I WAS up very early the next morning, as it was barely getting light. Some distance from our anchorage, I saw the salt wells of Kweifu, where, though the rise of the river had brought the season of work almost to an end, the scores of massive half-buried caldrons along the riverbank were still being fired day and night and were all boiling. From our viewpoint, when the first pink rays of sunlight slanted through the gate of the gorges onto the field of steam, it looked as if the vapors of a still-hot inner earth were escaping to the regions of man.

The cook had to go ashore to buy a sampan, and I went with him, to see the wells; we disembarked onto a shelf of shale by a long plank.

At the wells I was greeted by the sight of hundreds of naked men toiling up and down the spiral interior paths of the enormous brine pits. I began at first, seeing these figures that reminded me of Blake and Dante and Milton, to feel some kind of shallow theoretical distress, over men like these who were forced to do the work, not merely of animals, but of the most primitive machines, and this tripped off, as it made me think first of our trackers, then sharply of Old Pebble, and of the harrowing previous day, an overwhelming emotion of personal loss, and a very strong feeling of waste; cringing back from the brink of one of the huge conical pits, I was overcome by a sudden rage.

Later, back on the junk, as we moved on upriver, trying to purge myself of some of this anger, which lingered on, I tried to tell the cook that I knew of a well-known brand of submersible pump, which looked like a diving-bell, that could have been bought for no more, surely, than a month’s wages for all the well-slaves of Kweifu and that alone would do the work of all those men, and would free them.

The cook dismissed me and my pump by saying that our salt wouldn’t taste good.

I bit my lip and turned to Su-ling and said with a sad heart that the sea had a different smell from that of the brine pits; the pits smelled only of bitter salt, of tears and sweat, while the sea smells of the sun and spindrift and seaweed and voyages and living things….But Su-ling only stared, unhearing.

We were all moody that day. We were out of the gorge; it was an easy day on the river. We made twenty miles. We were all quiet.

Some of the crew came to the cook in the evening and asked him to get out paper and brush and ink block and write a letter for them to the Emperor of the Dead at Fengtu, requesting a passport for their head tracker to that place where all good junkmen go.