The cook was disgusted; he said that this was a silly thing to do. All the same, he wrote the letter and gave it to the men, and they put it into the celestial post—which is to say, they burned it in the cook’s charcoal brazier.

Condescendingly the cook said to me, “Ignorant men!” I thought of the day at the New Rapids when he and the head tracker had sacrificed the cock at the stem beam; of his look then of half-trust, half-belief.

I asked the cook why no one ever spoke of the owner.

He said the owner was not dead; he would be back.

I asked how he could know that.

He replied that the owner, one of the best boatmen on the river, had been in a boat, and he was surely alive and would come back; whereas Old Pebble, one of the best trackers on the river, had been in the river, and, he said, “The river when it is rising never gives back a life.”

If the request for a passport from the Emperor of the Dead was absurd, where, then, I asked, was the head tracker’s soul; what had become of the spirit that had made the songs of work so incredibly happy? Where was it now? Where would it go?

The cook looked across the gunwale at the dark river away from me and slowly asked, “Where does the flame go when we put a fire out?”

—

IT TOOK us three days to reach Wanhsien. The cook had discussed with Su-ling whether we should lie idle somewhere and wait for the owner, who, they both felt sure, would catch a ride up the river on another man’s junk; they decided, in view of the ever-rising waters, to go on, and after three days, moving through foothills on a swift but not dangerous river, we came during a sunset hour to our destination.

We passed a pagoda of thirteen storeys and then, at a great elbow in the river, arrived at the city of Wanhsien. We moored on the opposite bank.

We saw across the way a city built on a hill among hills. On the far horizon were high mountains, their rock foreheads red in the evening light, and below them were darker ranges of flat-topped hills, which in the faint low-lying mists of evening seemed a series of long cardboard cut-outs standing in the mysterious soft thick whitish-purple air, one in front of the other; and nearer still were terraced hills luxuriant with precious tung trees, layered early wheat, and rape and barley and beans, and poppies in a mist-softened clamor of bloom.