I was sitting cross-legged on some matting, aft, near the owner and his wife. I was close enough to them to hear, now and then, her laughter, which was so low and soft that it seemed to be hardly more than some sort of indulgence—smiling pushed just over the edge into audibility. The owner laughed hard with the rest.

Suddenly the pretended mockery volleying between the two men seemed to become serious. They jumped up, and in the flickering, soft light of paper-chimneyed oil lanterns hanging from the curved overhead ribs of the big fore cabin, their faces glistened reddish and furious; their eyes popped. It was impossible to guess what had suddenly made the banter of these two vigorous men turn earnest—unless it was the same fury as had caused the disorder in the great rocks of the wide valley.

“You are a turtle, the son of two turtles, a bastard turtle, you!” the cook shouted.

“You are a bastard, I defile your mother!” the head tracker answered in what seemed to be real bitterness.

What made the quick and ugly change of mood in the two men eerie was that the mood of the trackers around them changed not at all. They laughed still, as if witnessing more of what they had been seeing, and they laughed no less but no more.

I stood up, for this had turned from an annoyance into a minor spectacle; it may be that some of my own feelings, pent all day, were finding a vicarious outlet.

Close beside me I became aware that the owner’s wife was standing, too, in fierce enjoyment of the encounter. Her eyes flashed as she looked at me in the lantern light.

—

THE NEXT morning I awoke feverish, and for four days I lay sick on my bedroll on the planks of the conning deck, glimpsing only now and then of the passing terrain a rough cliff through the forward arch of the mat roof, seen upside down as I rolled back my head.

High above me on his platform of two planks which partially roofed the deck, the after-helmsman stood, and occasionally I saw his gown or his arm as he sluggishly moved the junk’s immensely long tiller. He was a silent, bitter, thin man, whose duties on an upriver voyage were negligible, because the great forward bow sweep, manned by a dozen men, did most of the steering against the current, and I soon thought of the helmsman as a mechanical fixture, a man scarcely there.

I lived to sounds: the beat of the trackers’ signaling drum forward of the mast, Old Pebble’s faraway chanting and the pained rhythmic cry of the trackers, orders shouted from the junk, the chopping of vegetables, the loud sipping of tea—all the noises of upstream progress; and always along the flanks of our craft the murmuring of the urgent river.