During the readying, Old Pebble seemed to be everywhere, and he wore a scowling look but he sang snatches of song and appeared to be highly elated.

For a while he rushed about on errands of superstition. I saw him secretively burning joss paper in the cook’s brazier—circlets of paper that were shiny like foil, with square holes cut in them, shapes of copper cash with which he paid tribute to venal deities. Then he hurried aft and for the first time on our journey hoisted on a pennant-halyard the owner’s masthead device, which had the double use of showing that our Old Big was a Wanhsien man and of keeping off evil spirits. It was a gay rig on a light bamboo staff, consisting of a square blue flag, then above that two oblong pennants, one red, one yellow, and at the very peak a pair of wobbly metal springs, which drooped like the antennae of a moth from the topmost point of the whole junk, and which had at their tips two tiny bells of piercingly brilliant call. All day long they poured on us their small globular sounds, like uncatchable drops of mercury. After he had hoisted the emblem, Old Pebble ran to his tiny bundle of private possessions at the head of his sleeping-mat in the crew’s cabinway, fumbled in it a moment, then trotted back to the conning deck and with a comically set blank face handed Su-ling a pair of earrings which had little red glass pendants on them, and he told her to put them on “to keep the boat dry.” It seemed to me that she was on the verge of weeping as she took them from him.

Old Pebble may have taken other precautions that I did not see. If his fetishes, charms, and luck-pieces could help us, we must have been hazard-proof.

Not knowing what we were going into, I inwardly ridiculed all these devices. What good, I asked myself, was the sort of bravery they gave? Later in the day, however, when the real force of the water had come home to me, I caught myself thinking angrily about my stolen watch; I must admit I wanted the comfort of it in my pocket then, as if there might have been safety in the habit of carrying that golden wafer of the hours.

The head tracker discussed the day’s tactics with the owner. When their conference ended I saw the owner permit himself a rare, if perhaps partly ironical, gesture to his Noise Suppressor. To wish Old Pebble a good day’s work, he brought together two clenched fists and bowed slightly to him, in the pantomime of humility and would-be servitude that a Chinese host accords a notable guest.

The head tracker snorted the required formal protest, giving it, however, a note of derision: “Don’t be polite!”