OF OUR getting out of the gorge, I remember only one sight that makes me realize how fierce the effort of the trackers must have been—the sight of the great sentinel-rock at the very gate, against the upper face of which the rushing river was smoothly mounded up, as water is piled in a hill around the prow of a blunt swift-moving cargo vessel.

At length we somehow reached the placid open valley above the gorge. The river was wide there, and calm, like a slowly moving lake, if such a thing could be. The surcease from quaking and rocking, and the sudden total lifting of danger, gave me a queer feeling of being suddenly sleepy, drugged, let wholly down into good darkness. One would have thought the trackers’ cries should have been triumphant here, for surely they had overreached their known powers, and they had passed out of the gate of the last of the gorges, and they must have felt themselves great men in their line, and close friends; but their groan-shout was unchanged, and it had the selfsame sound of the trackers’ cry which had not changed for two or three thousand years, half agony, half exultation, a patient measuring of steps in time and space: “Ayah!…Ayah!…”

It was dark by the time we anchored for the night, off the banks of Kweifu. The cook divided the enormous supper he had prepared for the owner among the bowls of the trackers, who would otherwise have received that night, as every other night, rations of rice palliated with a few snippets of fried cabbage. They ate bolting like curs and lay down and slept at once.

The cook cleaned his pots by lantern light. Then he bundled up his belongings and carried them aft with the lantern and moved into the owner’s cabin, from which Su-ling’s helpless sobs still came. I lay in my bedroll so taken up with all I had seen and felt that day that I was not even surprised or angered by this invasion of the cook’s. The trackers moaned in their sleep—the only mourning I ever heard them give Old Pebble, who had once told me he would surely have a fine funeral, bought with the coppers of friendship. I could see through the cracks in the cabin wall that the lantern shone within. Late at night I still heard Su-ling’s weeping, and over it I heard the clicking of an abacus, as the cook, in his new rôle as commander of the junk, made calculations of wages and probable sales and possible profits.

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