Our ferrymen made their landfall, after ten minutes of hard work, at the very center of the stone stairway to the city. They charged me three times as much as any of the Chinese aboard, and for a few moments I was very angry. I remember that during my brief altercation with the ferrymen I absent-mindedly patted the watch pocket in my trousers and was spurred to new heights of pettiness, contempt, and frustrating anger by a sharp thought of my golden timepiece stolen on the junk.

The ferrymen shouted loudly at me and made me appear to be a robber and oppressor for balking at paying them only three times the normal fare, and a crowd gathered, and I was soon very much out of sorts.

I paid off the ferrymen and asked my way to the inn.

The whole noisy crowd offered to lead the way, and we set off in a human wave up the stairway. Beggars pressed around me, touching my arms and whispering their needs. Friendly men offered to carry my bag, but thievery and high rates were in my mind, and I clutched the handle ever more fiercely. We flowed up to the crest of the city, gathering new adherents all the way.

At last we came to the inn. The door was locked. One of my most aggressive bodyguards, a grinning hunched-over lad with a great white fungus scab-cap on his shaven crown, pulled the handle of the doorbell, and far away, above the noise of my personal crowd, I heard a tiny ringing—and again was stirred by strong feelings, as I thought of the tinkling of the masthead bells in the gorge.

Soon a white-bearded man dressed in a silk gown appeared at the door, and he bowed to me; then he darted inside for a moment and reappeared with a bamboo staff and began screaming at my followers and flailing about with the dangerous rod. The crowd fell back, cursing and laughing, but did not adjourn.

How grand it made me feel, I confess, to have been greeted by a man clothed in silk!

The man, who turned out to be a brother of the innkeeper, pushed me inside the door and quickly bolted it. One could hear the crowd suddenly murmur and melt.

I negotiated for a room, ordered several dishes for my modest banquet, and then at once asked for a bath.

In a dark, damp, moldy-smelling cavern at the back of the inn I was presently squatting shoulder-deep in a round wooden tub of painfully hot water, and I stayed in it, lathering, rinsing, and growing happier and happier, till it was tepid. Then I put on clean clothes from my bag. I lay down on the brick bed in my whitewashed room to wait for my guests. I felt like a new person. I even began to think back through the gorges in quest of the memory of a suitable dam site.

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