Most of the time Old Pebble seemed kind, considerate, open, and warm. His moments of wrath, such as the one I had seen at the end of the gambling game that night, or when he had punished the farmer boy for turning over his fish, were rare, and they appeared to go against his nature. In those days, his goodness seemed to me innate, built-in, almost organic in him, like muscle tissue. It seemed not to be a matter of conscience and effort and struggling feeble heart. Only now on reflection, as I remember the signs of helplessness that lurked now and then momentarily in his eyes, do I see how hard he must have striven for virtue, and what a triumph of hard-working philosophy his simple goodness was. His life was a towpath; he was hauling himself wearily along it; his head and his heart were his stubborn trackers. He must have been trying his best, I now realize, to free himself from delusion, to struggle to rise above existence and pain, to speak truth, to be pure, to hurt no living thing, to have self-control, to have a wakeful mind, and rapturously to contemplate his short and awful life.

—

IN ONE day we passed the first two of the twelve peaks of Witches’ Mountain, and we were deep in the gorge. The water level was rising fast. The owner was taut, and the men jumpy and fractious.

We had passed a bleak, filthy village on a narrow limestone ledge, called Peishih, which means “Back to the Rock,” clinging to the cliffs like an Alpinist who has lost his nerve; then soon, not far beyond it, I remember, we saw a mountain stream in whose glen nested a tranquil evergreen grove, a picture almost too delicately composed for this rugged part of China, more like a memory-scene from a Japanese screen. Thus the sudden changes of the gorges.

The head tracker was driving his men with a relentless urgency that was spurred, I suppose, by the rise of the river. He was pressing his men perhaps too hard.

While tracking with the others over an enormous heap of fallen rock, the young farmer boy who was making his first passage as a junkman, the lackluster youth whom the head tracker had thrashed downriver because he had turned over the fish in his bowl, had the misfortune to make a misstep and to slip and wedge his ankle between two boulders, so that he gave himself great pain and, apparently thinking himself dying as he began to faint, let loose a frightful shriek. His echo, fugitive along the faces of the gorge, called pitifully back and back and back to us until it died in the distance.

Hearing the scream, Old Pebble responded with one of those seeming animal reflexes; if he thought at all of what he was doing and would do, it must have been as he moved.