Soon Su-ling came forward from her game with the owner to tell me to look up at a cliff we were passing, high on which, in huge cracks in the solid rocks, a number of curious dark oblong box-like objects were wedged. Perhaps they were bronze or stone coffins. How had human beings lodged them there? Su-ling said they resembled the bellows of a Chinese blacksmith’s forge; hence the name of the gorge.

The cook asked Su-ling what the owner would want to eat for his afternoon meal, and she said that after Wind-Box Gorge he would be hungry, that he would be able to get himself around a pullet in some soup and some fried white cabbage and some turnips; and in perfect confidence she went on with an entire menu to meet a grotesque appetite the Old Big would have when the tension of this passage was over.

The cook grunted, neither pleasantly nor angrily, at each item on her list, as if merely making a mental checkmark with his throat muscles.

Su-ling went aft.

The cook unlocked the great chest of his perishable treasures and rummaged and took out a small head of cabbage and some turnips, and he settled in a squatting position on the deck near the port scuppers and began to peel the turnips over the side.

He began humming a weird falsetto accompaniment to the head tracker’s distant chant. I say weird; it was indeed. It was not so much a harmony; it was rather a kind of stitching to the other tune, a thread that was put in, drawn tight, and pulled out again, neatly and regularly.

Old Pebble’s singing had an intensity now that made it very moving; it seemed to sharpen my sense of hearing.

The sampan, towing alongside the junk on the starboard hand, its bamboo painter fast on a pair of tholepins, kept bumping against the heavy half-round wales running along the side of the turreted hull. This bumping, along with the junk’s heartbeat, voiced by the drum, and the tinkling of the masthead bells, and the trackers’ sob-like shouts, and the cook’s penetrating humming, and the creaking of tons of twisting cypress beneath us, and the hard occasional crack of the owner’s raging voice, and Su-ling’s soft words, and the insistent swish of the river, and above all Old Pebble’s burning songs—all were mixed together in the seashell of my inner ear into a rhythmic rushing; sound that came and went, a kind of panting of excitement, terror, and wonder.

—

THE TRACKERS climbed high across a hip of shingle and entered the beginning of a path routed by hand from the face of one of the cliffs. This seemed to me the most terrible place on the whole river.