For the trackers, and particularly for Old Pebble, the gorge was an ever-changing challenge. The ingenuity of the head tracker was tested every hour, and he met each test with fiery joy. Here he led his towing gang over a mass of fallen boulders; next he put them aboard in a swarm, and they took up oars in erect ranks on the foredeck, sometimes pushing and sometimes pulling at the long oars, and they chanted and stamped in unison and beat up a brown froth with the wooden blades, in order that the junk might ride a cross-current to the opposite bank and there have the benefit of an upstream eddy; then for a while, shouting hoarse commands unlike any other cries of his, he would supervise his men as they stood on deck and literally clawed the junk with lizards and poles and bare hands along some sheer wetted palisades; later he would lead them on their harnesses high along a little-known ledge, or over a shoulder of rock, or across a steep scree—scrambling, singing, hurrying with elated whoops from one piece of horrible work to another. Often the head tracker was in the sampan, sculling madly from the shore out to the junk to consult with the bow steersman, or standing up in the skittish boat pulling it back ashore hand over hand on the towing hawser and roaring directions to his trackers, who had only one guttural voice to answer his shouts: “Ayah!…Ayah!…”