Then there was a commotion outside, and the scholar with the stupid face led the owner and the cook and the head tracker into our room.

Su-ling stood up and stepped toward the owner with her customary sweet obsequiousness.

“You should not have done it,” she chided him, showing however the pride in him he would want to see.

“It was easy,” he said. He was flushed and had evidently been drinking already.

“It was easy,” the cook exultantly said. “It was only a matter of knowing which gate to go through.”

The head tracker said nothing, but he smiled and his eyes sparkled.

Now Su-ling scarcely seemed to know Old Pebble. All her quiet attentions were for the owner.

By this time I had completely forgotten Su-ling’s warning never to breathe to Old Pebble a word of my ideas for changing the Great River.

Part Three: The Dam

In Witches’ Mountain Gorge I began to think more often about the dam.

Of course I had had the dam on my mind, off and on, all the way up from Ichang. I had been scanning both banks every day—but I had realized from the first that on this upriver trip I could only make cursory observations, for I would have to see the whole basin, and I would have to wait until I reached Wanhsien, where the headquarters of the boatmen’s guild was situated, to study charts of topography, and records of rise and fall, and data on the cities and villages that would be submerged by the lake above a dam, before I could make a more thoroughgoing survey on the downward passage. Now, however, as the days passed, and as I began to see what a dam could mean to the human beings on the boat on which I was traveling, particularly to the trackers, the dam became more important to me than it had been when I had approached it as something theoretically and technically desirable, as an abstraction in a company memorandum and in the minds of some faraway engineers.

The head tracker seemed to have been nowhere so much at home as he was in Witches’ Mountain Gorge, the longest, most beautiful, and most mysterious of all the chasms of the river. This gorge, I remember, was fully twenty miles long, and at places it was no more than a hundred and fifty yards wide, and as it afforded the river’s most awesome sights to this point, so also it presented some of its most arduous problems for the trackers, and these difficulties seemed to raise Old Pebble’s spirits, so that for three days he sang and flew about like a wild strong bird.