su-ling said she agreed with those who felt that the uppermost of the three pagodas on the left bank at Hsintan was badly placed and did not sufficiently deflect the evil emanations from the Gorge of the Military Code and Precious Blade above the rapids. Many a junk had been wrecked because of the failure of that pagoda to correct the fêng-shui of the valley, she gravely said.

I looked at the girl mouthing this rubbish and became impatient. “Listen!” I said. “With twenty thousand dollars I could change things here so that no junk need ever be wrecked again—so that there would never be need for pilots.”

The girl did not ask me how I could do this. She asked me with wide eyes where I could ever get so much money.

I pointed out to her the widest sluice in the Head Rapid, close to the opposite bank of the river, and the next widest, which was adjacent and farther out in the stream. It would be easy, I told Su-ling, for divers to set charges and blast out the nest of rocks between these two gaps with dynamite (for which I knew no Chinese word but called it “big strength powder”) and make a broad, deep channel through which the water of the Great River would hurry but in which there would be no danger.