The negotiation of that final half-mile or so—that was all, but how much!—must have called for something like a miracle from the trackers, something above heart and sinew. The men were without leadership, and they had to go through the worst stretch of the river we had yet seen. I really believe that more was required of our forty-odd men as we passed the upper limits of Wind-Box Gorge than had been asked of the three hundred fifty hired-on rag bags at the New Rapids, who leaned there on the lines but did not extend themselves, and certainly did not drain the very lees of their spirits, as our trackers must have done at the mouth of the gorge, stretching their strength beyond belief.

Yet our going through safely was not a miracle. It was a triumph of unremarkable men, a triumph of their patience and of the astounding love for each other of poverty-stricken brothers in pain and trouble.

They had eaten nothing all day. They had suffered the loss of a friend at their very feet. They had lost, too, their accustomed master, and though they may have hated the owner, and though probably none of them had seen with his eyes the Old Big’s going, they must have heard his piercing cries of remorse and helpless, tottering need as the sampan rushed away from us, and they must have heard the name he called and must have known the meaning of those shouts. Now there were no more beautiful songs. Now only the hollow drum hummed to them from the junk.

Yet somehow they hauled us through.

As I say, I hardly saw any of this happen. I sat on the coil of rope thinking of Old Pebble.

I wondered again what he had been thinking about in those last moments, and whether his fall had been sheer accident or if he had been felled, as it were, by an idea, by some realization. Had he thought of the dam?

That possibility, crossing my mind for the second time, made me shudder.

Then I felt a strange revulsion and doubt. Had Old Pebble really been singing as beautifully as I had thought—or had the burning intensity of those last few minutes before his fall been in my mind only? Was it possible that he had been singing exactly as he had always sung, and that fear and excitement and aspiration, which I had felt on seeing the holes of Mêng Liang’s ladder, had sharpened my senses?

What did I feel? As yet I scarcely knew. I was tired and puzzled.

Old Pebble was dead. He had been a nobody, a ragged faceless tracker among thousands of ragged faceless trackers on the Great River. His death changed nothing; there would be no obituaries. Even his closest friend, the cook, had scarcely seemed to notice his death. His body was in the river, but that did not change the river. Could the river be changed? Was Su-ling right—could nothing change the Great River?