And what this river certainly needed was a dam!

—

THE RIVER had begun to wear on me, for I had had my fill of amazements and more than enough frights. To see one whirlpool thirty feet across, its center depressed nearly a foot below its rim, as if the water of the Great River were running off through some huge partially clogged drainpipe down to the cesspools of Hell—to see one such whirlpool was awe-inspiring, but to skirt the edges of a dozen of them every day for a week, as we had done, had quite another effect. The rise of the river level was now measurable from hour to hour, and we had ascended some nasty races and gone around some rough turnings; two places I remember with particular distaste were known as Small-Cat Rapids and Get-Down-from-Horse Rapids. The walls of the gorge were high; we were in a monstrous ditch of rock.

The second evening in Witches’ Mountain Gorge, just after we had spar-moored for the night against a big boulder in a quiet cove, and while most of the trackers rested on their haunches on the rocks ashore, sipping tea, I sat alone on the conning deck watching blossoms of sunset unfold on the edges of the small delicate misty shrub-like clouds that stood naturalized in the visible sky over the gorge upstream—when all at once I imagined a dam.

There it was! Between those two sheer cliffs that tightened the gorge a half-mile upstream, there leaped up in my imagination a beautiful concrete straight-gravity dam which raised the upstream water five hundred feet; much of its curving span was capped by an overflow spillway controlled by drum gates and tube valve outlets, and a huge hydraulic jump apron designed to pass unprecedented volumes of water stood ready to protect both the dam and the lower countryside against the freshets of springtime. Ingenious lift-locks at either side carried junks up and down on truly hydraulic elevators. The power plant was entirely embedded in the cliffs on both sides of the river. The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels that had been used for the construction of the dam, and through other great tubes and shafts bored through solid rock, and finally into the whirling gills of nearly a hundred power units, created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress flowing out through high-hanging wires over six widespread provinces, Away through pipelines flowed, too, unimaginable numbers of acre-feet of water, irrigating lands that after the harvest would feed, let me say, seventy-five million Chinese. A terrible annual flood, now making up as the river rose toward its high water level, was leashed in advance by this beautiful arc. Beyond the tall barrier, junks sailed forward with their wares, to Chungking and farther, as on a placid lake.