Now Su-ling looked at me with an expression of alarm, as if I were the victim of mad superstition. Fêng-shui and dynamite: I suppose they were irreconcilable.

“You want to change the river?” Su-ling said.

“If it makes things easier for men—why not?”

“Nothing can change the Great River!”

I scoffed at Su-ling. “It would have been much easier for Old Pebble today if the rapids had been opened up.”

“Let me warn you,” she said. “Never speak to Old Pebble about such changes. Never boast to him that you can do such things to the Great River.”

“Doesn’t he want to find a ‘new way’ either?”

“He has lived all his life on the Great River. Don’t upset him. You know what fury he has in him.”

I did know. I remembered his amazing attack on the farm boy for turning his fish over in his bowl. Yet I could not help laughing at Su-ling’s frightened earnestness.

“I am not joking,” she said, looking shocked. “I am just warning.”

I took all this very lightly. How many times since then have I wished that I had heeded Su-ling’s warning?

She changed the subject. She asked me whether I had heard the words of the song Old Pebble had sung while the boat was on the tongue of the rapid.

I said I had been too excited by all that was happening to hear the words.

“I want to sing it for you,” she said.

“Didn’t you tell me the other day that it is bad luck for one who isn’t a tracker to sing a tracker’s song?”

“Who believes such nonsense?” she impatiently said, who had just been talking with a straight face about fêng-shui. “Listen!” she said. Then, in a small, controlled voice, keeping her eyes on mine with a burning intensity, she sang the haunting, twisting melody we had heard that afternoon from the midst of the rushing rapids:

At dawn we leave Paiti in rainbow mists,

A millennium’s span to Kialing we skim in a day,

From both banks the weeping of monkeys comes like a song:

The skiff floats by ten thousand mountains of stone.

“Is that not beautiful?” she said.

“It is,” I said.

“Is it not beautiful that that song lifted our heavy boat over Head Rapid this afternoon?”

“It is,” I said. “That is a beautiful thought.” Then abruptly I asked her, “You love him, do you not?”

Her eyes were pathetic as she replied, “Every day on the river he shows me that life is not hard.”

“What hope have you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What hope have you of happiness with Old Pebble?”

“There are many kinds of happiness,” she said. “I am happy to be near him,” she softly said, and at that moment, just when she was asserting her joy, a look of deep, everlasting sadness drew down the corner of her sensitive mouth.