Su-ling was standing by, and the head tracker turned to her, continuing his satire of manners, and said, “The fruit blossom will have her petals shaken today.”

Su-ling laughed and gave back a mocking answer, “The strong branches also tremble when the petals shake.”

The head tracker puckered his lips and bowed.

Now these speeches had been read broadly by the crude beggarly man and the unpolished river woman, and it had been obvious that they were making fun of an elegant tone that was far above their heads, but I saw the owner lift his eyebrows in chagrin at the highly charged words. He was as tense as he had been anywhere on the river.

A light up-wind had arisen, and in a deep bull-roar Old Pebble ordered the big lugsail hoisted, so he and his trackers would have every possible ounce of help against the fierce current of the gorge.

I was always fascinated by the seamanship of the junkmen. Their rigging and their ways of handling it, mostly thousands of years old, were in some respects as good as anything we had on our newest sailing vessels in the West. I went forward to watch the beautiful ceremony of halyards and sheets. In this Old Pebble had usually taken part as if it were a game, with open childish pleasure, jumping and shouting among the lines. Today he worked with a grave concentration. I had the bad luck to get in his way just as he was trying to clear the multiple sheets and trim them, and he turned on me with an expression far from playful and startled me by saying, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” It must have been pure chance that had made him hit on a question in those terms, which reverberated like an echo from my childhood, when I had often heard that same challenge hurled at the Poles and Italians who were coming into the valleys of my home state—and had in ignorant brutality used it myself. Perhaps he had only meant that I should go back to the afterdeck, and perhaps it had been merely a trick of translation in my head that had given his question this wider and more ominous sense. I did return to the conning deck, and did for a moment wish myself far away at home.

—

THEN Old Pebble was ferried ashore in the sampan, and we got under tow and entered the last gorge.

A spit at the lower end of the gorge seemed to dam up the water in a kind of reservoir above, so that within a dozen boat lengths there was a visible rise of nearly a foot in the water level. There was no turbulence. The river was simply an uphill slope. The current was alarmingly swift, and we hung fire on the sliding hill of water for nearly half an hour, moving forward literally inch by inch.