THE FOLLOWING day, the second of our passage, we moved through a landscape of such wildness as I had never before even imagined. Not far above the cove where we had moored for the night, the river took an abrupt turn to the right, beyond which we entered the trough called Lampshine Gorge. On the bank on our right were steep, giddying limestone cliffs crowned with soft-formed, many-wintered rocks, while on the left, on the shelves of less precipitous but still formidable mountains, picturesque villages and temples rested. Once, high on an apparently inaccessible cliff, we saw huge characters painted on the rock, and the owner read them to me: “The hills are bright, the waters dark.” Near the upper mouth of the gorge, on the eastern side, a narrow, isolated pinnacle of limestone called, as I was told, the Pillar of Heaven rose nearly two thousand feet; one could imagine that it did, indeed, support the crystal ceiling of the day.

At length we erupted from the gorge. The limestone formations fell away, and we moved all at once into a region of plutonic rocks. In a valley nearly a mile wide huge boulders of gneiss and granite, larger by far than our junk, lay strewn about, and straight across the line of the river, relenting only enough to grant it a shallow channel, curious dykes of greenstone and porphyry rose up out of the other stone. It was a primeval landscape, and it seemed to have been arranged by some force of fury. I was deeply moved and humbled by the sight of the trackers scrambling like tiny, purposeful crickets over the rough and intractable banks. We were all hopeless insects in this setting. My career, engineering, seemed only nonsense here. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could be done by man’s puny will for this harsh valley littered with gigantic rocks.

By evening I was worn out with awe and small-stirring fears, for the currents of the river, wrenched and twisted by hidden boulders and sunken dams of porphyry, had sucked at our huge junk and made it tremble and bob as if it had been a mere autumn leaf on the water; and when, after the evening meal in the softness of twilight, some slapstick began to be set up by the cook and the head tracker, while the other men laughed around them, I was irritated. I felt that my boatmates were men without feeling, if men at all. How could they have traveled all day through this land of pre-history only looking forward to an evening of pranks and cackling? The cook and the head tracker jumped about burlesquing the formal ritual of jugglers and magicians, chanting the nonsense-rhymes such men use, and waving their arms and looking mysterious; these two excelled in the universal funny talk of gangs of men—companionable abuse, loving cruelty—and they were making verbal monsters of each other, and their friends roared.