THE NEXT morning there was a fog in the gorge so thick that we could barely see the rocks against which we were spar-moored. We could not think of moving until it had melted away. We were enveloped, not only in fog, but also in a profound silence. Even the rumoring of the fast-rising water seemed hushed. Then in the far distance, as I sat on the conning deck, I heard first a low throbbing, then, somewhat later and very faintly, a falsetto chant and the guttural “Ayah!…Ayah!…” of many crewmen shouting as they stood and pushed oars on the foredeck of a downgoing junk and the repeated sounds of their feet stamping all together on the deck as they lunged with each beat of the oars, and the repeated thumps of their many oars all together against the tholepins; and this pulsating noise, seeming to carry on its shoulders, as it were, the thin sad song of that junk’s Noise Suppressor, grew louder and louder in the otherwise silent morning, until it seemed an almost unbearable pounding roar. It was a terrible, fearful, tragic sound, wrapped in fog. It was like an unendurable idea forcing itself up to recognition through the murk of the lower mind. For me the unendurable idea forcing itself upward at that moment was that perhaps Old Pebble was right: perhaps the Great River could not and should not be challenged by such as I; perhaps a millennium-in-a-day was after all not something that could be bestowed….Suddenly, not ten feet from our port side, a great junk like our own loomed out of the thick morning, and I saw for a few moments the frantic motions of the crew that went with the sounds I had heard, and then the junk was gone, and the noises diminished, until at last I heard only a deep, rhythmical thumping again, and then nothing at all; absolute silence. I wondered what whips of guilt or greed or fear could be driving a crazy owner along the Great River in such weather….And my doubt, like the junk, was gone in the mists.